The day Stevie Nicks first met Lindsay Buckingham
While the relationship between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham is damaged beyond the point of possible repair, their careers remain permanently intertwined. In addition to being one another’s muses for a selection of their respective best material, Nicks and Buckingham knew each other since childhood before experiencing the wildest rides of their lives together.
Despite recent calls from Mick Fleetwood for Nicks and Buckingham to heal their wounds, it remains unlikely they will ever be seen in the same room again, let alone perform. While Fleetwood Mac continued to perform following Buckingham’s dismissal in 2018, they closed the book on their career following the death of Christine McVie and are determined to leave the band in the past.
Although Buckingham was a vital component of Fleetwood Mac for several decades, the tone of his departure was a difficult pill for the guitarist to swallow. He claims that, essentially, Nicks served an ultimatum to Mick Fleetwood that either she or Buckingham needed to leave the group, and the drummer chose to save the singer.
However, while they have now grown from soulmates to strangers, their storied history is impossible to delete. For a time at least, Nicks and Buckingham were an inseparable duo ever since they first met in serendipitous circumstances.
Even before Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham Nicks was an imposing duo on the 1970 rock scene. The pair had met while the two were in high school and had forged a fearsome relationship between two fine singer-songwriters, a rollercoaster from start to finish.
However, their personal lives imploded at the height of their professional success, and the pair broke up. Their split forced the two ex-lovers not only to perform and record with one another but also perform and record songs that said ex had written directly about them, the most famous of which is Buckingham’s ‘Go Your Own Way’.
The song is a severe and scathing retelling of the pair’s supposed breakup and accurately reflects their vicious ending. It was a shame, considering they had met under such innocent circumstances and were united by a shared ambition. While studying at Menlo-Atherton High School, the older Nicks saw Buckingham jamming to the Mamas and the Papas classic song ”California Dreamin’ and “brazenly burst into harmony with him”.
From that first moment, there was a chemistry between Buckingham and Nicks, who were destined to make music together. They’d miraculously been placed in the same town and found one another, but they were never ones to follow the straightforward path.
Though there was certainly a spark of connection between the two, they went their separate ways and pursued their musical careers in their own way. Thankfully, the pair were reunited two years later as Buckingham searched for a new female vocalist for his soft-rock outfit Fritz. At this juncture, they were both students at San Jose University, blessed with a more mature songwriting palette and certainly more ready to push on with their dreams of becoming rock stars.
Following the demise of Fritz, they began their project Buckingham Nicks and even released a debut album, which, despite some appreciation, failed to make any dent in the charts. It was a disastrous time for the pair, and though they began making cash as session musicians, the dream of becoming stars was slipping away.
Some years later, during a television interview, Nicks spoke kindly of their relationship and hasn’t often deviated from her genuine affection for Buckingham, even during that time. “I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School. I loved him for all the right reasons,” she said. “We did have a great relationship at first. I loved taking care of him and the house.”
It was a direct reference to their time in Aspen, where the thought of a music career for Stevie Nicks seemingly evaporated. While Buckingham was working as a session guitarist for Don Everly, Nicks was left at home to tend to the house, a role she enjoyed but was not captivated by. Unsure whether to pursue her dreams, a song soon came to confirm her love of music, ‘Landslide’.
“So during that two months I made a decision to continue. ‘Landslide’ was the decision. [Sings] ‘When you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills’—it’s the only time in my life that I’ve lived in the snow. But looking up at those Rocky Mountains and going, ‘Okay, we can do it. I’m sure we can do it.’ In one of my journal entries, it says, ‘I took Lindsey and said, We’re going to the top!’ And that’s what we did.”
Mick Fleetwood picked up the duo after he tried to sign up Lindsey Buckingham to join his project, Fleetwood Mac, and Buckingham refused to join without his partner Nicks also signing on. It was a decision that would change their lives forever and see the band’s music still rightly revered today as some of the finest of the 20th century. Although they are now entirely different from the versions of themselves who met in high school, Buckingham and Nicks would never be where they are today had they not crossed paths.
