The 1966 song Stevie Nicks thought would make Lindsey Buckingham hate her: “I don’t care”
Being in a band like Fleetwood Mac was never going to be easy for Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to manage.
The fact that they came into the band as a couple was already going to be a recipe for disaster if everything went wrong, and even when the material was great on projects like Rumours, that didn’t stop them from becoming absolutely resentful of each other whenever they wrote songs attacking each other. But even before all of the drama had started, Nicks felt that Buckingham was going to hate her from the moment that she opened her mouth to sing for the first time.
Then again, Buckingham and Nicks were practically made for each other in lots of ways. They weren’t going to last as a couple by any stretch, but when they worked together as a songwriting team, there was no one else who could touch them. Even if Buckingham claimed that he didn’t want to work on many of her songs half the time, it was always that little bit of elbow grease that turned songs like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Gypsy’ into absolute masterpieces behind the scenes.
But it was always going to be difficult working around someone like Nicks. She wasn’t claiming to be the greatest musician in the world, and even when she was strumming away on a guitar, most of her songs were only based on a few chords in the beginning. At the same time, Buckingham knew that not every song needed to be complicated in order to sound great when he started playing.
He had cut his teeth listening to Beach Boys records, but if you listen to a song like ‘Second Hand News’, the whole tune is practically a remake of what someone like Buddy Holly might have done. Those early rock and roll tunes only needed a handful of chords and a decent melody to hold together well, and when Buckingham worked up his first rendition of the song ‘California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas, Nicks knew that she needed to be anywhere near him.
His voice blended with hers perfectly, but when she hopped onstage to sing with him for the first time, she couldn’t help but think that she was making a huge mistake, saying, “I heard this guy singing from a long way away in this big room, and he was singing [the Mamas and the Papas song] ‘California Dreamin’.”
“And I thought, ‘Oh, I know that song.’ So I kind of made my way over, and I saw him, and I thought, ‘I’m going to walk up there and sing. Oh, he’s going to hate me. Oh, I don’t care. I’m going.’”
Stevie Nicks
It might have been a bit strange to see some stranger getting up onstage with him, but Buckingham at least knew the kind of musician that Nicks could be. She could hold an audience in the palm of her hand, and if she was good enough to get the attention of Jimi Hendrix without even standing onstage, they were going to have something when they started singing together on ‘Crying in the Night’.
But there’s a fine line between singing over someone else’s part and stepping on another musician’s toes, and Buckingham was usually the one crossing that line. He had no problem telling the rest of ‘the Mac’ how their parts should be played, and even when he was working on their records, it wasn’t out of the question to bring in finished songs and not ask for anyone else’s input half the time.
That kind of meticulousness might have been grating after a while, but that’s not how Nicks chooses to remember things. It’s hard for them to go back to those moments of fighting and drama all the time, but chances are that when she thinks back to her singing ‘California Dreamin’ with her musical soulmate, all the other bullshit melts away.
