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The Ballad of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham

Before they helped turn Fleetwood Mac into one of the biggest bands in history—and became iconic characters in one of rock's longest-running soap operas—they battled an indifferent industry, poverty, and occasionally each other to make their first and only album as a duo, Buckingham Nicks. As this lost singer-songwriter classic returns to stores and streaming for the first time in decades, here's the Stevie and Lindsey story you haven't heard.

By Yuval Taylor

October 2, 2025

Stevie Nicks Lindsey Buckingham and the True Love Story Behind a Long Lost Album



“It is, in many ways, one of the greatest love stories ever told,” Stevie Nicks once said of her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham. “It’s like one of the great romances of the century.... We both tried to kill each other.”


Stevie and Lindsey started making their own music together in 1970. They called themselves Buckingham Nicks, finding their footing as songwriters and cementing their bond as lovers and collaborators. But the band’s story is far more intricate, complex, and human than “the greatest love story ever told” could possibly be.

During the production of their eponymous debut (and, as it turned out) only album as a duo, newly rereleased by Rhino Records for the first time since 1981, Lindsey and producer Keith Olsen managed to suppress, to a large degree, Stevie’s creativity and talent. Here is the tale of how that happened—and how, soon after the album's release, Stevie defied Lindsey’s authority and reasserted herself as a brilliant songwriter and vocalist, carving her own path.

Part One
The story of Buckingham Nicks begins with a band called Fritz.

In August 1970, manager David Forest brought Fritz from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles, having convinced vocalist Stevie Nicks, bassist and fellow vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, and drummer Bob Aguirre that success awaited them where the music business was concentrated. But songwriter and keyboardist Javier Pacheco and guitarist Brian Kane were holding out.

As a result, Fritz was crumbling. Javier hated LA. Lindsey was tired of playing bass and wanted to switch to guitar. Brian wanted the band to play more blues.

They arrived in Los Angeles on August 6th. On August 10, shortly before Fritz played a showcase at the Whiskey a Go Go, Javier went to the room Stevie and Lindsey were sharing at the Tropicana Motel to try to discuss Fritz’s future with them. (Although both had been in the band for over three years, they’d only recently started dating.) Lindsey was forthright. He had been talking to the managers without Javier. “We don’t care what you say anymore,” he told him.

Javier walked away speechless. He had just been deposed as leader, and his words no longer mattered.

Just a month earlier, Fritz had been at the peak of their success. They had played at San Francisco’s highest-profile venues, Fillmore West and Winterland. They had opened for Janis Joplin for the second time. They had a following, a dedicated manager, a strong work ethic, and a string of great gigs.

And then it all fell apart.

When Stevie and Lindsey started dating in 1970, Javier started writing songs about the relationship. “Bold Narcissus” predicted that Stevie would ditch Lindsey; once the couple realized that the lyrics were about them, they refused to perform it any longer. “Bolder Empress,” about Stevie, met the same fate. Stevie demanded respect, but getting it from Javier was tough. “I did pick on Stevie excessively, needlessly,” he later admitted. “She was the most vulnerable and I caused her much grief.”

The budding love affair seems to have been sparked by unhappiness with the way things were going within the band. But Stevie and Lindsey’s close harmony singing surely helped. The intensity of their musical interactions deepened. The thrills they would get from anticipating each other’s vocal turns were obvious.

A year or two earlier, Lindsey had inherited over $10,000 from an aunt. He had already started tinkering with Bob’s Sony two-track, creating an entire band by playing all the instruments himself in a back room of a coffee factory that his father owned. But now he’d bought an Ampex AG440 four-track with half-inch tape, and this allowed him and Javier to work out parts for Javier’s compositions. And once Fritz broke up, it allowed him to work out parts for Stevie’s as well.

Lindsey was the first of Stevie’s many collaborator-lovers—and their relationship quickly became reclusive and obsessive. Stevie drove the collaboration. Lindsey wasn’t terribly ambitious at this point—he just thought making music was fun—but for Stevie it meant much more. And her lyrics knocked Lindsey out.

When Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon—a vulnerable, personal album that concluded with her biggest “statement” songs, “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” and “The Circle Game”—was released in April 1970, Stevie did little else for a week other than listen to it, studying every word and phrase. “It was her music that showed me I could say everything I wanted to and push it into one sentence and sing it well,” she later said. Stevie penned her first true masterpiece, “Nomad” (renamed “Candlebright”), around that time. A song about restlessness, travel, coming home, and not being sure where you belong, its poetic concision and surprising musical turns owe a great deal to Joni. In the song, she leaves the man she loves “for no special reason”—she has been “rolling around my whole life”—but he anchors her. He’s her “candle bright in the window.” She loves him, though he is not her friend, and she always comes back to him. The song is Stevie defining herself romantically: she wanders, flies away, but comes back; her devotion is balanced by her dreams. It’s striking that this self-definition came so early in her relationship with Lindsey. It would be her approach to romance for the rest of her life.

A few months before the confrontation at the Tropicana motel, the band’s managers had flown producer Keith Olsen to the Bay Area to see Fritz perform at a Friday night high school dance. Keith was a nonentity at that point; all the bigger producers had passed on Fritz. Lindsey and Bob picked him up at SFO in the band’s van, which had no back seats; he sat with the amps and drum cases. Then they asked him to help carry their stuff into the school’s gymnasium. It was not exactly how a producer expects to be greeted by a band.

Keith would soon play a major part in Stevie and Lindsey’s careers. His garage band, the Music Machine, had a hit with “Talk Talk” in 1966; he then started working with brilliant pop producers like Curt Boettcher, Brian Wilson, and Gary Usher. Jangly and twee, the albums he helped produce in the 1960s sported close harmonies, clear high ends, lots of overdubs, bossa nova rhythms, harpsichords, bells, cello, and birdsong: they were prime examples of what would later be called “vanilla pop,” a genre as far away from R&B as one could get. His influence is all over Buckingham Nicks.

Fritz, however, “were OK but not the super band of the future,” he later recalled. He nonetheless agreed to go into the studio with them when they came down to LA—at least Lindsey and Stevie had shown some promise.

He didn’t have to wait long. Two nights after their Whiskey showcase, he brought Stevie, Lindsey, and Javier to Sound City, the studio he operated, for a late-night recording session. Sound City was in a nondescript building in Van Nuys in a run-down industrial stretch close to both Highway 101 and the Budweiser brewery; the air outside always smelled of beer. The studio, which would become a virtual home for the couple a few years later, was stuffy, with discarded food spilling out of the trash bins and ash trays filled with cigarette butts.

Keith wanted to record Stevie and Lindsey. But he needed Javier too, since Stevie’s songs were very much in the folk and country tradition, Lindsey hadn’t started writing yet, and Keith—along with the management team—wanted something pop. So Javier wrote a terrific nonsense song called “Polyanna Louise,” and Keith helped them record it; Lindsey’s spirited lead vocal sounded not unlike Elton John. They also recorded two other songs Javier had written. It was, in a way, Buckingham Nicks’ first recording session, in the same studio and with the same producer as all the others.

That night, Keith took Lindsey and Stevie aside. “You know,” he said, “you two have a unique sound together. But the rest of your band will hold you back.”

Stevie says that this advice cemented her and Lindsey’s relationship, but not in the way that Keith expected. “It was the guilt that drove us together.... We just felt so bad because everyone in Los Angeles was trying to kill our band. I mean, after three-and-a-half years together, these guys were our best pals in the world and they were just being shut out, and it was obvious.”

Later they would hear that the president of Dunhill Records thought that “Polyanna Louise” sounded like a hit. Both Dunhill and RCA were showing interest in signing the band. But nothing came of it.

Fritz was breaking up. Their onstage camaraderie—everyone egging Bob on as he embarked on a drum solo, or Lindsey turning to smile at Javier after a juicy keyboard riff—had disappeared, and the band members were just playing their parts.

In late fall, Keith traveled up to the Bay Area to meet with the band. After discovering that they had not practiced for almost a month, he told them they were not ready to record professionally. The band members just sat there, numb. David Forest came up to offer his condolences at a high school gig. But not much was said.

They played some more shows at high schools, junior colleges, and the like, even performing into 1971. But they had all agreed that this was the end. Their LA managers cleaned out their bank account, and Fritz was no more.

Much later, Stevie would say that her time in Fritz had been “the most electric three years of my life,” and the same was true for the other band members (with the possible exception of Lindsey). Stevie would speak wistfully of the experience to her fans in live concerts around the world. In their five years in Fritz, both Stevie and Lindsey first enjoyed the camaraderie of being in a band, learned to sing and play in front of large audiences, first felt the sensation of thousands of fans responding to their voices, became not just adults but professional musicians, and began a joyous and intense love affair.

And those years set the terms of their relationship. They were lovers. They were bandmates/collaborators/rock stars. And you couldn’t separate one fact from the other.

Part Two
Fritz’s breakup devastated everyone. Javier would be bitter for decades, first blaming himself, then Stevie’s ambition. Brian even wrote an anti-Stevie song with the line “You ruined everything you touched.” Bob took it hardest of all, as his allegiances had been divided, and as Fritz had been his brainchild. Stevie was forced to abandon one of her greatest pleasures: live performance.

Lindsey got sick. His struggle with mononucleosis was not caused by the break-up, of course, but it lasted six to nine months. Stevie visited him at his parents’ house all the time, sleeping in the living room, bringing him food and records, and comforting him with small kindnesses. Lindsey had always been extremely active; being confined to bed was not much fun. But he got an electric guitar and taught himself to play lead; he further developed his acoustic guitar skills; he worked some more on multi-track recording. And they worked together on Stevie’s songs.

(At some point Lindsey, Stevie, and Stevie’s old friend Robin Snyder all stayed in a house in Campbell, a city adjacent to San Jose, paying $30 per night; Robin was dating the owner’s son. This is the “room with some lace and paper flowers” which Stevie mentions in “Gypsy”; their only furniture was a lamp and a king-sized mattress with vintage coverlets on the floor. But most of the time they lived with their parents.)

During Lindsey’s recovery, he and Stevie spent nights recording in an improvised studio in his father’s coffee plant just south of San Francisco. They would arrive around eight or nine in the evening, well after all the workers had left, and remain six to nine hours, five days a week. It was a big, frightening place at night, but they would just stay in that room with the doors locked. (Stevie brought her crocheting with her so she would have something to do while Lindsey laid down the guitar parts.)

Lindsey had also written several songs by then. “Lola, My Love” would soon appear on Buckingham Nicks. “Butterfly” was in the vein of James Taylor’s 1970 album Sweet Baby James. But they focused mainly on recording Stevie’s material. And what material it was.

The songs Stevie had written in the 1960s were no great shakes, with lyrics like “Bubbles and balloons sailing upward to the sky” or “as the days go by, cinnamon and wine, pouring from a bottle amber never clearing.” But “Nomad” had been a breakthrough, and this initial recording is an unmitigated triumph.

“Designs of Love” (renamed “That’s Alright”) is Stevie’s best effort at country music, a reconception of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Waiting on a Train.” It centers around Stevie’s difficult decision to leave her man and how she comes to be at peace with it. The lyrics are mature: “I never did believe in time changing anybody’s mind. And I can’t define love like it should be.”

“Garbo” is a haunting waltz and an evocative meditation on fandom. In it, Stevie dances with a man in a dark linen suit and pretends to be Garbo, Marilyn, or Marlene.

“Lady from the Mountains” (later renamed “Sorcerer”) is one of Stevie’s darkest, most dreamlike and inscrutable songs, a string of suggestive images and feelings—“wild-eyed in my misery,” “black-ink darkness,” “man and woman on a star stream in the middle of a snow dream.”

In all of these, Lindsey plays beautiful guitar parts, ranging from acoustic to electric to banjo, and overdubs bass parts; the harmonies are provided both by Stevie and Lindsey; “Lady from the Mountains” also features a drum machine. Other songs were demoed too: a distinctive blues number written a few years earlier called “Cathouse Blues,” a nursery rhyme called “Goldfish and the Ladybug,” and a tender and devoted love song called “Without You.”

Meanwhile, life was difficult. Stevie’s parents were supportive, but were no longer giving her money, so she worked as a hostess in a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant.

David Forest arranged for them to play a showcase, as Buckingham Nicks, in LA. There Lindsey met with Keith Olsen and played him the demos. Keith was blown away. “Holy crap,” he said. “Let’s do this album.”

The couple had some trepidations about moving. The Bay Area was the only home they’d ever known. The San Fernando earthquake of February 9, 1971, had devastated the Los Angeles area, killing more than 65 people. “Making it in Hollywood” had never been their aspiration. They had few friends there and no place to live.

But at some point in late 1971 or 1972, Lindsey and Stevie packed their bags and drove her Toyota down to Los Angeles (with, as Stevie has said, only 35 cents between them).

Stevie’s family were furious. After five years of college, she had quit school and was about to live with her boyfriend (her parents considered that a sin). “What are you going to do?” they asked. “Be in the circus the rest of your life?”

But they couldn’t blame Lindsey. Going to Los Angeles was all Stevie’s idea. Lindsey maintains he would have remained in the Bay Area were it not for her drive to succeed.

Part Three
Keith Olsen signed Buckingham Nicks to his production company, Pogologo Productions. He took the Buckingham Nicks demos and played them for all the big labels. The only person who liked them was an A&R man named David Shackler, who was instrumental in signing the duo to Anthem, a small label distributed by Polydor. Anthem’s owners, Ted Feigin and Lee Lasseff, had owned White Whale Records from 1965 to 1971, when it went out of business; the sole hitmakers on that label besides a few one-hit wonders had been the Turtles. Given Feigin and Lasseff’s track record, this wasn’t a great option, but there were no others. So a few months after Lindsey and Stevie moved to LA—they lived in Keith’s house at first—they signed with Anthem. The total advance was $35,000, which included the signing payment for the artists, the producer’s advance, and the projected recording costs.

Richard Dashut, a twenty-one-year-old Angeleno who had been working as a janitor at another studio, Crystal Sound, got a job doing maintenance at Sound City. A handsome, fully bearded man with small blue eyes and wide cheeks, he looked like a practical joker, though he was more often than not the butt of practical jokes. After a week, Keith promoted him to assistant engineer, and he would remain his second for about two years.

But his first job at the studio had been to paint the control room—with a little help from Stevie and Lindsey. Stevie was trying to paint the ceiling and kept getting paint in her hair, so Richard grabbed the paint roller and showed her how to do it. During a break, he saw them huddled in the maintenance room, smoking a joint. Being a fan of marijuana, he asked if he could join them. Five minutes later, they were best friends—a fact that lasted for a good ten years or more—and by the end of the day, they decided to get an apartment together—Richard was looking for something and they were dying to move out of Keith’s house.

Richard took them back to his current apartment to meet his roommate and high-school buddy, Tom Moncrieff, another aspiring musician. Lindsey played Tom and Richard the coffee plant demos, and they were blown away. Tom would soon join the Buckingham Nicks band on bass, and would end up being the musician that Stevie and Lindsey relied on the most for the longest. Classically handsome but shy of his looks, clean-shaven and studious, Tom was an intelligent and tasteful player, with an intuitive sense of what each of them required musically. He could play bass, drums, and guitar, and was a skilled arranger as well; he was also both a gentleman and a joker.

Stevie, Lindsey, and Richard’s new place was on Primera on the edge of the Hollywood Hills near Studio City, about a half-hour drive from Keith’s and right next to Highway 101. It was a small split-level apartment attached to a large house on a quiet and residential street. They had a tiny kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom upstairs, and then a little basement room with a loft bed down a narrow stairwell. They furnished it as best they could, considering how low on funds they were. They didn’t bother getting a television; a record player and a book of five thousand guitar chords were enough.

Lindsey and Stevie had kept in touch with Bob Aguirre, who had been touring with Dr. Hook’s Medicine Show; Lindsey wanted him in the Buckingham Nicks band. (In the end, Bob would not appear on the Buckingham Nicks album. Instead the drummers were chosen by Keith.) Bob soon came to L.A. and moved in with them for a time.

Sometimes, after twenty hours of work at Sound City, Richard would come back to his room and trip over the cables with which Lindsey connected his microphones to his four-track. Lindsey’s guitar-playing friends would be passed out on the floor in the living room and Stevie would be asleep in Richard’s bed—squeezed between the editing block and an empty reel—after a fight with her man.

They were penniless. Keith offered to give them money, but Stevie insisted on working for it—living on charity would be beneath her. So she started cleaning his house for $25 twice a week; got a job as a dental assistant (it lasted one day); and worked as a waitress at the Copper Penny, a coffee shop. She enjoyed waitressing—she only worked lunches, from eleven to four, she “got to be out there with real people,” and she made enough money to pay for rent, food, and car upkeep. As for Lindsey, he and Tom would write hot checks to Hollywood coffee shops and never go back again.

Stevie told Spin in 1997, “I didn’t want to be a waitress, but I believed that Lindsey shouldn’t have to work, that he should just lay on the floor and practice his guitar and become more brilliant every day. And as I watched him become more brilliant every day, I felt very gratified.” Lindsey was so magnetizing that he bent her to his wishes. “His eyes were that intense,” she confessed in 1994. “You could be the toughest person, but those eyes would make you be whatever he wanted you to be.”

They called the basement Quality Sound Recorders. Lindsey set up his four-track there; Gary Hodges would bring his drum kit; guitarists Waddy Wachtel and Tom Moncrieff and bassist/percussionist Jorge Calderón would stop by. Keith had made all this possible, including inviting the musicians, because he knew it would help keep the actual recording costs low. In addition, Keith wanted Lindsey to be “at ease” and “play off” the musicians so that “magic” could happen. Lindsey was having the time of his life, showing off his guitar impersonations of Andrés Segovia and Django Reinhardt.

Stevie and Lindsey seemed a charmed couple. Even though they were having hard times and LA was a cutthroat town, everybody adored them, wanted to hang out with them, wanted to play music with them, wanted to help them. Stevie “had this alluring shyness about her,” Richard later wrote, “which made [her] all the more attractive, with a certain vulnerability.” They had charisma: you couldn’t help but be drawn to this beautiful, talented, sweet, modest, and funny pair. And they repaid their friends’ kindness, doing them favors, lending them money when they had any, and just being simpatico.

One evening Stevie came home in her cleaning shoes, carrying her Hoover vacuum cleaner, her Ajax, and her toilet brush. Somehow Lindsey had gotten hold of eleven ounces of opiated hash. He and his musician friends—Richard, Bob, Waddy, Jorge, Warren Zevon, and a few others—were sitting in a circle smoking it. Stevie didn’t like smoke—she thought it ruined her voice—and she had to step over all the bodies. Although she was tired, she started cleaning around and under them, emptying their ashtrays. She was getting a reputation as a neatnik; she was meticulous about keeping things orderly.

The hash lasted about a month. Afterwards the guys would tell Stevie, “I don’t know why I don’t feel very good.” Stevie’s answer was perfect: “I’ll tell you why—because you’ve done nothing else for weeks but lie on the floor and smoke and take my money.”

At about the same time, Stevie was introduced to cocaine. Keith, as a joke, left a line of it under something just to see how thorough a housecleaner she was. She found it, of course. She tried it, but didn’t think it was a big deal.

Stevie says she wasn’t bitter about working while the boys played. After all, the only thing Lindsey really knew how to do was play guitar. He didn’t think Buckingham Nicks should be playing at steak houses and bar-and-grills, though Stevie would have considered that a sight better than being a cleaning lady—playing four sets at a Chuck’s Steak House would have netted them $500 a week. They had a fight about that, but Lindsey won.

“I loved him,” Stevie would say in 1981. “I loved our music, and I was willing to do anything I could to get us from point B to point A.”

Stevie kept writing songs. One was the country-tinged “After the Glitter Fades,” which reimagines her life ten years hence, after she had “made it in Hollywood”: “Even though the living is sometimes laced with lies, it’s all right: the feeling remains even after the glitter fades.” Already, after less than a year in Los Angeles, she knew she belonged there. Another was “The Grandfather Song,” a country number that pays tribute to her grandfather, an itinerant musician who had sparked Stevie’s ambitions. He was sick: “I can still hear him playing, though he’ll soon be gone,” she sang. She would dedicate Buckingham Nicks to him.

Stevie would record her songs on cassette tapes when nobody was around. She’d leave a tape by the coffee pot and tell Lindsey that he could arrange the song, but he couldn’t change anything—not the lyrics, not the melody.

Lindsey obeyed. But he was also trying to change her songwriting. He forced her to listen to the Beatles for their sense of form—the verse, then two bars, then another verse, then a chorus, then a bridge. Stevie hated being lectured to like this. But she gave in. The two of them would sit together on the shag carpet, Lindsey in sandals, holes in his jeans and shirts. With pencils and scraps of legal paper, much of it wadded up, they’d work out the structure of their songs, singing them out, working on the harmony—usually between nine PM and three AM, arguing all the while.

The songs they were recording at Sound City showcased this new complexity. Far more Beatlesque than the coffee plant demos, songs like Lindsey’s “Without a Leg to Stand On” and Stevie’s “Crying in the Night” and “Races Are Run” are complicated, intricate, and formal, with little emotion or lyrical imagination.

Lindsey ended up dominating the recording sessions; Stevie largely avoided them, coming in now and then just to add her vocals. At the beginning, though, she stuck it out. She once wrote a letter to her parents and little brother from the studio. “I am getting very tired of sitting around listening to 12 hours of music per day. Oh well, I know it will pay off in the end, and when I am sitting in my small, but luxurious, Beverly Hills home overlooking my small but tasteful pool that is totally secluded where I can sun in the nude and tan my entire [illegible] body while waiting [illegible] plastic surgery [illegible], it will all be worth it.... [I] wish you could be here to hear some of this stuff. By the way, Dad & Chris—that rock and roll tune that you both liked [Lindsey’s ‘Don’t Let Me Down Again’] ... is almost finished and Lindsey may go down in history as one of the greats in guitar playing.”

Besides the Beatles, they were also enchanted by the British singer-songwriter Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman (1970); they listened to it every day, sang along, played along, harmonized to it. Stevens promoted, to huge success, a jaunty yet tender optimism that peace and love could win the day. Also on heavy rotation were Dave Mason’s Alone Together, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, CSNY, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, the Stones, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, the Supremes, Simon & Garfunkel, the Everly Brothers, and Lindsey’s old bluegrass and folk records, especially the Kingston Trio. It was mostly mainstream, popular rock—no Zappa, heavy metal, prog rock, or funk.

But the music that they listened to most, and that mattered the most, was their own.

In 1971, Sly and the Family Stone released There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which opened with the line “Feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move.” The album went right to the top of the charts. Sly’s lyric captured the era’s aesthetic—successful American records of the early 1970s had to be either feel-good, don’t-wanna-move, or both. These records—whether by Al Green or Grand Funk Railroad, the Stylistics or Barbra Streisand—didn’t advocate revolution or free love or lift you out of your seat with inspiration or joy. This was the era of couch potato records, mood pieces for pot smokers and margarita drinkers and high-fidelity earphone listeners who liked to read along with the lyric sheet.

And they were full of bad vibes. The Grateful Dead’s masterpiece, “Truckin’,” expressed the same weariness as Sly Stone, taking the Merry Pranksters’ bus and turning it into a truck, complete with burned-out drug addicts and vicious cops, lovers crying alone and cities that look the same, indecision and boredom. The dissatisfaction expressed in this and other California records of the time—the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” the Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush—couldn’t possibly motivate anyone to get up off their seat and do something about it. The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” don’t even ride the storm—they’re born in the same house they live in and are thrown into the same world; there may be a killer on the road but nobody gives him a ride. The entirety of L.A. Woman is like this track, its most famous—meandering, bluesy, mildly threatening, but never really giving a ****.

Inertia and helplessness—America was pervaded with it. Why? After all, Richard Nixon was trying to make the country good again: he banned cigarette advertisements, withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam, and froze prices, wages, and rents. Of course, at the same time he invaded Cambodia, Laos, and the DNC headquarters in the Watergate building. Under Nixon, U.S. troops slaughtered four civilians at Kent State, two at Jackson State, and forty-two at Attica State Prison. Amid all this violence, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional, they sounded like holdovers from the 1960s. Peace? Peace was dead, over, done with.

In 1973, things got worse. PBS aired An American Family, the first “reality TV” series, the first show with an openly gay central character, and a devastating depiction of divorce and disfunctionality. Last Tango in Paris and The Exorcist were released and Deep Throat brought X-rated films into the mainstream. The Watergate hearings dominated the country’s attention, Spiro Agnew resigned, and Nixon insisted that he was “not a crook.”

The world had changed, and its meaning had been lost. That was the message of most American movies of the era—The Godfather, Cabaret, Born to Win, Dirty Harry, The Fiddler on the Roof, Five Easy Pieces, McCabe and Mrs. Miller—and of the novel that tried the hardest to capture that era in all its bleakness. The signature line of John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, a tale of moral, political, and racial confusion, was Harry Angstrom’s shrugging answer to all questions: “Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad.”

But it was left to John Prine, a young folk singer, to say the most in the fewest words. In “Pretty Good,” on his first album (1971), Prine makes love to a girl from Venus while another girl named Molly gets raped in the woods by a dog—and the only reaction either of them can give is “Pretty good, not bad, can’t complain.” With that, Prine captured the entire era in a nutshell.

As for Buckingham Nicks, who would shortly share a stage with Prine, they went right along with the trend. Their music was pretty good, not bad; there were bad vibes in it, but they were mellow; the production was perfect for couch potatoes and the mood perfect for sitting around getting stoned.

The band had a good time making the music, both in their basement and at Sound City, working with a large number of skilled musicians, Lindsey learning the art of studio recording. Gary Hodges relates how they would improvise the percussion parts, using sand in a matchbox in place of a shaker, a pair of pliers hitting a microphone base in place of an anvil. Waddy Wachtel was so ubiquitous that he practically lived with them—he was the one who had convinced Lindsey to take a more architectural approach to his listening. He was a skinny New Yorker with a large nose, wire-rimmed glasses, and a frizzy mane of blond hair, parted in the middle and falling far past his shoulders. At the same time as they were recording the album, he recorded a terrific single for Anthem, with Stevie and Lindsey providing backing vocals on the A-side. But the vibe was typical of the era: “A year of lovin’ you was nothin’ but no fun; if you had thought to ask me you’d know it’s all done.”

Richard Dashut was working eighteen-hour days at Sound City, recording everything from jingles to blues. When he’d come home, Lindsey would be in Richard’s bed, headphones on, recording on his four-track, so Richard would help him for an hour or so and then get a few winks before going back to Sound City again. And he was a true believer in Buckingham Nicks. He knew if he hung in there with them it would lead to something big. He called himself not a fan, but a disciple.

On occasion Buckingham Nicks would also gig around town, Lindsey and Waddy on guitars, Jorge on bass, Bob or Hoppy (Gary Hodges) on drums, Stevie on vocals. They’d perform originals, a wide variety of country covers, and a few rock ’n’ roll numbers. But eventually Waddy called a meeting and told them he had to quit. Stevie’s lyrics were driving him crazy. “I just can’t do it,” he said. “I’m a dude! I’m a ****in’ rock ’n’ roll dude! I can’t stand here and be doing ‘the fountain and the velvet.’” (This is not a quote from an actual Stevie lyric, but the general idea behind “Crystal.”) “Lindsey, come on, man, play guitar with me. Let’s go play rock ’n’ roll. Let’s go do something. How can you back up these ****ing lyrics?” So they let him go.

For the cover photo of their album, Stevie spent her last dime on a beautiful $111 blouse that wrapped around and tied in the back; a huge flower was hand-painted on the front and the sleeves were diaphanous chiffon. Lindsey wore a pale Western-style shirt with embroidered flowers on the chest. Jimmy Wachtel, Waddy’s brother, was the art director, but Polydor wanted another photographer to take the cover photo. Lorrie Sullivan was well established by this point, having taken a number of album photos. She first took a warm and casual picture of the two of them standing and laughing, Lindsey holding a beer bottle and Stevie slightly behind him holding his other hand. (This seems to be the only photo extant of Stevie and Lindsey as happy lovers; it appears in the album’s gatefold.) Then she sat them down, posed them, and took dozens of shots of Lindsey leaning back, almost lying down, propped up on his left elbow, his shirt completely unbuttoned, with Stevie sitting behind him.

Suddenly she asked them to remove their tops.

Stevie was unwilling, so Lindsey got angry. “You know,” he said, “you’re just being a child. This is art.”

“This is not art,” Stevie replied. “This is taking a nude photograph with you, and I don’t dig it.” Who are you? she thought. Don’t you know me?

Eventually they talked her into it. But she was extremely upset, feeling like a rat in a trap. She has said she was crying, her breasts mostly hidden behind Lindsey’s bare shoulders. There are three dozen photos; if none of them show any tears, Stevie certainly doesn’t look happy. Instead, they both stare blankly into the camera.

When the album came out with one of these nude photos full-bleed on the cover, Stevie felt terribly humiliated. “That cover is as close to selling the music on sex as you’ll ever get,” she later said.

In September 1973, Polydor, who had a distribution deal with Anthem, released Buckingham Nicks; 35,000 copies were printed. To celebrate, Keith took Stevie and Lindsey to Hawaii for a short vacation.

But Polydor showed no enthusiasm whatsoever; they “thought that the album lacked imagination,” in Keith’s words, and did little to promote it.

Perhaps the duo had simply been working too hard on it; perhaps the influences of the Beatles, Cat Stevens, and Dave Mason had overcome their better instincts; perhaps their idea of creating an album consisting almost exclusively of new songs written specifically for it was misguided; perhaps Keith’s and Lindsey’s polished professionalism simply overwhelmed Stevie. But for whatever reason, the album failed to capture the magic of the coffee plant demos. Like those demos, the music here was tight, careful, unspontaneous. But the songwriting was decidedly weaker. Lyrics like “Races are run: some people win, some people always have to lose” (Stevie) and “In the morning after, I say, ‘Lola, you sure can love’” (Lindsey) are trite and awkward. None of Stevie’s songs were as imaginative, beguiling, or revealing as “Nomad,” “Garbo,” and “Lady from the Mountains.”

At least the record sounded great. It was the first album recorded on Sound City’s famous $75,000 state-of-the-art Neve console. The production was impeccable; the harmonies were divine; the playing was superb, especially Lindsey’s guitar work on the second side; and Lindsey’s voice is excellent throughout. There were even imaginative orchestral touches overdubbed onto “Crystal” (a gentle number about Stevie’s feelings for her father and grandfather, with lead vocals by Lindsey), “Django” (a cover of a Modern Jazz Quartet number), and the epic, seven-minute “Frozen Love,” the only song officially cowritten by Stevie, Lindsey, and nobody else.

But “Frozen Love” was emblematic of the album. Stevie wrote the beginning and end and Lindsey wrote the middle, and Lindsey worked terribly hard on it, taking months to put it together. Incredibly, the drums, played by Hoppy, were recorded after all the other instruments, even the orchestra. And in the end, the song sounds difficult.

Worst of all, Stevie’s vocals on Buckingham Nicks are possibly the least nuanced and heartfelt of her entire career. She seems to be simply singing by the numbers. All of her vocals are double-tracked, as if someone were ashamed of them. And indeed Keith was. He later called Stevie’s voice a “nasally thing that is almost on the verge of being a goat”; during the recording process, he often told her “please, Stevie, no goat rock.” Lindsey even took the lead on one of Stevie’s most characteristic songs, “Crystal.”

As Stevie has pointed out, she and Lindsey had fundamentally different approaches to making music. Stevie just wanted to sing, compose, perform: she wanted the music to be alive in its own moment. Lindsey wanted everything perfect, nailed down, polished. “His perfection drives me crazy,” she told Molly Meldrum in 1986, putting herself back in this period and using the present tense, “because I think he doesn’t have any fun, and my recklessness drives him crazy because he thinks I’m not as good as I should be.” On Buckingham Nicks, Lindsey clearly won that argument.

In 1998, a fan asked Stevie to name her favorite Lindsey song ever. It took her a while to answer, but when she finally did, she named “Stephanie,” the second track on Buckingham Nicks. Lindsey hadn’t written it with her in mind; he didn’t have a title for it when it was recorded so Stevie suggested its name. It’s a short, sweet, and brilliant twin acoustic guitar number in open D tuning, with Waddy Wachtel on second guitar; it provides the album’s most peaceful moment. But it’s striking that the song Stevie would choose would be the one without any lyrics.

Buckingham Nicks’ crown jewel is Lindsey’s “Don’t Let Me Down Again.” The only track that bristles with energy, this southern rock rave-up showcases a terrific guitar riff; the two-guitar solo echoes the Allman Brothers’ “Revival.” The lyrics, typically for Lindsey, are a casual afterthought, but menacing nonetheless: the chorus spells out a deadly warning that echoes the Beatles’ “Run for Your Life.” Even in one of his first songs, Lindsey couldn’t help but give vent to his paranoia.

Lyrically, the album has little variety. With the exception of “Lola, My Love,” which Lindsey had written back in the Fritz era, each song describes a relationship in conflict. The attachment may be strong, but so are the counterforces. Few of the lyrics are straightforward; the contradictions muddy their impact. “Hate gave you me for a lover,” they sing in “Frozen Love,” “and if you go forward, I’ll meet you there ... Cry out to life for a frozen love.” What can one make of lyrics like these, or “I got nothin’ but time, no time for living,” the opening lines of “Without a Leg to Stand On”? Like the music, the lyrics are simply too complicated.

A single was released: “Don’t Let Me Down Again” b/w “Races Are Run.” Billboard gave it a good review. But neither the single nor the album sold well at all. The project fizzled out. And what was their recompense for their three months of solid studio work? Five thousand dollars each.

Polydor cut them off in December, saying that they were too folky for them, and Buckingham Nicks was set adrift, without a label, airplay, fans, or money.

Keith Olsen still had them under his wing. His abiding faith in them, his permission to continue to use his studio, and the musicians he had hooked them up with kept Buckingham Nicks afloat, if barely. As Keith told writer Cath Carroll, “I can’t say I was numb to [their dejection]. All I said to them was, ‘Well, you got to write some new songs. I’ll make sure you get time in the studio, we’ll demo them out, and let’s find you another deal.’”

Stevie brought the album home to show her parents, but chickened out. She spent five weeks recovering from an ovarian cyst operation, during which the album stayed under her bed. When her mother finally saw it, she was shocked by the cover art. Stevie and Lindsey are topless, staring directly into the camera, in stark black and white, with greens and yellows applied to the feathers dangling from Stevie’s earring. Lindsey’s face is mostly obscured by his hair and moustache, but he looks alert and intense; Stevie, with her mouth slightly open and her eyes wide, is like a deer in the headlights. “We’re going to have to think about this before we show it to dad,” she told Stevie. Stevie didn’t want him to see it. But finally she gave in. “My father said to me, ‘Did you want to do this?’ And I said no. And he said, ‘Then why did you do it?’ And I said, ‘Because I was literally forced to do it, Dad.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you could have done. You could have said no.’”

tevie realized that he was right. It was a turning point for her. She swore she would never lack the courage to say no again.

Richard Dashut moved out of the Hollywood Hills apartment after close to a year there and found a place closer to central LA. The Spanish-style house with an avocado tree in the front yard was at 751 Orange Grove, a block east of Fairfax and a block south of the West Hollywood border. But then Stevie and Lindsey decided it would be better to continue to share expenses with Richard than to pay rent on their own, so, with Hoppy’s help (he owned a VW van), they moved in with Richard, taking over the master bedroom and confining him to the tiny second one (Stevie could be quite convincing). Richard was a perfect companion for the couple: calm, cool, extremely intelligent, and radiant with good vibes.

They were now farther from Sound City and well over the hills from the San Fernando Valley. It was cooler in Fairfax, more urban, infinitely more hip, and just a short drive from the Hollywood studios, the Whisky a Go Go, and most of the city’s recording studios.

But these were hard times. Both were having second thoughts. Perhaps they should have stayed in the Bay Area. They believed in themselves and in their music—and so did Keith Olsen. But they were barely playing any gigs, and there was practically no money. They made a pact not to look in any store windows. Even getting enough food to eat was a struggle. Once they did a showcase at the Art LaBoe Club (formerly the legendary Ciro’s) on Sunset Strip, and nobody except Waddy and a friend of his showed up. They had, Stevie would tell Sylvie Simmons in 1981, “two years of solid depression. It was hard, you know, when you practice that hard and you sound that good and everyone tells you that you should be doing something else.... It was a terrible time, because Lindsey and I just couldn’t understand how we could sing a beautiful song to you and nobody liked it and it was so pretty it made me cry. It was like: we don’t belong here. Nobody understands us.” She put it differently when she talked about that period for VH1’s Behind the Music: “Lindsey and I think that the world has ended because we have had a taste of the finer things. We have recorded in a big studio, we have been introduced to fabulous musicians, we have met a lot of people. We are very proud of our record, and it just gets dropped. And we are back to square one.”

In later years, both of them charmingly claimed that the other was driving the band. In 2003, Stevie said, “I did not ask to be the one that became the most famous.... I was just fine being a total back-up to Lindsey. I didn’t ask to be the one under the spotlight. It just happened.” Lindsey has said the opposite.

Despite it all, they decided not to look back.


Stevie and Lindsey had been as good as married; not only did they appear so to their housemates, bandmates, and friends, who have amply testified to it, but they appeared so to each other as well. As Stevie has often told interviewers, “we really were married”; she wanted to spend her life with him, singing with him every day. Their frequent fights just solidified their bond.

Why didn’t they marry, then? Hoppy suspects that because so many of the folks around them—including Hoppy himself—were having marital troubles, they may have preferred the simpler solidity of “shacking up.” Besides, they were too dedicated to their music to devote time to formalities. They never discussed children: their entire focus was on their musical career. Lindsey would later say, “As excellent lovers as we may have been, we were never particularly good friends. We were both very competitive people.”

In 2015, Maclean’s magazine asked Stevie when she realized that she wouldn’t get married. “Right away!” she answered. “In the beginning of my relationship with Lindsey, I realized that being in a relationship with a very powerful, controlling man probably wouldn’t work out for me in the future as an artist.” On the other hand, she told music critic Gavin Martin in 2003, “we had a great relationship. And I was very much the care-taker in that relationship, and I loved taking care of him. And I loved taking care of our house and, you know, all the things that women do when they love a man. You know, I washed his jeans and embroidered stupid moons and stars on the bottom of them, you know. I made sure that he was perfect, you know. I mean, I loved being that person in our relationship.”

How can one reconcile these two statements? Perhaps by listening to Stevie’s “Long-Distance Winner” (the last song on the first side of Buckingham Nicks), which she suggested, in 1998, held the key to the Buckingham-Nicks relationship. In it, Stevie and Lindsey run down a hill together, and Lindsey’s the winner; she brings water to him, but he’s too hot to touch. The chorus runs, “Love somebody, save their soul, tie them to your heaven, erase their hell; love their lifestyle if you feel it: don’t try to change them, you never will.” Perhaps Stevie had indeed realized early on that being with a powerful, controlling man would leave her little freedom to realize her dreams; but in Los Angeles, she was very clearly so devoted to him that she was willing to sacrifice, at least for a time, her dreams for his.

All that, however, was about to change. And once it did, Stevie would never, in her long life, live more than a few months with another man.

Part Four
In January 1974, Joni Mitchell released Court and Spark. It was her sixth album, the most poppy and least artsy, and would be her best selling record. It was also, thematically, her most complicated so far.

Stevie bought it, took it to Keith Olsen’s house, lay on the floor, took some acid (a rarity for Stevie, who says she has only used it three times), and listened to it on his huge speakers over and over again. Then she took the record home and kept listening to it for three days straight. One musical result was that Buckingham Nicks began performing Joni’s hard-rocking “Raised on Robbery” at gigs. Another was that she would sing “Same Situation” all the time, driving Lindsey nuts.

Stevie felt like she was living in Joni’s world, the Los Angeles that pervades the record, “caught” between her “struggle for higher achievements” and her “search for love that don’t seem to cease” (to quote “Same Situation”). And then there was the title track. “The more he talked to me, you know, the more he reached me,” Joni sang. “But I couldn’t let go of L.A.”
Stevie could relate. As she told The Guardian in 2007, after going through some rocky patches with Lindsey, she’d just met someone new, someone who seemed to “reach” her. Perhaps this was a man named Lindsey Wilkinson; Stevie has admitted to having an affair with him around this time, but kept it a secret from Lindsey Buckingham.

Then, on February 14, Lindsey’s father Morris died. He was only 55.

He’d been having heart troubles. (They run in the family: Lindsey’s brother Greg would die of a heart attack at the age of 45, and Lindsey would require heart surgery in 2019.) He was in a gas line (there was a gas shortage) and he had a massive heart attack. Stevie answered the phone that morning and, after learning what had happened, handed it to Lindsey, knowing how hard he’d take it. He was utterly devastated. He and his father had had a rather formal relationship without much display of affection, but recently it had become significantly warmer. Now it was over.

No funeral was planned, just a private internment. And the show had to go on. Buckingham Nicks were about to go on tour to promote their album. Just four days after Morris’s death, they were onstage in Cleveland.

That month and the next, they played more shows in Columbus, New York City, Birmingham, Cambridge, and San Francisco. Billboard gave their New York City date a mixed review, but was absolutely brutal about Stevie’s delivery: “Ms. Nicks also encounters problems, chiefly in her solo style, which points up to the occasional roughness of her voice and the strident quality to her top end that makes duets bracing, but proves less than fruitful when she takes to the stage alone.” In early May they played four nights at the Starwood in Los Angeles. They had been so well received in Birmingham—“Frozen Love” was frequently heard on WJLN—that they went back there in August to open for Mountain.

After receiving practically no reviews when it came out, Buckingham Nicks finally garnered a rave review in Rock magazine in December, 1974, fifteen months after its release. But at that point, the record was hard to find.

They did some record-company auditions. Russ Regan, head of 20th Century Records, told Lindsey he thought they were a “smash act” but couldn’t sign them. A Polydor rep in New York told them that he thought they could do better if they did crackerbilly songs like Jim Stafford’s recent hit “Spiders and Snakes.” Lou Adler, the famous producer who had just won a Grammy for Carole King’s Tapestry, listened to half a song and then said, “Thank you very much.”

And that basically sums up Buckingham Nicks’ career moves in 1974. The band was dying.

Their “marriage” was crumbling too. Faced with the pain of his father’s death and the failure of his band, Lindsey’s relationship with Stevie was becoming rocky, whether or not he was aware of Stevie’s recent interest in another man. “When I came home [from work], I’d always get a cold shoulder,” Stevie told Woman’s Own in 1990. “He wouldn’t quite trust me about where I’d been or what I’d been doing.... He felt I should be working much harder [on my music]. I tried asking, ‘Lindsey, how can I change?’ But everything about me seemed to bug him. My laughter, the way I could deal with a lot of difficult things, all made him cringe. So I changed when I was around him. I became mouse-like and would never dare offer a suggestion.”

Except when they were fighting. This was happening more now; they were openly questioning whether they really belonged together. “Lindsey and I were in total chaos” that year, Stevie later said. She moved out of their apartment twice, and then had to move back in because of money troubles. “Our relationship was already in dire straits.” Lindsey explains, “I think there was a love of each other, but there was also a love of the idea of where we were going that unified us,” and that idea was being tested as never before. “I think we were both too immature to try to want to work through our respective craziness, and it just sort of fell apart, and I think it would have for anyone.”

Both were writing new songs. Likely inspired by his father’s death, the slow, bluesy, minor-key “I’m So Afraid” is Lindsey’s first attempt to plumb the depths of his anguish. For years I felt it was overwrought: “I slip and I fall and I die”—really? But I’ve come to see how genuine it is: it isn’t altogether paranoid to be afraid of death when your father dies at 55. “Monday Morning,” by contrast, was a fun and intricate pop song about the back-and-forth will-we-break-up-or-stay-together condition that he found himself in with Stevie. During the verse, “traveling” is on his mind; during the chorus, he pledges himself to her—“I’ll be there if you want me to”—but insists that she give him some peace of mind.

“Knocking on Doors” (renamed “Lady”) was the first song Stevie wrote on her new piano, a complaint about boredom, discouragement, and uncertainty. The chorus starts with despair—“I wonder what is to become of me”—but then she says that Lindsey tells her, “Lady, you don’t have to see.” Slow and depressing, the song was relatively quickly abandoned. “I Don’t Want to Know”—infectious, joyous, hard-hitting, and irresistible, its candy coating hiding a profound ambivalence—was the perfect complement to “Monday Morning”’s back-and-forth. Stevie doesn’t want to know why their relationship is on the rocks. “Now you tell me that I’m crazy; it’s nothing that I didn’t know,” she pointedly remarks. Lindsey later commented that the song hints at the forthcoming breakup of their relationship, and has a “dark subtext.”

But Stevie’s songwriting would really blossom a few months later, when Lindsey wasn’t around.

One day in March a phone call came. It was Stevie’s Uncle Jonathan. He told her to find her brother Chris and to fly as soon as they could to the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where her father was to have open-heart surgery the next morning. He’d suddenly taken ill. Stevie must have immediately thought about what had just happened to Lindsey’s dad.

Stevie remembers running with Chris through the hospital hallways, only to find her mother sitting by herself and weeping. She told her kids, “He said to give these Greyhound cuff links to your uncle, and he said I could sell the car he bought me. I don’t want it and he knows it.”

Stevie was in shock. “He’s gone? He’s gone? We didn’t get to say goodbye to him?”

But Jess Nicks wasn’t gone—not yet. They sat and waited for ten hours in “a somber gray corridor.” Finally they saw him. “My dad’s not a complainer,” she told Timothy White in 1981. “[H]e’s real strong, and he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m in so much pain!’” Chris was so frightened he passed out.

It was life-altering. “Nothing else mattered; Lindsey didn’t matter, music didn’t matter, songs didn’t matter, nothing mattered more. I said, ‘Dear God, I would give everything up if you would just let me keep him for a little while.’”

And her father recovered.

Desperate for money, Lindsey finally got a job soliciting ads on the phone for a nonexistent business products directory. But that lasted only about a month.

Sound City’s owners offered Buckingham Nicks studio time there to record their next album; the plan was for Keith Olsen to shop it around when it was done. But they had to record at night so that they wouldn’t interfere with Keith’s other projects; Richard Dashut shepherded them to the studio in the dark. As far as I’ve been able to deduce from conversations with the participants, by the end of the year they had recorded four complete songs there—“I’m So Afraid,” “Monday Morning,” “I Don’t Want to Know,” and “Rhiannon”—and some of the basic tracks for “B Rock Tune” (a solo electric-guitar instrumental that vaguely resembles “Never Going Back Again”), “Blue Letter” (a song borrowed from their friends the Curtis brothers), “Landslide,” and “Lady from the Mountains.” Tom played bass and Bob and Hoppy played drums. All the songs brimmed with fierce energy—unlike the album’s carefully overdubbed recordings featuring session musicians, these tracks were cut by a real working band. Keith had nothing to do with the recordings, letting Lindsey and Richard be in charge. Unfortunately, these recordings no longer exist since the tapes were reused by other bands.

But things couldn’t have looked much bleaker. They had been turned down by practically every record company in LA. When Stevie went home for a visit either in May or September (she has told the story in several different ways), she was so skinny that her father took her aside. “You know,” he said, “You and Lindsey aren’t happy. I think you should put a six-month limit on this. And then I think you should go back to school. We’ll pay for it.” Stevie reluctantly assented.

In 1973, Waddy Wachtel had been working with the Everly Brothers, who then split up. Warren Zevon became Don Everly’s bandleader and hired Waddy on guitar and Jorge Calderón on bass. But then Waddy and Don had a falling out. So Waddy asked Warren if Lindsey could take his place, and Warren hired him. The money was good, and the tour started in September.

Don was living in Aspen, Colorado, so Lindsey and Stevie drove there for rehearsals, Stevie bringing along her dog and her best friend at the time, Terri Cole, who had suggested to Stevie that Aspen would be good for her.

Terri had met them some months earlier while hitchhiking: Richard had picked her up; she ended up moving in with Stevie, Lindsey, and Richard, whom she was dating. What she saw during those months was an unbalanced relationship. “I felt like Stevie was protected by Lindsey,” she says; “she felt safe around him. He was her world.... Lindsey was so driven.... Buckingham Nicks is going to make it. He knew it, sure. No doubt about it.... He didn’t think about doing anything else. He was always creating and thinking and just playing, that was his way of communicating, really.”

In Aspen the three of them found a horrible apartment owned by a crazy fisherman, and once Lindsey left with Don’s band, Stevie and Terri moved into a motel. They went out to dinner one night and met three guys who shared a three-bedroom apartment; they let the two women stay in their living room for a few weeks, asking nothing of them.

But Stevie was bored and melancholy, according to her own account. Her beloved grandfather A.J. died on August 1. She had about $40 left. Her Toyota had become frozen and wouldn’t start. She missed Lindsey and doubted that he would remain faithful to her while they were apart; their fights had been escalating before he left.

Terri, on the other hand, remembers things differently. Stevie “came into her own and had her own freedom” during that month in Aspen, she recalls. She began to see herself once more as Stevie Nicks, not just as Lindsey Buckingham’s girlfriend. Terri saw her “blossom” and be “liberated.”

One evening Stevie went to a very fancy house owned by a friend of one of the men whose apartment she was sharing. The rest of the crew went out to dinner, but Stevie stayed there in that house, playing her Goya guitar, looking out the window at all the snow-covered hills. “I sat looking out at the Rocky Mountains, pondering the avalanche of everything that had started to come crashing down on us. At that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.”

She decided then that no matter what, she’d give the relationship another try. The music was just too important. She knew how good it was. And she knew that with Lindsey’s help she could take it to the top of those mountains.

Stevie was writing masterpieces while Lindsey was touring.

In “Kind of Woman,” Stevie imagines Lindsey cheating on her on the road. The song is forthright: Stevie depicts herself as the “kind of woman that will haunt you.” And haunt him she would.

“Telephone” (also known as “You Won’t Forget Me”) only exists in two blistering live performances from Buckingham Nicks’s Alabama shows on January 28 and 29, 1975. One could be forgiven for thinking this was originally a Neil Young song: the riff that leads it off, the sluggish, heavy rhythm, and Lindsey’s mid-song solo could all have come straight out of Time Fades Away. Stevie introduces the song by saying, “This is a song about things that happen to women all the time, about a lady that gets a telephone call”; the call is clearly from Lindsey, out on the road, telling her he doesn’t want to talk to her; he implies that he’s leaving her but won’t say why and won’t say goodbye.

In “Landslide,” the song she wrote in that multimillion-dollar mansion in Aspen, Stevie is less direct, envisioning her relationship with Lindsey crumbling. The foundations are insecure, things are slipping away. In performances, backed simply by Lindsey’s acoustic guitar, she seems patient, resigned, and wise—a marked contrast to her windswept persona.

These songs were huge leaps forward from those she’d written for Buckingham Nicks. She seems to have gone back to what had served her so well for the coffee plant demos: simple, direct songs informed by deep emotion. But also by ferocity: “Kind of Woman” and “Telephone” were the angriest songs she’d written. And significantly, they were written when Lindsey was not around.

Lindsey, meanwhile, was having a blast, singing Phil Everly’s parts and meeting celebrities like Roy Orbison. He stayed in Nashville for a little while and got a taste of Music City, playing guitar with Merle Travis. But nobody wanted to come hear Don Everly, and the tour was a bust. Lindsey came back to Aspen in late October and Buckingham Nicks did a show there on Halloween.

A huge fight ensued. Stevie had expected Lindsey to actually make money for a change as a recompense for leaving her alone all this time. But Lindsey came back with practically nothing.

The other issue might have been infidelity. Did Lindsey cheat on Stevie while he was out on the road with Don Everly? Lindsey claims he didn’t. Stevie has implied it quite strongly. “Temptation falls in your path,” Stevie sang in “Kind of Woman.” “No hesitation. ‘Why,’ you ask.... You didn’t mean to meet her, you cry. Oh, but the sun goes down every night. She came to you when you were alone.”

Stevie refused to drive back to Los Angeles with Lindsey and told him to take the car and the dog; she’d catch a bus (her father was now president of Greyhound, so she had a bus pass). After he drove away, she heard on the radio that there was a bus drivers’ strike and no Greyhounds were operating. She was stuck; to make things worse, she had come down with strep throat. She called her parents, who couldn’t understand what she was doing in Aspen. But they sent her a plane ticket anyway.


While Lindsey was out on the road with Don Everly there was a six-week period in which Stevie was back in Los Angeles, and only she and Richard were in their apartment on Orange Grove. It was then and there that Stevie wrote the song that would define her career.

At the beginning of Stevie’s demo cassette recording of “Rhiannon,” she says, as she plays the upright piano that was in the dining room, “Richard, I finished this song. We have to go to a park and record the sound of birds rising. It’s really important. The sound of birds rising, you know, the rustling?”

“OK,” Richard answers, but it’s Stevie’s voice.

“Lindsey,” Stevie continues, “don’t you think that Rhiannon is a beautiful name?”

“Yes, Stevie, I do, I think Rhiannon is a beautiful name.” Once again, it’s Stevie’s voice on the tape, not Lindsey’s. (This dialogue was originally intended to be part of the song; she repeated it in a later piano demo.)

Then she begins singing. The song is very slow, soft, and utterly despairing: “‘Rhiannon!,’ you cry, but then she’s gone, and your life knows no answer/Dreams unwind; love’s a state of mind/Dream on, silly dreamer. Try hard, you can’t leave her.”

The song concerns an enchantress of the night—a “Welsh witch,” as Stevie identified her in the intro to practically every live version in 1975—who has absolute freedom but whose appearance deprives the beholder of his life’s meaning. At this point, Stevie didn’t know about the legend of Rhiannon in the Mabinogion—she took the name from a character in a paperback she had picked up in an airport or off somebody’s couch, Mary Leader’s Triad: A Novel of the Supernatural. (In the novel, the wind follows the heroine from room to room, whispering “Rhiannon,” the name of her long-dead cousin who is reaching from the grave to possess her.)


What was Stevie thinking when she made these conversations part of what would become her theme song? Did the one with Richard actually occur prior to Stevie recording the demo, or did she imagine them both?

Stevie likely envisioned herself as Rhiannon, a bird in flight, leaving Lindsey far behind; he remains the silly dreamer whose life will know no answer. In this interpretation, “Rhiannon” is entirely in keeping with “Kind of Woman” and “Telephone”—all three describe, with no regrets, the hurt that Stevie envisioned causing when she broke up with Lindsey. “Yes, Stevie, I do, I think Rhiannon is a beautiful name” sets Lindsey up for the enchantment that the song will work on him, and the resultant devastation.

One morning after Lindsey came back from the Everly tour, Stevie went to work, leaving a cassette with her piano demo of “Rhiannon” in the kitchen. With it was a note for him: “Here is a new song. You can produce it, but don’t change it.”

And indeed, Lindsey was enchanted by the song. He quickly worked up an arrangement, adding a chorus (simply “Rhiannon” four times) and jettisoning the “dreams unwind” coda. As originally performed by Buckingham Nicks (at least three live versions are extant), “Rhiannon” was a hard rocker, modeled on the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black”; despite Stevie’s admonishment at the beginning of one performance, “Don’t play it too fast,” it was so high-speed that Stevie had trouble getting all the words in.

For decades afterwards, Stevie would sit at her piano and perform “Rhiannon” for her own ears only. But perhaps in late 1974 she already saw herself as her fans would soon see her: as an unapproachable, magical figure, about to take flight into darkness.

At some point in 1974, Lindsey and Stevie ran completely out of money. Together with Richard they would have breakfast every morning at the International House of Pancakes on Olympic Boulevard. They would order the Spanish omelet for $2.55, which came with two pieces of toast, hash browns, and three little pancakes, which they would smother with syrup. They would split that plate equally, dividing the omelet and toast and each getting one pancake. And then Richard and Lindsey would take turns paying for it with a check that would bounce. Their waitress knew that the checks were no good, but she would accept them anyway.

One morning Stevie woke up extremely early, went downstairs to get a cup of coffee, walked back upstairs, woke Lindsey up, and said, “We have to get a job. Today. Because we cannot pay the rent this month. We do not have $250. So we are getting a job. I’ll get the job; you have to take me to find the job. So get up, and let’s go!” The two of them got into Stevie’s Toyota and drove up and down La Cienega from the Sunset Strip to Mid-City, and Stevie applied at practically every restaurant she saw.

Barney’s Beanery, a storied bar and restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard a block from La Cienaga that had been a popular hangout for movie and rock stars (Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin had been regulars), hired her that day. She was going to start the next day at five in the afternoon. It was a degrading place to work, but she was desperate.

But as she was dressing for the gig, she got a call from Clementine’s Food and Spirits, a Beverly Hills restaurant and “singles rendezvous” that attempted to resurrect the Roaring Twenties. It was a much “nicer” restaurant and they wanted her to start right away, so Stevie went there and was hired at $1.50 an hour. She never even called Barney’s Beanery. She had to wear a flapper outfit, which she and Richard found hilarious. She ended up working the lunch hours, four hours a day, four times a week, and did well with the tips.

Buckingham Nicks went out to the East Coast in late November, playing nine back-to-back nights at the Plantation Supper Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They came back to Los Angeles and performed at an inn in Cotati, California, on December 11. But nobody was paying attention. Being poor sucks, Stevie thought. I hate it, and I’m not happy anymore. I’ve got to do something.

Stevie took a hard look at her situation. Her six-month promise was expiring, her relationship with Lindsey was on the rocks, and it was very difficult, at this point, for her to be hopeful about her career.

Unless a miracle happened, in 1975 Stevie would be leaving Lindsey and going back to school, with her parents paying all expenses, to get a degree in education—she wanted to use music in teaching elementary school.

And then the miracle happened.

Part Five
In early December 1974, Mick Fleetwood, drummer and de facto bandleader of the erstwhile British blues band Fleetwood Mac, was shopping at the Canyon Country Store in Laurel Canyon when he ran into Thomas Christian, an acquaintance who was scouting out bands to record at Sound City in exchange for ten percent of the receipts. Christian started talking to him about the studio, so Mick, who was looking for a place to record their next album, drove the half-hour over the hills to visit it that afternoon, leaving his groceries in Christian’s car. Keith played him several tracks he’d recorded there, including three Buckingham Nicks songs: “Frozen Love,” “Crying in the Night,” and possibly “Crystal.” (For what it’s worth, he also played him something by Emmitt Rhodes and something by Aretha Franklin.) Keith recalled, “I turned it on and cranked it up and he was in awe; those records sounded really good for that period.” Mick said that he “instantly liked [Lindsey’s] guitar playing—it was economic, melodic, with an astute sense of tone and a unique style.”

Buckingham Nicks were working in studio B, with Richard at the helm and Hoppy on drums. (They normally worked in Sound City only at night, but some space in studio B had opened that afternoon, and Richard put out the word.) Mick saw them through the window. He was taken with Stevie, who was wearing “a long, sort of Indiany cotton skirt and a little blouse.” “Frozen Love” was playing so loudly that the band members could hear it coming through the wall. Lindsey decided to go see what Keith was doing. He saw the huge figure of Mick Fleetwood (he was six-and-a-half feet tall) transported by the music, his eyes closed under his dark bangs and his head shaking his shoulder-length hair. Keith introduced the two musicians; Mick complimented Lindsey on his guitar playing. Then Lindsey went back to studio B to continue working.

Right there, Mick made a deal with Keith: Fleetwood Mac would record their next record at Sound City, and Keith would co-produce it. Sessions were booked for February, March, and April.

None of them had any inkling that Mick’s visit to Sound City that afternoon would completely change all of their lives.

A week or two later, Fleetwood Mac guitarist and songwriter Bob Welch lost his temper after a show in Las Vegas, and keyboardist Christine McVie responded, “**** you.” So Welch announced that he was leaving the band in favor of a solo career.

Fleetwood Mac was, in a word, failing. Their nightly gig earnings had fallen from about $5,000 to about $2,000, or even $1,500. It looked like they had reached a dead end.

But, characteristically, Mick didn’t think so.

It wasn’t a question of whether Mick had faith in the future of Fleetwood Mac. It was a question of his entire creative existence, which was based on his ability to drum—and to drum with John McVie. Fleetwood Mac disbanding would have been, to Mick, like suicide. So he decided to replace Welch. And the first person he thought of was Lindsey Buckingham.

Mick called Keith Olsen from a Los Angeles airport. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said.

“Give me the bad news,” Keith replied.

“Bob Welch just quit the band, so the project we’re going to start in February probably won’t start, because we don’t have a guitar player.”

“OK,” Keith said. This was very bad news indeed: without those sessions, Keith had no way of paying the bills. “What’s the good news?”

“You know those two kids you played for me?” Mick answered. He couldn’t remember their names. “You think they might want to join my band? We really only want the guitar player, but I guess they’re a duo, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, if you take one, you’re gonna have to take the other. That’s the honest-to-God truth.”

Mick responded that he wanted them both.

“I can ask them,” Keith replied.

“Can you do it tonight?”

Mick then called his lawyer, Mickey Shapiro, and told him he was asking Lindsey and Stevie to be in Fleetwood Mac.

Keith called Lindsey. It was New Year’s Eve, 1974, and he was celebrating with Stevie. Bringing his date and a bottle of champagne, Keith sat with them in their bedroom from eight or nine that evening until two or two-thirty in the morning, trying to convince them. They’d be on a salary; they’d be working with great musicians; they’d be able to perform their own material.

They resisted: “No, we really want to do our thing.” On top of that, Lindsey said, “Oh, man, I don’t think I could ever follow after Peter Green [Fleetwood Mac’s founder and initial guitarist]. How am I supposed to get up there and play ‘The Green Manalishi’?”

Keith’s date was utterly bored, he was losing the argument, and he felt guilty: not only had he been responsible for convincing Stevie and Lindsey to leave Fritz, now he was trying to get them to leave their Buckingham Nicks bandmates. But he pressed on. “Why don’t you give it the benefit of the doubt,” he argued, “and at least try it for a few weeks, maybe a month? There’s nothing to lose.” For Stevie and Lindsey, that line—and the promise of a salary—seemed more convincing than anything else he had said.
(Keith, Mick, Lindsey, Stevie, and Richard all related similar versions of this account. Much later, Mick, Lindsey, and Stevie changed the story to exclude Keith, saying that Mick called Lindsey directly, and that Lindsey was the one who told Mick that the duo came as a package. This later version is untrue.)

Unsurprisingly, there was considerable debate between Lindsey and Stevie as to the best course of action. Lindsey was wary of compromising between his own artistic ambitions and those of a band that had already made its own artistic statements, particularly as those statements made under Bob Welch’s guidance held little appeal to him.

Stevie, on the other hand, was ready to take the plunge. “To be perfectly honest,” she told writer Samuel Graham in 1978, “I didn’t know a whole lot about Fleetwood Mac. I knew they had to be somebody big and they had a girl singer. I remember hearing Christine sing ‘Show Me a Smile’ on TV, and I thought it was really nice she was in the band. Even without knowing much about them, I was awestruck.”

So she tried to talk Lindsey into it. “I said, ‘We can always quit. They’re going to pay us $200 each a week, so we can save some money and leave in six months with a little nest egg if it doesn’t work.’” She went to Tower Records and bought all the Fleetwood Mac albums she could find and listened to them back to front, twice. She could envision herself in the band. There was something mystical about their music, from “Black Magic Woman” to “The Green Manalishi” to “Hypnotized” to “Bermuda Triangle.” Yeah, I can blend in, she told herself.

Lindsey, on the other hand, was really only a fan of Fleetwood Mac’s 1969 Then Play On—one of Richard’s favorite records of all time, and one he’d play over and over; Lindsey remembers liking “Oh Well” when it came on the radio in ’69, and he knew 1970’s Kiln House. But he wasn’t very familiar with the rest of their oeuvre, and actively disliked some of their most recent material. Fleetwood Mac, at this point, were a failure by almost any standard: their album sales had been moderate, their singles had all flopped, airplay was minimal, band members kept leaving, and it seemed like, after seven years and ten albums, they would never break through to a larger audience. What Lindsey and Stevie had been recording recently was, he thought, stellar; giving that up to join a failed British blues band seemed crazy.

Lindsey and Stevie talked and talked. They put together a list of pros and cons. But Lindsey still wasn’t convinced.

So he called Waddy for his advice. “Man,” Lindsey said, “I gotta run something by you. I got a strange situation here.... This guy named Mick Fleetwood came to Sound City looking for production with Keith Olsen. And, uh, Keith played him our stuff. And he wants us to join Fleetwood Mac.”

Waddy replied, “Yeah. What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know if we want to do it. You know, we got Buckingham Nicks.”

“Lindsey,” Waddy said, “the only mistake you are making right now is you’re on the wrong phone call. I want you to hang up, and call Mick Fleetwood, and tell him, ‘Yes.’”

Stevie turned the screws. She forced Lindsey to listen to the albums. “It’s a great band, Lindsey,” she said. “They have a great rhythm section. Christine’s an amazing Hammond organ player. You can totally fit into any one of those guitar players’ world if you want, if you so choose. And you know what? We are starving to death. You [can] wait around, [but] I’m sick of being a waitress. And I’m tired of being super, super poor. So we need to go. We need to meet these people and then make a decision. And you need to, like, be nice.”

But there was something else that needed to be worked out. If they were going to join a band together, they had to put their relationship on a more solid footing. It couldn’t be almost over anymore. Stevie told Lindsey, “OK, this is what we’ve been working for since 1968. And so Lindsey, you and I have to sew this relationship back up. We have too much to lose here. We need to put our problems behind us.”

This was an argument of self-interest. Stevie knew that she was being asked to join Fleetwood Mac for one reason only: she came with Lindsey.

Herbie Worthington was Fleetwood Mac’s photographer and hung out with the band a lot. Mick had talked to him about replacing Bob. As soon as he’d talked with Keith, Mick said, “Oh, Herbie, we found a guitar player to take Bob’s place.... The only thing is he’s got a girl, but if she don’t work out, we’ll dump her.”

Herbie later commented, “That’s who Mick is. If you’re in the way, you’re out.... If she didn’t turn out to be this mother****in’ powerful tornado that she is, she would’ve got dumped and Mick wouldn’t have thought about it twice.”

Mick was renting a house in Laurel Canyon, and Lindsey and Stevie stopped by in early January. “He was quite an imposing presence, a bit demonic,” Lindsey later said.

Stevie felt like she was in the presence of royalty. “He was wearing a burgundy silk vest with a watch-chain and a very long jacket that was nipped at the waist, and beautifully made pants. I was awestruck.”

Jenny Boyd, who was married to Mick at the time, has warm memories of their visit. “I remember how fun they were, just a completely different vibe [from the other Fleetwood Mac members, who] were so English, so British, so proper. And then in comes Stevie and Lindsey and they’re just cool and friendly and open.”

Lindsey offered to audition. Mick declined. Instead, he simply asked, “Want to join?”

Lindsey and Stevie looked at each other. Until that moment, Lindsey hadn’t been sure. But now he was. “Yes,” he said.

It wasn’t as if Fleetwood Mac was suddenly a group of five people on a more or less even footing, though. Stevie and Lindsey had joined the band on a trial basis, and, though they didn’t admit as much to the other band members, they envisioned that trial lasting about six weeks. That would net them $2,400, enough rent money for an entire year.

Part Six
In late January 1975, Buckingham Nicks—Lindsey, Stevie, Tom on bass, and Bob and Hoppy commandeering a two-drum attack similar to that of the Allman Brothers—traveled east to play shows in Alabama (one in Tuscaloosa and two in Birmingham) and Jacksonville, Florida. (They adopted fake names for themselves: Lindsey was Marshall Hiwatt, Stevie was Gloria, and Hoppy was A. Hoppy.) And they finally tasted the success they’d been longing for.

All three of the Alabama shows were at least partially recorded, and they sound great. Stevie was performing her new songs like “Telephone,” “I Don’t Want to Know,” and “Rhiannon,” and giving them her all. “Blue Letter” and “Don’t Let Me Down Again” were true crowd-pleasers. “Crystal,” performed as an encore at the Tuscaloosa show, had a real edge for once, ending with a kind of destructive energy. The band played to six thousand rabid fans in Birmingham who couldn’t believe what they were hearing—their heroes had joined Fleetwood Mac? And the show in Tuscaloosa—with two opening acts—was completely sold out, with over a thousand turned away at the door. It really felt like the big time.

Buckingham Nicks were interviewed for Birmingham After Dark, which inexplicably titled the piece “Buckingham Nicks: Goodbye to the First Eight Years.” (The band was only about three years old.) Joining Fleetwood Mac “wasn’t an easy decision for us,” Lindsey said, “but we decided to do one album [with them] before we came out here.”

Stevie piped in: “The Buckingham Nicks thing—me and Lindsey—have been together six [sic] years with the people we’re playing with, Tom and Hoppy. As soon as the Buckingham Nicks go back together, they’ll come too.”

Tom seconded the sentiment. “They’ll go out there and do their best and when it’s over we’ll be here.”

Jacksonville State’s Mathews Coliseum was only half full, but the audience was so enthusiastic they had to do two encores. Before the last song, Stevie announced that this was the band’s last tour. The crowd booed. But when she said, “Lindsey and I are joining Fleetwood Mac,” they cheered. The Chanticleer (JSU’s student newspaper) gave the band a good review, calling them “sometimes serious, but always loud,” and noting that Stevie “sounded almost demonic at times.” She had recently gotten a permanent: “Her hair falling in a long, tangled heap of curls,” the review began, and a photo of the concert shows her like that.


Having finally tasted some real success with Buckingham Nicks, Lindsey now had second thoughts about going back to Fleetwood Mac. This time it was Bob, a huge fan of Kiln House, who talked him into it. “I told him, ‘Do it for a year or two. If it doesn’t work out, it would help you guys being ex-members of Fleetwood Mac.’”

Just because they were in Fleetwood Mac now didn’t mean that Lindsey and Stevie turned their backs on their old friends. The band members—Tom, Hoppy, and Bob—had been devastated by the news that their leaders were joining Fleetwood Mac; Richard was too, because he had been producing the next Buckingham Nicks record, and now Keith was back at the helm. “I kinda got the stool kicked out from under me,” Richard recalled; by that time he was no longer Keith’s second engineer, but had hung out his own shingle. “I remember being depressed for two weeks after that and not being able to get out of bed and just being sick.” All four of them had been counting on the new songs they’d been recording to bring them some success.

Hoppy later said, “They invited me to come to the studio to play with them when they were doing the first Fleetwood Mac album at Sound City. I was so heartbroken, I didn’t even go. It was awful, what happened. Here you are, you spend three or four years with these people, you’re starving, and then watching them rise to stardom. It’s like watching your best friend or your girlfriend suddenly getting a record deal and you watch her just skyrocket and earn millions of dollars and all the fame and fortune and glory and glitz and all of it, and you’re sitting there still at your drum set.” To make it up to them, Lindsey and Stevie gave them all the money from the Alabama gigs—probably close to $10,000—keeping none of it for themselves. After all, they were each now earning hundreds of dollars a week, in cash, and had no idea what to do with it. In the end, Richard, Tom, and Bob would remain as much a part of Stevie and Lindsey’s lives as ever before (Hoppy did not). The biggest difference for them was that now the couple had money.

As Stevie tells it, she now “got an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard [actually it was on Olympic Boulevard], [Lindsey] moved back in with me, and we kind of put our relationship back together. We weren’t fighting about money, we had a really nice place, and we were going to work with these hysterically funny English people every day, making great music. Christine was like my mentor, and the only person who could buffer Lindsey. She could totally soothe him and calm him down, and that was great, because I wasn’t good at that. We were sailing along on the highest wave.” She also soon replaced her ailing Toyota with a Mercedes 280SL convertible.

Stevie, however, felt uncertain, and wondered if she was really of any importance to this band, or whether they were just putting up with her because they needed Lindsey. “At first they didn’t need another girl singer,” she told Sylvie Simmons a few years later. “Why should they? They needed a guitarist, not a girl singer who didn’t really play piano or guitar or anything.... They’re not going to say, ‘you stand out there and be the star and we’ll just play, right.’ I know for a fact that I was simply being hired as extra baggage. They couldn’t get Lindsey without me.” However, “they made me feel wonderful,” she told Simmons on another occasion. “I fell madly in love with all of them immediately, and even though I knew in my heart that they didn’t really need me, I would try to be really good and maybe I would find a way to be needed there.... And they were real careful and never made me feel unwanted.”

When it came to selecting material for the next Fleetwood Mac album, there was a lot to choose from, including all the songs already recorded on Buckingham Nicks. Lindsey thought “Frozen Love” was too long and too hard to play live. Mick didn’t want to redo the single (“Don’t Let Me Down Again”). But John McVie adored “Crystal,” so that one was recut. As for their newer material, the strengths of “Monday Morning,” “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” “Blue Letter,” and “I’m So Afraid” simply couldn’t be denied. Perhaps the same could have been said for three of Stevie’s other recent songs, “I Don’t Want to Know,” “Kind of Woman,” and “Telephone,” but Stevie was not in an assertive position at this point and took what she could get. Her vocals had been shortchanged on Buckingham Nicks by the way they’d been recorded; now they’d be shortchanged on Fleetwood Mac as well: only two songs on the album (“Rhiannon” and “Landslide”) featured her lead vocals, while Christine got four and Lindsey got five.

And when it came to harmonies, Stevie was mostly either absent or unrecognizable. At this point, she was certainly the most vestigial of the band’s five members.

Most of the blame for this probably goes to Keith. Not only did he compare Stevie’s vocals to a goat’s and continue to tell her “please, Stevie, no goat rock,” he denigrated her songwriting as well. “What Stevie had was what I call brute ignorance,” he told music journalist Jake Brown. “She had no idea why on a lot of stuff.... Lindsey ... made her songs work. Because when you first get a song from Stevie, it has no form at all, it just rambles on and on and on.” He called “Landslide” “the one discernable exception to that rule.”

Certainly there’s some truth to Olsen’s “rambles” complaint: “I Don’t Want to Know,” “Kind of Woman,” “Telephone,” “Rhiannon,” and the soon-to-be-written “Dreams” are each constructed relatively simply around two basic and similar melodic and chordal ideas, and the same can be said of many of her later songs. But “Landslide” is no different in that respect. And certainly “Nomad,” “Designs of Love,” “Lady from the Mountains,” and “Crystal” are full-fledged pop songs, with as much chordal and melodic variety as anything by Christine McVie. Stevie had already shown that she was capable of writing classic pop songs, and would certainly do so many times over the next few years. If she favored somewhat repetitive song structures in other songs, that wasn’t “brute ignorance” but a deliberate choice. She knew that simpler structures would lend themselves to more improvisation and spontaneity; she knew that sophisticated chord and melodic structures could detract from the power and emotional heft of a song. And that emotional heft is what she was aiming for.

Warner Bros. thought it was a crazy idea. Why go on tour with the new band before the album was released? They’d seen the band disintegrate on tour before—what if it happened again? They had no new music to sell, and they didn’t even have a manager.
But Fleetwood Mac needed the money. The advance they’d received for the record had all disappeared.

The first leg of the tour consisted of twenty-one concerts between May 15 and June 8, starting with five gigs in Texas, then moving to the Midwest and the East Coast. The band took a short break, then in late July, after the album’s release, they went back on the road, touring straight through mid-December, covering practically the entire United States and Western Canada, with only a few days’ break at any one time. The tour was only mildly successful. The band took in about $3,000 a gig, and the venues generally didn’t sell out. But the money made a difference, especially to the two new members of the band.

The shows were nothing like what Fleetwood Mac would later do. They were mostly at small venues seating fewer than four thousand, venues like the Bagley Theater in Detroit or a community center in Tucson. Most of the time Fleetwood Mac were headliners, but sometimes they opened for other bands: ZZ Top, Procol Harum, Loggins and Messina, Jefferson Starship.

The first show of the tour was in El Paso, where Stevie had lived as a child. Before the show, Stevie was so nervous she got sick to her stomach. But as soon as she walked on stage, all her stage fright utterly vanished, and she was in full control.

The band opened with some older Fleetwood Mac material: they usually didn’t dig into the new material until after the first three songs. The first of the new songs was often “Rhiannon”—it typically started out fast and perfunctory, but after some guitar and electric piano solos, Stevie would go into her incantatory trance, singing, “Dreams unwind, love’s a state of mind,” the entire band getting harder and wilder and more intense, with everyone in a frenzy until the end. Stevie’s performance made the audience feel as if a completely different band had taken Fleetwood Mac’s place: her singing was so much more idiosyncratic, free, and passionate than that of either Christine or Lindsey, and the lyrics were out of left field compared to the pedestrian words of Mac stalwarts such as “Get Like You Used to Be,” “Station Man,” or “Spare Me a Little.” The song’s climax was galvanic, thunderous, Stevie shouting over Lindsey’s playing, making herself hoarse, channeling Janis Joplin. As Stevie would tell Crawdaddy the following year, “‘Rhiannon’ is the heavy-duty song to sing every night. On stage it’s really a mind tripper. Everybody, including me, is just blitzed by the end of it. And I put out so much in that song that I’m nearly down. There’s something to that song that touches people. I don’t know what it is but I’m really glad it happened.” And she would later confess that she spent every night in bed working out what she was going to do with “Rhiannon” the following night.

But that sort of singing—along with the lack of decent meals on the road, performing four out of every five days, and having to sleep on top of amps in the back of a station wagon—took its toll. Stevie developed an almost constant sore throat; before and after shows she could often be found wrapped in a shawl, drinking tea. She lost so much weight that her family, when they saw her after the show in Phoenix, were aghast. She had been on the road for four months and given over forty concerts.

Christine dominated those first shows; it felt like Stevie, who sang lead on two or three songs, was only a guest. All in all, Fleetwood Mac didn’t sound altogether different from how they’d sounded the last few years, with the addition of a bizarre female fireball for a small part of their set. But the audiences weren’t necessarily familiar with the old Fleetwood Mac. When they saw Stevie, with her heavy eye makeup and filmy clothes, they were taken aback. She really didn’t fit: she seemed more like a silent film star from the 1920s than a rock star from the 1970s. A review from the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, that September gives us a hint of how Stevie struck her uninitiated viewers: “Look at her: she’s wearing a delicate black dress bare at the midriff and with a gauzy black veil thrown over her shoulders, and ... she floats and glides around the stage as though she were listening to a minuet. It looks a little odd at first, as though a glitter-struck young singer had dreamed up a costume and image for herself and then slipped the nearest band over her fantasies like a long black glove.”

On the other hand, the band members knew that something fundamental had changed. There were no catcalls from the audience, no cries of “Where’s Bob Welch” or “Play ‘Albatross’!” Even the old Fleetwood Mac fans in the audience loved the new Fleetwood Mac. After only a week or two on the road, they knew that the modest little band they were in was going to be huge.

Lindsey and Stevie were, of course, used to performing together, and their chemistry was apparent. Lindsey’s appreciation of Stevie’s talents grew during that tour, as he admitted a few years later.

But that didn’t improve their relationship. Instead, 1975, which had started out with great good fortune and a successful reuniting, would end with the pair completely torn apart.

One night in May, quite early in the tour, they were staying at a Holiday Inn in Texas, a real “dump,” as Mick described it. After the gig, Mick went to Lindsey’s room; Stevie wasn’t there. They shared a joint, and Mick, who had stopped smoking years earlier, got “hammered.” They started talking, “man to man,” a long, intimate conversation.

Suddenly, Lindsey turned to Mick and said, “It’s you and Stevie, isn’t it?”

Mick had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?” he stammered. “She’s your girlfriend.”

Lindsey didn’t explain. Perhaps his possessive, paranoid instinct, exacerbated by the weed, had flared up, out of his control, for just a moment. But the moment passed, leaving Mick shaken and disturbed.

On the other hand, Mick would later say he’d harbored feelings for Stevie ever since he first saw her through the window at Sound City in December. Lindsey might have noticed it and had the courage to say something about it. After all, Mick’s wife Jenny had just moved out of his house, and it looked like their marriage was over. Now Lindsey had hinted not only at the gulf that was beginning to yawn between him and Stevie, but at a new possibility for Mick himself.

Fleetwood Mac was released on July 11. The band was taking a six-week break from touring. Stevie took the album back home, lay on the couch, drew all the shades down, lit a candle, and listened to it all by herself. She liked what she heard. It was very pretty, and the vocals were beautiful. Finally her distinctive singing style had been released to the world in high fidelity, complete with all its idiosyncracies. She knew that she and Lindsey had “enhanced” Fleetwood Mac.
At some point Warner Brothers had a release luncheon for the White Album, at which they played it for the staff. Lindsey and Stevie went into the bathroom together to discuss something; when they emerged, Stevie was drenched in tears.

Warner Brothers took out a full-page ad for the band in the August 2 Billboard, featuring the back-cover photo with the headline “The great British-American-male-female-old-new-blues-rock-ballad band.” Above each band member was typed his or her name. Unfortunately, WB got them wrong: Stevie was named Lindsey Buckingham and Lindsey was named Stevie Nicks.

And then nothing much happened. The album sold, but not very well. The first single from the album, “Over My Head” b/w “I’m So Afraid,” wouldn’t be issued until late September.

Rolling Stone reviewed the album in the September 25th issue; Fleetwood Mac were in the Midwest at the time. Bud Scoppa concluded his appraisal with the following remarks: “Nicks, on the other hand, has yet to integrate herself into the group style. Compared to McVie’s, her singing seems callow and mannered, especially on ‘Landslide,’ where she sounds lost and out of place.” Although Stevie had received negative reviews before, this was the worst. She was completely crushed.

But Christine and Mick and John, at least, had her back.

The tour resumed at the end of July. Within weeks, everyone in Fleetwood Mac was more or less single again. Mick knew that his relationship with Jenny was over. John and Christine were barely speaking, and neither were Lindsey and Stevie—except when they were fighting.

The gigs on October 5 in Largo, Maryland, and October 17 in Passaic, New Jersey, were filmed. Stevie wore a white sleeveless tie-front crop top, a filmy shawl, a black choker, numerous bracelets, bellbottom jeans, and, for some of the show in Passaic, a black top hat that she’d picked up a week earlier at a thrift store in Buffalo; her blonde bangs almost covered her eyes. She spent almost the entirety of the Passaic concert dancing and twirling with her arms out and her sleeves trailing. Lindsey wore a satin long-sleeved shirt, with the top four buttons open, tucked into his blue jeans, and a chain necklace; his curls almost hid his eyes as well. “Rhiannon” was, of course, unbelievably intense. “Don’t Let Me Down Again” was rousing. The concerts were mostly heavy blues-rock in the old Fleetwood Mac style. But Lindsey’s bluesy guitar playing, even on “I’m So Afraid,” didn’t express sorrow, like Peter Green’s, instead projecting anger and power.

As far as I know, no film footage exists of either Buckingham Nicks or earlier Fleetwood Mac shows with Stevie and Lindsey. And the only surviving footage of Fritz is silent. This is the first live sound footage of Stevie and Lindsey playing together. So it’s striking that the band members display absolutely no camaraderie or affection (though the three male band members occasionally groove together, and Christine throws Stevie a sweet smile during the Largo performance of “World Turning”). Christine does most of the introductions; Stevie says almost nothing. The romantic couples in the band barely even look at each other.

The Stevie-Lindsey breakup was a long process. It had begun well before the pair joined Fleetwood Mac. It would be absolutely complete by the end of the Sausalito sessions for Rumours the following year. But there may have been no final moment, no big scene, no shouting match with slammed doors and broken dishes. The couple had more or less split before joining Fleetwood Mac, but they had hung on. Stevie had felt that if they broke up again within the first six months, the band would fall apart as well. But now those six months were over. And everything had changed.

Mick says, “Stevie had blossomed into something new, something that Lindsey couldn’t control. When we first met them they spoke as a unit and when they spoke about their musical ideas he spoke for them. After a while she spoke for herself. It was a change that I don’t think Lindsey really liked.”

“Lindsey always blamed Fleetwood Mac for the loss of me,” Stevie later told Oprah Winfrey. She claims that Lindsey believed if they hadn’t joined Fleetwood Mac, they “would have continued on with our music but we probably would have gotten married and we probably would have had a child.”

For all these years, Stevie had relied, musically, on Lindsey. Her songs were written with his help, his input; her performances were completely intertwined with his; her career was simply half—or maybe less—of Buckingham Nicks. But with Fleetwood Mac, Stevie stood apart from the rest of the band—and that included Lindsey. Her performances of “Rhiannon” and “Landslide” were almost like guest spots. And the crowds adored her. She realized she no longer needed Lindsey. She had come out of her shell.

Lindsey picked up on this immediately. Stevie was no longer devoted to him, no longer worshipped his playing, no longer wanted to do everything she could to make him comfortable and happy. She acted freer and more confident than he’d ever seen her before. And when she occasionally got hurt by something, felt wretched, or got sick, she didn’t turn to him for solace. Christine was much better at that, and Mick loved to listen to her confessions. Lindsey was perfecting his performances, trying to lead his new band to new heights, but given his possessiveness, Stevie’s newfound freedom devastated him.

Despite everything that Mick and Christine said to her, Stevie knew that the only reason she’d been asked to join Fleetwood Mac was that she came along with Lindsey. If she continued to be tied to him, that would never change. But if she no longer “came along with Lindsey,” she could more easily justify her status as, instead, one of Fleetwood Mac’s star attractions. Her independence from him put her on an entirely different footing. They could take her or leave her—and her talent, not her boyfriend, would be the deciding factor in the choice. Of course, she knew that at this point that Mick, John, and Christine would never want her to leave. They loved her, and her performances, too much. So her separation from Lindsey was essential to her status as an indispensable member of Fleetwood Mac. And perhaps that status mattered more to Stevie than Lindsey did.

So they stayed in separate hotel rooms for most of that tour. It was lonely and difficult, especially for Stevie. As she would tell journalist Vivien Goldman a year later, “The thought of packing another suitcase makes me sick. I’m a Gemini, I love my home. I hate hotel rooms, I hate packing. And now that Lindsey and me have broken up, it’s even lonelier, really. Because even though our relationship wasn’t too good, at least there was that closeness of having someone to say, ‘Oh, I’m so bored, I want to go home,’ or something, and now there’s nothing.”

On October 20, the night after the Passaic show, Fleetwood Mac played at the Boston Garden, a large arena, opening for Jefferson Starship. There, Lindsey met a young woman (he called her a “girl”) he was intensely attracted to. She didn’t want to spend any time with him, but he talked her into it. Spending those few tender hours with her illuminated his situation and instilled in him a longing for a change. Was this the first time he was unfaithful to Stevie? We don’t know, though it seems probable that he’d two-timed her a year earlier, while backing Don Everly. He also might have been seeing other women over the last few weeks of the tour. “In the days after Stevie and I broke up, before we started recording Rumours [in February 1976],” Lindsey recalled a few decades later, “there were a lot of women who would just come and go in a very short time.” At any rate, this encounter made a strong impact on him; he would write a song about it a few months later.

Then in November, Fleetwood Mac played the McFarlin Auditorium at Southern Methodist University near Dallas. Hoppy happened to be in town and went to the soundcheck, where he was told that Lindsey was staying at the Fairmont, one of the nicer hotels in downtown Dallas. When Hoppy went there, Lindsey was sitting at the bar next to the lobby, drinking some sort of large strawberry drink. Lindsey invited Hoppy to join him for dinner at the hotel restaurant, and they ordered. A few minutes later, Stevie walked in and joined them, surprised to see Hoppy. But conversation was strained. After dinner, Hoppy and Lindsey went up to Lindsey’s room—he and Stevie were no longer rooming together—and Lindsey sat for a moment with his eyes closed and his guitar in his hand, gathering up energy for the show.

Stevie joined them again for the limo ride to SMU, where a crowd was waiting. After leaving the limo, Stevie suddenly took off her fur coat, threw it over Hoppy’s arm, and led them through the crowd to the backstage area, where drinks were ready; but Mick, John, and Lindsey went into another room to tune their instruments to an old strobe tuner.

When, during the concert, the band started playing Buckingham Nicks’s “Don’t Let Me Down Again,” Stevie hollered, “Listen to this, Hoppy!” Hoppy, who was standing in the back of the auditorium, and who had played drums on that song plenty of times, was thrilled.

But he knew right then that Buckingham Nicks was never going to get together again.