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CNN
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
How Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham went from lovers to bandmates and back again
People in entertainment Music MediaFacebookTweetLink Follow When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped propel the band to a commercial and creative pinnacle. For the couple, though, joining the band was the beginning of the end of their love story. Nicks and Buckingham's infamously tumultuous relationship, which began in the early 1970s, ended just two years into their tenure in Fleetwood Mac. Though they've been broken up for nearly 50 years, their mutual antipathy remains as legendary as their musical output. 'I met her when I was about 16,' Buckingham said in a 2009 BBC documentary about the band. 'It's been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion's share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else, too. It's never been just one thing.' And yet, after decades of performing love songs onstage while ripping into each other backstage, Nicks and Buckingham seem to have paused their ongoing feud to rerelease the only album they made as a duo, 1973's 'Buckingham Nicks.' Whether the pair will do more to promote the album than share cryptic corresponding Instagram posts remains to be seen. Their acrimony fueled enduring, influential music, but any reunion between the two likely won't be as effortless as their sound. Nicks and Buckingham met in 1966 as high school students in California's Bay Area. Though they played guitar a bit together, it wasn't until they were both attending San Jose State University that they officially teamed up musically, when Buckingham invited Nicks to join his first band, the psychedelic-folk rock group Fritz. The pair resisted romance until after Fritz broke up in the early '70s. 'I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them,' Nicks told Cameron Crowe in a 1977 interview for Rolling Stone. The pair fell for each other while writing 'Buckingham Nicks,' a folk-rock record released in 1973. Despite the talent evident on the album (not to mention its cover art, in which Nicks and Buckingham appear nude), 'Buckingham Nicks' flopped almost everywhere –– except Birmingham, Alabama, where local DJs regularly played the record and developed the duo a small but devoted fanbase. (It's also where the pair played their final show before joining Fleetwood Mac.) 'That album holds up pretty well,' Buckingham told Dan Rather in 2015. 'It did not do well commercially, but it certainly was noticed. More importantly, it was noticed by Mick Fleetwood.' The Fleetwood Mac co-founder discovered 'Buckingham Nicks' at a pivotal time for the band, which was hemorrhaging guitarists and vocalists, including founding member Peter Green. Fleetwood was seeking a new recording space when he met an engineer who played him a record he had produced. It was 'Buckingham Nicks.' A few weeks after hearing the album, and shortly after losing yet another band member, Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join the band without having heard him play live. Buckingham remembered saying he wouldn't go without Nicks. 'Didn't think about Stevie one way or the other, 'cause I was looking for a guitar player,' Fleetwood said in the BBC documentary. 'And very quickly we realized they were totally joined at the hip.' Fleetwood Mac's 1975 eponymous album was the first to feature Buckingham and Nicks –– and the group's first No. 1 album in the US. Many of the album's enduring hits were written by Nicks, including the heartbreaking ballad 'Landslide' and 'Rhiannon,' a haunting song about a Welsh witch. (Witchiness would soon become integral to Nicks' onstage persona.) While Nicks and Buckingham were still dating when they joined the group, their relationship was already deteriorating under the weight of working together so closely, Nicks said in 2009. 'I think we kind of all made a little silent vow — let's fix these relationships for right now,' she said. Nicks and Buckingham's relationship was on the brink of collapse throughout the recording of what would become Fleetwood Mac's most successful record, 'Rumours.' Nicks wrote 'Dreams,' the group's first and only No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single, about the imminent demise of her relationship, she said. But her take on heartbreak was mellow, if melancholy: 'Say women, they will come and they will go,' she sings. 'When the rain washes you clean, you'll know.' 'In other words, we're all gonna come out of this,' she said in 2009. 'And Lindsey, you and I will come out of this, and we'll be friends, and it'll be okay.' Buckingham's rebuttal, the upbeat 'Go Your Own Way,' was 'angry and nasty,' Nicks said. 'Loving you isn't the right thing to do,' Buckingham sings. 'How can I ever change things that I feel?' Nicks said in the 2009 documentary that she had thought Buckingham's lyrics accusing a lover of 'shacking up' were 'extremely disrespectful.' 'It may be a rather truthful and blunt observation,' Buckingham countered. 'But that's the way you write songs.' Their fraying relationship ended during the recording of 'Rumours,' after months of playing on tracks that were not-so-secretly written about the other. As Nicks recalled to the BBC, Nicks told Buckingham after one last fight that she would fly home without him. The behind-the-scenes tumult only fed audience interest in 'Rumours,' which became the band's defining album, spending 31 weeks at No. 1. 'Everyone knew that these songs, the subject matter, was what we were living,' Buckingham said in 2015. 'And I think there was an investment in not just the music but in the people who made the music because of that.' The album was fueled by heartbreak, rage and a massive 'community bag of cocaine,' said album engineer Ken Caillat. Nicks' addiction to cocaine began during the recording of 'Rumours,' she said, a habit she picked up 'just to get through' the process. Nicks started writing and recording solo material while making 'Tusk,' the experimental follow-up to 'Rumours' that Buckingham spearheaded. In 1981, she released 'Bella Donna,' which featured the hit 'Edge of Seventeen,' the first of four solo albums she made in the '80s. In 1985, Nicks sought treatment at the Betty Ford Center for her cocaine addiction. But when she left rehab, she was prescribed Klonopin, a tranquilizer she became dependent on. As a result, she was often absent from recording sessions for the group's 1987 album 'Tango in the Night.' 'Being in Fleetwood Mac, even to this day, is very tense,' Nicks said in 2009. 'In my solo career, I'm not tense, I'm not uptight.' In 1987, the band met at member Christine McVie's home to discuss their upcoming concerts in support of 'Tango in the Night.' Buckingham refused to join the group on tour. 'When Lindsey said, 'I'm not going,' I think I got up and ran across the room and tried to strangle him,' Nicks remembered in the BBC documentary. 'And then he chased me out of the house through Christine's driveway, and we had a huge fight. That was that. He was done.' The group made one more album with Nicks and without Buckingham, 1990's 'Behind the Mask,' but Nicks left the group soon after, when Fleetwood refused to let her release 'Silver Springs,' a B-side she wrote about Buckingham, on a box set of Nicks' solo work. Fleetwood Mac reformed with Nicks and Buckingham in 1997 for 'The Dance,' a successful tour tied to the 20th anniversary of 'Rumours' that also spawned a No. 1 live album. And every night, Buckingham would join Nicks on guitar as she sang 'Silver Springs.' She often ended the performance by resting her head on Buckingham's back. The following year, the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and spent the next several years touring on and off, recording one last album, 2003's 'Say You Will.' Despite spending extended periods of time on and offstage with each other, Nicks was loath to get close to Buckingham again. 'Lindsey and I will never be touchy feely friends,' she said in 2009. 'Maybe later on down the line, all those wounds will heal.' In 2018, as the group was gearing up for yet another reunion tour, Fleetwood Mac started to splinter again. Buckingham was ousted from the group that year, telling Rolling Stone that his manager said Nicks never wanted to perform onstage with him again. Buckingham admitted to Rolling Stone that he'd had an 'outburst' stemming from the choice to introduce the band onstage with 'Rhiannon,' Nicks' witchy hit. Fleetwood said the group had reached an 'impasse' with Buckingham on tour. 'Our relationship has always been volatile,' Buckingham said of Nicks to Rolling Stone. 'We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids' hearts and destroy everyone around them because it's just hard.' When Christine McVie died in 2022, Nicks said she doubted that Fleetwood Mac could reunite again without her. At McVie's memorial, Nicks spoke with Buckingham briefly after an extended period without contact. 'I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could,' she told Rolling Stone in 2024. 'You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.' Less than a year after that interview, though, Nicks and Buckingham have seemingly patched things up to release 'Buckingham Nicks,' which will be available to stream for the first time on September 19. Aside from their Instagram posts, neither musician has commented on the rerelease of the only album made as a duo.
CNN
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
How Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham went from lovers to bandmates and back again
When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped propel the band to a commercial and creative pinnacle. For the couple, though, joining the band was the beginning of the end of their love story. Nicks and Buckingham's infamously tumultuous relationship, which began in the early 1970s, ended just two years into their tenure in Fleetwood Mac. Though they've been broken up for nearly 50 years, their mutual antipathy remains as legendary as their musical output. 'I met her when I was about 16,' Buckingham said in a 2009 BBC documentary about the band. 'It's been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion's share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else, too. It's never been just one thing.' And yet, after decades of performing love songs onstage while ripping into each other backstage, Nicks and Buckingham seem to have paused their ongoing feud to rerelease the only album they made as a duo, 1973's 'Buckingham Nicks.' Whether the pair will do more to promote the album than share cryptic corresponding Instagram posts remains to be seen. Their acrimony fueled enduring, influential music, but any reunion between the two likely won't be as effortless as their sound. Nicks and Buckingham met in 1966 as high school students in California's Bay Area. Though they played guitar a bit together, it wasn't until they were both attending San Jose State University that they officially teamed up musically, when Buckingham invited Nicks to join his first band, the psychedelic-folk rock group Fritz. The pair resisted romance until after Fritz broke up in the early '70s. 'I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them,' Nicks told Cameron Crowe in a 1977 interview for Rolling Stone. The pair fell for each other while writing 'Buckingham Nicks,' a folk-rock record released in 1973. Despite the talent evident on the album (not to mention its cover art, in which Nicks and Buckingham appear nude), 'Buckingham Nicks' flopped almost everywhere –– except Birmingham, Alabama, where local DJs regularly played the record and developed the duo a small but devoted fanbase. (It's also where the pair played their final show before joining Fleetwood Mac.) 'That album holds up pretty well,' Buckingham told Dan Rather in 2015. 'It did not do well commercially, but it certainly was noticed. More importantly, it was noticed by Mick Fleetwood.' The Fleetwood Mac co-founder discovered 'Buckingham Nicks' at a pivotal time for the band, which was hemorrhaging guitarists and vocalists, including founding member Peter Green. Fleetwood was seeking a new recording space when he met an engineer who played him a record he had produced. It was 'Buckingham Nicks.' A few weeks after hearing the album, and shortly after losing yet another band member, Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join the band without having heard him play live. Buckingham remembered saying he wouldn't go without Nicks. 'Didn't think about Stevie one way or the other, 'cause I was looking for a guitar player,' Fleetwood said in the BBC documentary. 'And very quickly we realized they were totally joined at the hip.' Fleetwood Mac's 1975 eponymous album was the first to feature Buckingham and Nicks –– and the group's first No. 1 album in the US. Many of the album's enduring hits were written by Nicks, including the heartbreaking ballad 'Landslide' and 'Rhiannon,' a haunting song about a Welsh witch. (Witchiness would soon become integral to Nicks' onstage persona.) While Nicks and Buckingham were still dating when they joined the group, their relationship was already deteriorating under the weight of working together so closely, Nicks said in 2009. 'I think we kind of all made a little silent vow — let's fix these relationships for right now,' she said. Nicks and Buckingham's relationship was on the brink of collapse throughout the recording of what would become Fleetwood Mac's most successful record, 'Rumours.' Nicks wrote 'Dreams,' the group's first and only No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single, about the imminent demise of her relationship, she said. But her take on heartbreak was mellow, if melancholy: 'Say women, they will come and they will go,' she sings. 'When the rain washes you clean, you'll know.' 'In other words, we're all gonna come out of this,' she said in 2009. 'And Lindsey, you and I will come out of this, and we'll be friends, and it'll be okay.' Buckingham's rebuttal, the upbeat 'Go Your Own Way,' was 'angry and nasty,' Nicks said. 'Loving you isn't the right thing to do,' Buckingham sings. 'How can I ever change things that I feel?' Nicks said in the 2009 documentary that she had thought Buckingham's lyrics accusing a lover of 'shacking up' were 'extremely disrespectful.' 'It may be a rather truthful and blunt observation,' Buckingham countered. 'But that's the way you write songs.' Their fraying relationship ended during the recording of 'Rumours,' after months of playing on tracks that were not-so-secretly written about the other. As Nicks recalled to the BBC, Nicks told Buckingham after one last fight that she would fly home without him. The behind-the-scenes tumult only fed audience interest in 'Rumours,' which became the band's defining album, spending 31 weeks at No. 1. 'Everyone knew that these songs, the subject matter, was what we were living,' Buckingham said in 2015. 'And I think there was an investment in not just the music but in the people who made the music because of that.' The album was fueled by heartbreak, rage and a massive 'community bag of cocaine,' said album engineer Ken Caillat. Nicks' addiction to cocaine began during the recording of 'Rumours,' she said, a habit she picked up 'just to get through' the process. Nicks started writing and recording solo material while making 'Tusk,' the experimental follow-up to 'Rumours' that Buckingham spearheaded. In 1981, she released 'Bella Donna,' which featured the hit 'Edge of Seventeen,' the first of four solo albums she made in the '80s. In 1985, Nicks sought treatment at the Betty Ford Center for her cocaine addiction. But when she left rehab, she was prescribed Klonopin, a tranquilizer she became dependent on. As a result, she was often absent from recording sessions for the group's 1987 album 'Tango in the Night.' 'Being in Fleetwood Mac, even to this day, is very tense,' Nicks said in 2009. 'In my solo career, I'm not tense, I'm not uptight.' In 1987, the band met at member Christine McVie's home to discuss their upcoming concerts in support of 'Tango in the Night.' Buckingham refused to join the group on tour. 'When Lindsey said, 'I'm not going,' I think I got up and ran across the room and tried to strangle him,' Nicks remembered in the BBC documentary. 'And then he chased me out of the house through Christine's driveway, and we had a huge fight. That was that. He was done.' The group made one more album with Nicks and without Buckingham, 1990's 'Behind the Mask,' but Nicks left the group soon after, when Fleetwood refused to let her release 'Silver Springs,' a B-side she wrote about Buckingham, on a box set of Nicks' solo work. Fleetwood Mac reformed with Nicks and Buckingham in 1997 for 'The Dance,' a successful tour tied to the 20th anniversary of 'Rumours' that also spawned a No. 1 live album. And every night, Buckingham would join Nicks on guitar as she sang 'Silver Springs.' She often ended the performance by resting her head on Buckingham's back. The following year, the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and spent the next several years touring on and off, recording one last album, 2003's 'Say You Will.' Despite spending extended periods of time on and offstage with each other, Nicks was loath to get close to Buckingham again. 'Lindsey and I will never be touchy feely friends,' she said in 2009. 'Maybe later on down the line, all those wounds will heal.' In 2018, as the group was gearing up for yet another reunion tour, Fleetwood Mac started to splinter again. Buckingham was ousted from the group that year, telling Rolling Stone that his manager said Nicks never wanted to perform onstage with him again. Buckingham admitted to Rolling Stone that he'd had an 'outburst' stemming from the choice to introduce the band onstage with 'Rhiannon,' Nicks' witchy hit. Fleetwood said the group had reached an 'impasse' with Buckingham on tour. 'Our relationship has always been volatile,' Buckingham said of Nicks to Rolling Stone. 'We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids' hearts and destroy everyone around them because it's just hard.' When Christine McVie died in 2022, Nicks said she doubted that Fleetwood Mac could reunite again without her. At McVie's memorial, Nicks spoke with Buckingham briefly after an extended period without contact. 'I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could,' she told Rolling Stone in 2024. 'You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.' Less than a year after that interview, though, Nicks and Buckingham have seemingly patched things up to release 'Buckingham Nicks,' which will be available to stream for the first time on September 19. Aside from their Instagram posts, neither musician has commented on the rerelease of the only album made as a duo.
CNN
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
How Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham went from lovers to bandmates and back again
When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped propel the band to a commercial and creative pinnacle. For the couple, though, joining the band was the beginning of the end of their love story. Nicks and Buckingham's infamously tumultuous relationship, which began in the early 1970s, ended just two years into their tenure in Fleetwood Mac. Though they've been broken up for nearly 50 years, their mutual antipathy remains as legendary as their musical output. 'I met her when I was about 16,' Buckingham said in a 2009 BBC documentary about the band. 'It's been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion's share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else, too. It's never been just one thing.' And yet, after decades of performing love songs onstage while ripping into each other backstage, Nicks and Buckingham seem to have paused their ongoing feud to rerelease the only album they made as a duo, 1973's 'Buckingham Nicks.' Whether the pair will do more to promote the album than share cryptic corresponding Instagram posts remains to be seen. Their acrimony fueled enduring, influential music, but any reunion between the two likely won't be as effortless as their sound. Nicks and Buckingham met in 1966 as high school students in California's Bay Area. Though they played guitar a bit together, it wasn't until they were both attending San Jose State University that they officially teamed up musically, when Buckingham invited Nicks to join his first band, the psychedelic-folk rock group Fritz. The pair resisted romance until after Fritz broke up in the early '70s. 'I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them,' Nicks told Cameron Crowe in a 1977 interview for Rolling Stone. The pair fell for each other while writing 'Buckingham Nicks,' a folk-rock record released in 1973. Despite the talent evident on the album (not to mention its cover art, in which Nicks and Buckingham appear nude), 'Buckingham Nicks' flopped almost everywhere –– except Birmingham, Alabama, where local DJs regularly played the record and developed the duo a small but devoted fanbase. (It's also where the pair played their final show before joining Fleetwood Mac.) 'That album holds up pretty well,' Buckingham told Dan Rather in 2015. 'It did not do well commercially, but it certainly was noticed. More importantly, it was noticed by Mick Fleetwood.' The Fleetwood Mac co-founder discovered 'Buckingham Nicks' at a pivotal time for the band, which was hemorrhaging guitarists and vocalists, including founding member Peter Green. Fleetwood was seeking a new recording space when he met an engineer who played him a record he had produced. It was 'Buckingham Nicks.' A few weeks after hearing the album, and shortly after losing yet another band member, Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join the band without having heard him play live. Buckingham remembered saying he wouldn't go without Nicks. 'Didn't think about Stevie one way or the other, 'cause I was looking for a guitar player,' Fleetwood said in the BBC documentary. 'And very quickly we realized they were totally joined at the hip.' Fleetwood Mac's 1975 eponymous album was the first to feature Buckingham and Nicks –– and the group's first No. 1 album in the US. Many of the album's enduring hits were written by Nicks, including the heartbreaking ballad 'Landslide' and 'Rhiannon,' a haunting song about a Welsh witch. (Witchiness would soon become integral to Nicks' onstage persona.) While Nicks and Buckingham were still dating when they joined the group, their relationship was already deteriorating under the weight of working together so closely, Nicks said in 2009. 'I think we kind of all made a little silent vow — let's fix these relationships for right now,' she said. Nicks and Buckingham's relationship was on the brink of collapse throughout the recording of what would become Fleetwood Mac's most successful record, 'Rumours.' Nicks wrote 'Dreams,' the group's first and only No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single, about the imminent demise of her relationship, she said. But her take on heartbreak was mellow, if melancholy: 'Say women, they will come and they will go,' she sings. 'When the rain washes you clean, you'll know.' 'In other words, we're all gonna come out of this,' she said in 2009. 'And Lindsey, you and I will come out of this, and we'll be friends, and it'll be okay.' Buckingham's rebuttal, the upbeat 'Go Your Own Way,' was 'angry and nasty,' Nicks said. 'Loving you isn't the right thing to do,' Buckingham sings. 'How can I ever change things that I feel?' Nicks said in the 2009 documentary that she had thought Buckingham's lyrics accusing a lover of 'shacking up' were 'extremely disrespectful.' 'It may be a rather truthful and blunt observation,' Buckingham countered. 'But that's the way you write songs.' Their fraying relationship ended during the recording of 'Rumours,' after months of playing on tracks that were not-so-secretly written about the other. As Nicks recalled to the BBC, Nicks told Buckingham after one last fight that she would fly home without him. The behind-the-scenes tumult only fed audience interest in 'Rumours,' which became the band's defining album, spending 31 weeks at No. 1. 'Everyone knew that these songs, the subject matter, was what we were living,' Buckingham said in 2015. 'And I think there was an investment in not just the music but in the people who made the music because of that.' The album was fueled by heartbreak, rage and a massive 'community bag of cocaine,' said album engineer Ken Caillat. Nicks' addiction to cocaine began during the recording of 'Rumours,' she said, a habit she picked up 'just to get through' the process. Nicks started writing and recording solo material while making 'Tusk,' the experimental follow-up to 'Rumours' that Buckingham spearheaded. In 1981, she released 'Bella Donna,' which featured the hit 'Edge of Seventeen,' the first of four solo albums she made in the '80s. In 1985, Nicks sought treatment at the Betty Ford Center for her cocaine addiction. But when she left rehab, she was prescribed Klonopin, a tranquilizer she became dependent on. As a result, she was often absent from recording sessions for the group's 1987 album 'Tango in the Night.' 'Being in Fleetwood Mac, even to this day, is very tense,' Nicks said in 2009. 'In my solo career, I'm not tense, I'm not uptight.' In 1987, the band met at member Christine McVie's home to discuss their upcoming concerts in support of 'Tango in the Night.' Buckingham refused to join the group on tour. 'When Lindsey said, 'I'm not going,' I think I got up and ran across the room and tried to strangle him,' Nicks remembered in the BBC documentary. 'And then he chased me out of the house through Christine's driveway, and we had a huge fight. That was that. He was done.' The group made one more album with Nicks and without Buckingham, 1990's 'Behind the Mask,' but Nicks left the group soon after, when Fleetwood refused to let her release 'Silver Springs,' a B-side she wrote about Buckingham, on a box set of Nicks' solo work. Fleetwood Mac reformed with Nicks and Buckingham in 1997 for 'The Dance,' a successful tour tied to the 20th anniversary of 'Rumours' that also spawned a No. 1 live album. And every night, Buckingham would join Nicks on guitar as she sang 'Silver Springs.' She often ended the performance by resting her head on Buckingham's back. The following year, the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and spent the next several years touring on and off, recording one last album, 2003's 'Say You Will.' Despite spending extended periods of time on and offstage with each other, Nicks was loath to get close to Buckingham again. 'Lindsey and I will never be touchy feely friends,' she said in 2009. 'Maybe later on down the line, all those wounds will heal.' In 2018, as the group was gearing up for yet another reunion tour, Fleetwood Mac started to splinter again. Buckingham was ousted from the group that year, telling Rolling Stone that his manager said Nicks never wanted to perform onstage with him again. Buckingham admitted to Rolling Stone that he'd had an 'outburst' stemming from the choice to introduce the band onstage with 'Rhiannon,' Nicks' witchy hit. Fleetwood said the group had reached an 'impasse' with Buckingham on tour. 'Our relationship has always been volatile,' Buckingham said of Nicks to Rolling Stone. 'We were never married, but we might as well have been. Some couples get divorced after 40 years. They break their kids' hearts and destroy everyone around them because it's just hard.' When Christine McVie died in 2022, Nicks said she doubted that Fleetwood Mac could reunite again without her. At McVie's memorial, Nicks spoke with Buckingham briefly after an extended period without contact. 'I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could,' she told Rolling Stone in 2024. 'You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.' Less than a year after that interview, though, Nicks and Buckingham have seemingly patched things up to release 'Buckingham Nicks,' which will be available to stream for the first time on September 19. Aside from their Instagram posts, neither musician has commented on the rerelease of the only album made as a duo.
Euronews
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham to reissue ‘Buckingham Nicks'
A love not so frozen anymore. Last week, Euronews Culture chronicled the frenzied online speculations about a possible Fleetwood Mac reunion, following cryptic social media posts by longtime members/exes Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Unwilling to yield to collective mania and possibly wary of future disappointment, we concluded that the posts were probably 'just bandmates having a laugh and patching things up.' How blissfully naive we were. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham have announced the reissue of 'Buckingham Nicks', more than 50 years after the initial release of their only studio album as a duo. A remastered version will be on sale on 19 September, both digitally and on CD, with a limited number of 5,000 physical copies. The record's opening track, 'Crying in the Night', was made available to stream on Wednesday. 'Buckingham Nicks' was originally released in 1973. It was a commercial failure but it caught the attention of Mick Fleetwood, who invited Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. The American singer insisted that Nicks join too. The two, then a couple, became the central faces, voices and songwriters of the group for the four decades that followed. Their tumultuous relationship inspired several of the band's most famous songs, including on the 1977 hit album 'Rumours.' 'Buckingham Nicks' reached a cult classic status among Fleetwood Mac fans but became a rare sight in record stores. It was last issued on vinyl in 1981 and has remained absent from streaming platforms. The duo foreshadowed the announcement in a series of Instagram posts last week. Nicks shared a hand-written line from the pair's 1973 song 'Frozen Love': 'And if you go forward…' 'I'll meet you there', Buckingham responded on his own account, completing the lyric. The interaction sent fans into a frenzy, leading many to believe that a Fleetwood Mac reunion was imminent, but the prospect seemed uncertain. Nicks has said that without the late singer Christine McVie, who died on 30 November 2022 aged 79, 'there's no chance of putting Fleetwood Mac back together.' Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham had long wanted to reedit their debut work. In 2011, Buckingham told Uncut that he and Nicks had 'every intention of putting that album back out.' The reissued version of 'Buckingham Nicks' features the same album cover as the original, a photograph of the then-couple posing nude. Buckingham and Nicks were in their early to mid-20s during the making of their album. 'It stands up in a way you hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work', Buckingham said in the re-release's liner notes.. '[We] knew what we had as a duo, two songwriters that sang really well together. And it was a very natural thing, from the beginning', Nicks said.
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
'Buckingham Nicks' was a record store holy grail for decades. It's finally getting reissued
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- They were in love once. Four years before Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours' became one of the best breakup records of the 1970s — and, many might say, all time — Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were relative unknowns, a young couple putting out their own album, posing nude on the cover like a Laurel Canyon version of Adam and Eve. Released as 'Buckingham Nicks,' the 1973 album has for decades maintained somewhat of a holy grail status in the dusty bins of record stores, selling for $20 to $90 depending on its condition. Now, in addition to new vinyl, it will be available on streaming and CD for the first time when it's reissued Sept. 19 on Rhino, Warner Music Group announced Wednesday. 'It's one of those records that everybody has heard of but not that many people have actually heard,' said Brian Mansfield, a music historian, journalist and record collector in Nashville, Tennessee. 'Especially before everything got put onto YouTube, very few people had heard it because it had never been on CD. But it had this iconic cover that everybody recognized.' 'Buckingham Nicks' featured the duo's iconic harmonies and Buckingham's distinct guitar sound, which later fueled Fleetwood Mac's ability to sell tens of millions of records. But 'Buckingham Nicks' bombed upon release and Polydor dropped them from the label, prompting Nicks' return to waitressing and Buckingham to briefly tour with Don Everly. The rest of the story is enshrined in lore: Drummer Mick Fleetwood heard 'Frozen Love' from the album when he visited the studio where it was recorded, Sound City. After guitarist Bob Welch left the band, Fleetwood invited Buckingham to Fleetwood Mac, with Buckingham insisting Nicks join too. The band also included the late Christine McVie on keyboards and John McVie on bass. Generations of avid Fleetwood Mac fans have tattooed their lyrics or analyzed them at a forensic level, enshrining the tumultuous relationship between Buckingham and Nicks in pop culture. The upcoming reissue of 'Buckingham Nicks' is a reminder of the couple's musical beginnings and the special status their only joint album has held among fans and record collectors. 'As soon as we put it out, it goes that day,' said Michael Bell, owner of Hunky Dory Records, which has locations in Raleigh, Durham and Cary, North Carolina. Nicks and Buckingham met during high school at a local church in Northern California where young musicians gathered on a school night, according to Stephen Davis' 'Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks.' Buckingham played the Mamas & the Papas' 'California Dreamin'" on piano, prompting Nicks to chime in, singing Michelle Phillips' high harmony. 'They glanced at each other; she noticed his eyes, cold blue like lake ice," Davis wrote. "They sang the whole song while the room went quiet, everyone mesmerized.' After high school, Nicks joined the band Buckingham was in, Fritz, which would open for Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. They eventually split off as a duo, started dating and moved to Los Angeles. Nicks said she loved Buckingham before he was a millionaire, according to Davis' book, and 'washed his jeans and embroidered stupid moons and stars on the bottom of them.' The first track on 'Buckingham Nicks,' 'Crying in the Night," has 'a sense of Joni Mitchell fronting the Eagles,' Davis wrote. 'Frozen Love' closed out side two, with 'layers of strings and synthesizers and a major Lindsey Buckingham rock guitar symphony." 'No one seemed to like the record,' Davis wrote. 'Polydor executives hadn't even wanted to release it." A review that ran in The Pittsburgh Press said Nicks and Buckingham produced "a pleasant, albeit a whiny vocal blend on some pretty fair songs.' 'And if you don't like the record,' the review concluded, 'you might like the costumes they're wearing on the cover — a couple of those oh-so-chic birthday suits.' Interest in the record only grew following the new Fleetwood Mac lineup. That incarnation's first record in 1975, 'Fleetwood Mac,' contained the songs 'Landslide,' 'Rhiannon' and 'Monday Morning.' 'Rumours' came two years later. Bob Fuchs, retail manager of record store Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, said the shop gets in about two to four of the original vinyl a year. Those go on on its collectible wall that showcases hard-to-find titles. Depending on its condition, the album sells for between $40 to $90, he said. 'You put it up on a Saturday morning and it's gone by Saturday at noon. So it lasts about two hours,' he said. Fuchs never bought the album himself because, 'every time I came in, it was $60 or $80. ... So I'll probably end up picking up a reissue.' Across the river at the St. Paul, Minnesota, location of Cheapo Discs, though, worker Geoff Good said people rarely came in looking for the original. He does expect the reissue to juice sales. He has the original, which he bought in 1974 or 1975, in his own collection. 'The songwriting is really good, the harmonies are good, Lindsey Buckingham is an amazing guitar player,' he said. Mansfield, the Nashville historian, randomly found a copy two weeks ago in a neighborhood garage sale, just days prior to hints that a reissue was coming. He has no idea why 'Buckingham Nicks' hasn't been reissued more considering the steady demand. For him, it's a good album but not one that reached the heights of what was to come. 'It's definitely not there yet,' he said. 'I don't know that there's anything on this album that would have made a Fleetwood album.' The romantic relationship between Buckingham and Nicks would end around the making of 'Rumours.' Nicks and Buckingham would shoot eye daggers at each other onstage in packed stadiums, while Buckingham would roll his eyes during Nicks' MusiCares speech in 2018, according to the Los Angeles Times. Buckingham would eventually be kicked off the band's tour in 2018 , prompting a lawsuit that was later settled. But this month, Buckingham and Nicks seemed to be operating in perfect symmetry — at least on Instagram. Each posted half a line from 'Frozen Love,' — with Nicks writing "And if you go forward…' and Buckingham responding, 'I'll meet you there.' On Wednesday, they shared the same video of a billboard being put up to advertise the reissue of 'Buckingham Nicks.' They may have made the album more than 50 years ago, Buckingham said in announcing its reissue, 'but it stands up in a way you hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work.'
