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Long before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were an essential part of Fleetwood Mac, and when their relationship was rosier, they released an album as a duo in 1973 called Buckingham Nicks. It was a commercial flop upon release and has been out of print since the 80s — never released on CD. But over time, it developed legendary status among music lovers. Used copies can fetch top dollar in record stores. On September 19, it’s being reissued for the first time in decades.
Angie Martoccio , senior music writer for Rolling Stone, takes KCRW back to the beginning when Buckingham and Nicks met — 1965 at Menlo-Atherton High School in California. She explains that at an event where teens could play music, Buckingham, who was a junior at the time, played “California Dreamin’” on the piano, and Nicks, a senior, walked over and harmonized with him on the chorus. Nicks later joined Buckingham’s band called The Fritz, and eventually they became a couple. After being in the band for two and a half years, they formed a duo, thinking they’d be more successful.
Being romantically involved changed their music dynamic, she says. “Stevie has been open throughout the years of how that was a little hard, even when they were doing well as a couple, that they would be in a studio all day, and then they would go home and still talk about being in the studio. And mixing work with pleasure, as they say, is already difficult.”
Keith Olsen produced Buckingham Nicks, basically as his audition tape for Fleetwood Mac, Martoccio says. He played the album for drummer Mick Fleetwood.
“Mick said, ‘Oh, well, this is great, you can produce. And I really want these two people, who are they?’ And I think what Mick heard was this dynamic between the two of them. They have this special, this real chemistry. Lindsey is also a complete guitar ace. He's really, really, really talented. Stevie has this unusual voice. It's gruff and it's really deep, and it's really strong, and it's very different from a lot of the singer-songwriter artists at the time that you would hear.”
The song “Crystal” was recorded three separate times, and “has so many different lives in it,” Martoccio says.
In “Frozen Love,” the duo’s voices are intertwined, they’re harmonizing and “locked in.” She continues, “We could sit here all day and talk about the metaphors … like has the frozen love thawed? … I really do think it represents their relationship over time, and why we're still so obsessed with these two.”
Buckingham and Nicks have discussed wanting to reissue the album for years, Martoccio says. “They've both spoken so fondly about this era, just because it was this one-off that didn't do well, but we all latched onto it. There's something about lost or out-of-print albums in rock that people really hold on to. And this is one of those albums.”
Why exactly did the record fail? Many artists were getting signed in 1973, not a lot of promotion was happening, and “artists would just fall through the cracks,” Martoccio says.
She suggests there’s a chance that Buckingham and Nicks would tour with their album. “If there's anything that I've learned covering this band and loving this band for as long as I have, it's that you can never say never. You really never know what's going to happen. They change their minds a lot. This time last year, I was with Stevie for a few hours one evening, and she said, ‘We're never doing that.’ But that being said, I wouldn't be surprised if a tour was announced, because that's just how they work. That's why we're so attached to this saga. It's our very own soap opera in rock that we get to see these two intertwine and play together and talk about each other. It really keeps it going forever.” |
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