The ‘audition’ took place over dinner in a Mexican restaurant in LA. 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 recalls today. Initially, the guitarist had reservations about submerging his musical personality in an already established band – particularly as he had not been a fan of the Bob Welch-era Fleetwood Mac. Stupid me, eh?” Buckingham jokes today.įleetwood was so convinced that Buckingham was his man that he swiftly agreed to take them both – although he promised Christine McVie that she had a veto if she disliked Nicks. “He was standing there grooving to this searing guitar solo and he needed a guitar player. But Fleetwood Mac already had a female singer in Christine McVie, so his initial invitation was merely to the guitarist. He was impressed by the song “Frozen Love” from their Polydor album. Mick Fleetwood, meanwhile, was searching for a new guitarist to replace the departed Welch, when he ran across Buckingham Nicks at Sound City Studios.
It’s very possible that I would have gone back to school and Lindsey would have gone back to San Francisco.” “I was really tired of having no money and being a waitress. “If we hadn’t joined Fleetwood Mac would Lindsey and I have carried on and made it?” she asks today. And when you really feel that way about somebody, it’s very easy to take your own personality and quiet it way down.”īut by late 1974, Nicks was “within weeks” of returning to her parents’ home in Phoenix, and contemplating a return to college. I was totally devoted to making it happen for him. “And as I watched him become more brilliant every day, I felt very gratified. “I believed that Lindsey shouldn’t have to work, that he should just lay on the floor and practise his guitar and become more brilliant every day,” Nicks explains. Nicks was reduced to waitressing at Clementine’s, a Beverly Hills singles bar, for $1.50 an hour, while Buckingham did a few sessions and lived on her money. But with no real marketing or promotion, it died a death. A record deal with Polydor resulted in the 1973 album Buckingham Nicks. By 1971, Fritz had split, and Buckingham and Nicks – by now lovers as well as musical soulmates – moved to LA. Two years later, when Fritz needed a singer, she was the first person he called.Īlthough they opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, a record deal failed to materialise, and it eventually became obvious they were going nowhere fast. Buckingham had been playing “California Dreamin’” at a party and Nicks simply started singing with him. Their ‘dream team’ introduction appeared to make their subsequent relationship inevitable. Although she had grown up in Phoenix, Arizona, Nicks (born in May 1948) had first met Buckingham when she transferred to high school in San Francisco in 1966. He taught himself guitar (he still doesn’t read music) and by 1968 found himself playing bass in a local Bay Area band called Fritz.īuckingham in turn recommended to them a young singer called Stevie Nicks. Born into a wealthy San Francisco family in October 1947, Lindsey Buckingham fell early under the influence of Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore and folk groups such as The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul And Mary. Recently relocated to LA, the band’s star had waned since the glory days of Peter Green, and when guitarist, singer and composer Bob Welch had abruptly left what was the group’s ninth lineup in eight years, the future looked bleak indeed – particularly as Heroes Are Hard To Find, the band’s final album with Welch, had barely sold enough copies “to pay Warner Brothers’ electric light bill”, as Fleetwood puts it.Īcross town, prospects for the Buckingham-Nicks duo looked equally unpromising. When Mick Fleetwood rang Lindsey Buckingham on New Year’s Eve, 1974, and invited him to join Fleetwood Mac, the move seemed born of desperation. However, it nearly cost them their sanity.
#Fleetwood mac discography archive#
In this archive feature from Uncut’s May 2003 issue (Take 72), rock’s greatest living soap opera tell the story of how they went to hell and back to bring the world some of the most popular, and most perfect, hard-centred easy listening music of all time.
0 kommentar(er)
