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#2
09-25-2025, 09:47 PM
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Fate was working overtime at Sound City in November 1974 when Mick Fleetwood first heard the voices, songwriting, and destiny(?) on Buckingham Nicks. Fleetwood-founding drummer of veteran British rock band Fleetwood Mac-was checking out studios where the group, now residents of California, could record the follow-up to its latest LP, Heroes Are Hard to Find, released that September. At Sound City, a funky well-kept secret in the San Fernando Valley, Keith Olsen demonstrated the facility's advantages and his skills as a producer and engineer by playing an album he'd made there: Buckingham Nicks, the 1973 debut by singer-songwriters Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Fleetwood remembered "Crystal" - an expression of attraction and wonder written by Nicks with crisp harmonies and Buckingham's buoyant web of acoustic guitar-as "one of maybe three songs I hears," he told Mojo in 2014. Buckingham was actually working at Sound City that day with Nicks, in Studio B, on new material, when he heard Olsen blasting "Frozen Love"-Buckingham Nicks' seven minute finale of radiant singing, guitar crescendos, and glistening orchestration-for Fleetwood in Studio A. That song had so much range and landscape," Buckingham says today. "Stevie's voice and mine were similar in tone, range and character-like a male-female twist on The Everly Brothers, following each other closely with harmonies". He cites Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and The Allman Brothers Band as inspirations for "the symphonic twist and turns" and the searing effect of the guitars in "Frozen Love" That's what got Mick," Nicks contends. "The orchestrated thing with Lindsey, which slowly comes in and builds with the strings, is phenomenal." It was also in the turbulent spirit of her lyrics and melody: Nicks gave Buckingham the lead vocal in the first verse a zigzag[?] of profound uncertainty and assured commitment. "It could be Wuthering Heights, any of the great love stories of the world," she suggests. "But I wanted it to be a duet," reflecting the everyday dynamics of any romantic relationship, including her own at the time with Buckingham. In December 1974, Fleetwood Mac's American guitarist Bob Welch left the group. Fleetwood offered the job to Buckingham, who said he and Nicks were a package deal. On New Year's Eve, they joined Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, and his wife, singer-pianist Christine McVie, in the lineup that transformed Fleetwood Mac's artistic and commercial fortunes. But none of what came next- the serial hits and multi-platinum, the personal fireworks and frank confession in song, the indelible legacy of the quintet's studio albums-would have happened without Buckingham Nicks. Released by Anthem Records, an independent label, through Polydor, in September 1973, Buckingham Nicks has been one of the most elusive records of its era. This reissue is its first official return in any format for more than 40 years. It is still better known for its pivotal footprint in the Fleetwood Mac saga than for the ambition and craft Nicks and Buckingham achieved on their first time out-and only album-as a duo. The immediate aftermath didn't help. Buckingham Nicks sold poorly, charting in Billboard for one hot minute in 1983, well into the couple's Fleetwood Mac ride, as a budget-line LP. There were pockets of ardent FM airplay in the South, but the label didn't bother to tell the artists. In January 1975, Buckingham Nicks did a short tour there, fronting a band with two drummers and playing ecstatically received shows in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama-too late to save the album. They were soon back in Sound City, recording 1975's Fleetwood Mac. Nicks remembers what went wrong. "We thought it had completely tanked," she says. "Lindsey and I would look at each other. "We just made the best record we'll ever make. And nobody likes it. How can it be?" It's still hard to believe. In ten songs and 36 minutes, Buckingham Nicks veers with imagination and confidence from the opening folk-rock stride of Nicks' "Crying in the Night" - an earthy preview of what was coming for Fleetwood Mac with cascading harmonies-to "the Southern rockabilly with a Celtic twist" (as Nicks puts it) in Buckingham's "Don't Let Me Down Again". Nicks' winding, plaintive melody in "Races Are Run" evokes evening shadows in late-'60s Laurel Canyon-right before the coltish country-blues kick of Buckingham's "Lola". His brief instrumentals "Stephanie" (for Nicks) and "Django", a cover of the Modern Jazz Quartet's homage to the Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, are virtuoso fingerpicking snapshots of rock 'n' roll vigor illuminated with the melodic and rhythmic articulation in folk and blues- a lasting signature in Buckingham's playing and composing for Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. The variety of styles on Buckingham Nicks, heightened by Olsen's emphatic production, "speaks to our level of readiness to be in band like Fleetwood Mac," Buckingham says. Fleetwood Mac, in turn, were ready for Buckingham and Nicks after years of disruptive personnel changes and a chaotic passage from British-blues lightning in the 1960s to the progressive-pop poise of 1971s Future Games and [I]Heroes are Hard to Find. "Buckingham Nicks allowed us to connect with Mick, John, and Christine," Buckingham admits. "But it stands up in a way you hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work." The sessions were "joyous," Nicks declares, "because we knew we had something. We knew other people were going to help us, doing great things for and with us." Olsen and assistant engineer Richard Dashut would go on to work with Buckingham and Nicks in Fleetwood Mac. The galloping backfield under Buckingham's three-part-harmony guitar break in "Don't Let Me Down Again" was the rhythm section from Elvis Presley's band, bassist Jerry Scheff and drummer Ron Tutt. The slide-guitar break in "Lola", filtered through a Leslie organ speaker, was played by Waddy Wachtel, fresh from working with The Everly Brothers and a young Warren Zevon - and later a regular on Nicks' solo albums. But Nicks insists she and Buckingham "knew what we had as a duo, two songwriters that sang really well together. And it was a very natural thing, from the beginning." That was Northern California in 1967. Born in Phoenix, Nicks was going to high school in the Bay Area when she met Buckingham, a fellow student and guitarist since childhood, then playing bass in a psychedelic combo called Fritz (originally the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band). Nicks recalls harmonizing to old records with her grandfather A.J., a county musician. She wrote her first song at 16 and passed the auditions when Fritz needed a new vocalist. Fritz worked hard in stellar company, sharing bills with the Steve Miller Band, Janis Joplin, and one festival date with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, where the guitarist, spotting Nicks at the side of the stage, dedicated "Foxy Lady to her. Olsen, who played bass in garage-rock icons the Music Machine, was moving into production when he and a friend, producer Curt Boettcher (The Association's "Along Comes Mary"), saw Fritz live in San Francisco and encouraged them to try their luck in Los Angeles. A showcase gig there backfired for the band when Olsen expressed more interest in Nicks and Buckingham as a duo. Back in the Bay Area, they took over a room in his father's coffee-roasting plant to write and record their own songs, making four-track demos on an Ampex AC-440 deck Buckingham bought with money left to him in a relative's will. "That became our goal," Buckingham says, "seeing ourselves as something that had never occurred to us. That led us to gravitating towards being a couple romantically" - a development he marked with the compact grace of "Stephanie" and Nicks addressed in songs such as "Long Distance Winner" and "Crystal". In the latter, Buckingham again sang lead. "I'd written the song about him and me when things were good." Nicks explains. "I said, 'You sing it to me'". They spent nearly a year at the coffee plant "regrouping, figuring out what were as a duo," Buckingham says. He credits Nicks with the decision to move to L.A., where Olsen let them stay at his house in Coldwater Canyon and, Nicks points out, "didn't charge us one nickel for rent and basically supported us for a year. Keith really believed in Lindsey and me." On Buckingham Nicks, she says, Olsen was "really like the third harmony." Opening in 1969 in a former Vox instrument and amplifier factory, Sound City was becoming a hip refuge outside the Hollywood glitz - Neil Young, Spirit, and Dr. John cut seminal 1970-72 work there-when Buckingham and Nicks christened Studio A's legendary Neve 8028 console in 1973. (Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters bought it in 2011 and immortalized the studio in a 2013 documentary.) Olsen drew from a deep pool of sidemen. Jim Keltner, who played on "Crying in the Night," was a first-call drummer for Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, and three ex- Beatles. Richard Halligan, the string arranger on "Frozen Love, was a brass-and-keyboard alumnus of Blood, Sweat and tears. One bassist, Mark Tulin, had been in Electric Prune. But Buckingham Nicks was the singers' tour de force, their doubled, sometimes tripled air-tight harmonies affirming a unique chemistry and bond. "Keith would have added a subtle amount of plate reverb," Buckingham says. "We wanted to keep it close to the bone. Double-tracking, though, was something we embraced liberally," adding space and depth to "the intimacy and intensity: of the couple's intuitive blend. "Lindsey and I were dyed-in-the-wool duo," Nicks says brightly. At the coffee plant, "We would sit on the floor, he would play guitar, and we would sing. It was easy. It was fun. I don't think we ever got through backgrounds and stuff for the songs until we were recording," she adds. But on stage as Buckingham Nicks, "We wouldn't have background singers. We couldn't afford it. And we didn't want it anyway." (Later, in Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham notes that "Christine's more breathy thing with these two other voices really created something special".) The fluid, weaving spell of Buckingham's fingerpicking came, he says, "from shedding what I had been doing" on bass in Fritz and "reclaiming my sense of myself as a guitar player." By the time he and Nicks were "remaking ourselves," Buckingham was listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue and Crosby, Stills and Nash. The open tunings in "Races are Run" and "Crystal" were "very Laurel Canyon." The brisk strumming in "Without a Leg to Stand On" was "an exercise in framing a melody with a certain rhythmic sensibility" and "a little Cat Stevens in there." Buckingham characterizes the climax of guitar in "Frozen Love" as "specific" and "idiosyncratic," in a tuning that was "kind of modal, in open E. I had to make up chords that made sense with the tuning." The guitars, vocals, and strings were recorded before the drums, added last by Gary "Hoppy" Hodges, a Dallas native who met Buckingham at the water fountain in Sound City. Hodges also contributed percussion on the album and was one of the two summers on the 1975 tour with Bob Aguirre of Fritz. And Nicks clears up a typo in the lyrics of "Frozen Love" as they were printed on the 1973 inner-gatefold sleeve. She sang, "Fate gave you me for a lover" at the end of the third verse, not "Hate" - a big difference. Buckingham says Olsen never told him why the producer chose to play "Frozen Love" for Fleetwood at Sound City: "And I never questioned it. But that one song was like a demo" for all of the invention, drive, and promise on Buckingham Nicks. "Mick grasped that immediately." "We were standing at a crossroads," Nicks says of the moment she and Buckingham bet their future on Fleetwood Mac. But, as she tells it now, "We're gonna walk in and be, in a lot of ways, exactly who we are right now. And who we are is Buckingham Nicks." Indeed, of the songs Nicks and Buckingham brought forward to Fleetwood Mac, "Crystal" was a remake from the LP (Buckingham still singing lead) while "Landslide" and "I'm Not Afraid" [sic] were written by Nicks and Buckingham, respectively, during its gestation. Three more - Buckingham's "Monday Morning", Nicks' "Rhiannon" (written on piano, she says, "in the midst of doing Buckingham Nicks), and "Blue Letter," composed by Richard and Michael Curtis, brothers who made demos at Sound City - were all played on the January '75 tour. Nicks' "I Don't Want to Know," featured in those shows, was recorded for 1977's Rumours, and Buckingham says his drop-D tuning on "Lola" (tuning the low E string down to a D) was "a precursor to things like 'The Chain'" on that album. (For her 2001 album, Trouble in Shangri-La, Nicks revived "Sorcerer," another song from the period, in a duet with Sheryl Crow.) "All of this stuff - we were working on it as Buckingham Nicks," Buckingham confirms. "One of the reasons Fleetwood Mac was easy to do" - made in three months at Sound City with Olsen coproducing - "was that our songs were already demoed." Nicks says she will never be happy about Buckingham Nicks' cover photo. "I did not want to do that." She prefers the casual snapshot in the gatefold, the couple clothed and smiling. "The absolute joy Lindsey and I had, that was caught in that picture" - and in the lines next to it, the dedication to "A.J. Nicks, the grandfather of country music." "He did ride the rails, he had a little trio," she says. "Lindsey liked my grandad. He was such a character. And he respected Lindsey, our singing." A.J. was in his 80s when Buckingham Nicks was released. When Stevie showed him the album, "A little bit of bitterness went across his face. He had tried his whole life to have that. Then it was gone. He was like, "Well, damn, they're gonna make it.'" Even now, Nicks says, "I think he's up there, going 'Good job, both of you. Good job.'" -David Fricke https://www.discogs.com/release/3514...U6MTMxMTUzMTQ5 Last edited by WalkAThinLine.; 09-26-2025 at 10:53 PM.. Reason: Typos 
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#4
09-26-2025, 07:52 PM
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Thank you WalkAThinLine for posting those liner notes. I only bought the CD, and those liner notes were not included, so apparently they’re only on the vinyl product. My CD does include the lyrics, and they’re in a different order than the album listing, which was probably true of the original album. I am surprised and disappointed the new liner notes weren’t included on the CD.
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#5
09-27-2025, 02:49 PM
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At least you got to own a piece of music history.
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#6
09-27-2025, 04:14 PM
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#7
09-27-2025, 04:17 PM
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To my understanding, the David Fricke liner notes were made exclusive to the limited numbered edition of Buckingham Nicks, which sold out very quickly.
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#8
10-03-2025, 08:19 AM
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__________________
 I would tell Christine Perfect, "You're Christine f***ing McVie, and don't you forget it!"
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