Is Billy Corgan really responsible for the success of Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 track ‘Landslide’?
Billy Corgan is basically trying to claim that he’s the one responsible for handing Fleetwood Mac one of their most enduring hits.
And, to be fair, his justification for that is because Stevie Nicks herself told him so. It was by a sheer stroke of luck that, in preparation for a BBC recording session in 1994, he flipped through his scant record collection and came across Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album from 1975. From there, he plucked a random track called ‘Landslide’ and decided to give it a whirl.
As The Smashing Pumpkins frontman later put it himself, the song had “never been a single, wasn’t considered a classic, [and] wasn’t played on the radio”. Essentially, he was taking a complete stab in the dark and had no concept of the golden ticket he was handing Fleetwood Mac in the process.
With just 20 minutes left of his session, Corgan recorded the vocals and layers of instrumentation for ‘Landslide’ as somewhat of a rush job, perhaps thinking at the time that it was just like any other given cover he would perform at the time. Listening back to his takes, he lifted a section of vocal here, a part of a guitar lick there, and left it at that.
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, it became a hit. “After that, Stevie Nicks is on the phone thanking me for all the publishing money she got,” Corgan explained with a nonchalant air, as if it was what he had intended all along, because of course he did. And, for what it’s worth, “Since then, it’s been a hit four times over,” he added.
As Nicks put it herself in confirming her seal of approval, “Over this song, there’s been this incredible connection…he reached out… I believe that my poetry is really meant for everyone, no matter what age”. Indeed, it was the better part of 20 years since the song was released that it finally got its flowers, but it was worth every second of the waiting.
Yes, on the one hand, it spoke to the universality that exists in every corner of the sonic world, but it was also a testament to Corgan’s limited record collections and the gemstones that can be uncovered when you take a leap of faith. A ‘Landslide’ was actually an appropriate way of putting it, because as soon as the first domino fell, there was no stopping the cascade.
The frontman may rightly hold a piece of smugness close to his chest because of this, and he isn’t afraid to make it known, either. “She wrote the song. It’s a brilliant song,” he said in relation to Nicks, “But I cracked the code”. ‘Landslide’ may not seem like an enigma to us now, but he was right: it was he who helped the puzzle pieces fall into place.
Ultimately, there’s no denying that ‘Landslide’ still very much belongs to its original Fleetwood Mac owners, rather than The Smashing Pumpkins, but in this sense, its journey was one that the band bestowed onto the world, before being regifted their own present, only in even greater form. That’s the circle of life.
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