The 1977 song that made Stevie Nicks leave Fleetwood Mac: “There was a lot of begging”
Any good band dynamic usually comes down to making compromises.
Although many musicians might not like the idea of their musical babies being left on the cutting room floor, there usually comes a time when you need to let some of your visions die rather than have to argue about what should or should not be included on every single release. While Stevie Nicks may have known the pain of compromises all too well in Fleetwood Mac, the song ‘Silver Springs’ was enough to get her to consider walking out on the band.
When Fleetwood Mac began working on their first few albums with Nicks at the helm, it was clear that she had an innate sense of song that no one else did. Although Lindsey Buckingham may have been responsible for helping flesh out the arrangements of her material, Nicks had a spectral quality to her voice that no one else could touch, especially when working on her heartbreaking ballads like ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’.
While it appeared as though things were looking up for the band by getting Buckingham and Nicks into the fold, shit started to hit the fan the minute they started working on Rumours. After being on the road and getting their sound together as a live act, Buckingham and Nicks’ romantic relationship had fallen apart, leading to many of their songs for the next album being written about each other.
Throughout most of Rumours, the band packs in more juicy gossip than a daytime soap opera, as Buckingham talked about the pain that he felt towards the breakup on songs like ‘Second Hand News’ and ‘Go Your Own Way’. While Nicks had a lot to get off her chest, her song ‘Silver Springs’ would be cut from the album for being too long, which would have compromised the quality of the vinyl.
What made the decision so difficult to swallow was that ‘Silver Springs’ wasn’t a throwaway album track. Written directly in the aftermath of her split from Buckingham, it was arguably the most explicit account of their relationship breakdown that either songwriter committed to tape during the Rumours era. For her, leaving it off the album meant leaving part of the story untold.
While Nicks was able to back off and rerecord the lighthearted ‘I Don’t Want To Know’, the sting of not having the whole story on the record came back to haunt her years later. Years after Buckingham had been booted from the band, Nicks would delicately toe the line between her solo career and working with the band up until the album Behind the Mask. Once she decided to release the song as one of her career highlights, bandleader Mick Fleetwood got in the way of Nicks releasing her legacy track.
Since the song never came together as a full band effort, Nicks elected to feature the song on one of the greatest hits compilations of her solo catalogue. While the proceeds would eventually go to Nicks’ mother as a thank you for helping her out all these years, Fleetwood would be the one who put his foot down, not wanting Nicks to put the song out anywhere else.
Looking back on it, this was one of the biggest creative blows that Nicks had ever had, explaining in Gold Dust Woman, “This made Nicks very angry. ‘Silver Springs’ just couldn’t catch a break. There was a lot of begging, pleading and cajoling over this, but Mick was determined to maintain control over Fleetwood Mac’s legacy. Nicks threatened to quit Fleetwood Mac… She announced her departure in 1991″.
Once the classic lineup returned to the stage for the album The Dance, though, ‘Silver Springs’ would finally be given the right treatment, letting Nicks inhabit the character that she always wanted to back in 1976. Band tension is never going to be easy with ex-lovers in the mix, but the longevity of ‘Silver Springs’ proved that it was a song worth waiting for.
By that point, the song had taken on a life of its own among Fleetwood Mac fans. The performance captured for The Dance in 1997 remains one of the most talked-about moments in the band’s history, largely because the years seemed to melt away as Nicks delivered the song directly towards Buckingham. For British audiences who had grown up with Rumours as a permanent fixture in record collections and living rooms alike, it felt less like a reunion performance and more like a decades-old conversation finally reaching its conclusion.
