The moment Stevie Nicks fell in love with Lindsey Buckingham and began a musical legacy
“You could not say that I did not give him more than 300million chances,” Stevie Nicks said last year, explaining the reasons why she and Lindsey Buckingham have long been unable to see eye to eye. Even those who’ve been paying close attention find it difficult to work out whether this is the ultimate love story or a feud carried through the ages, but either way, there’s no disputing the bond that emerged from day one.
Recounting all the ways Nicks and Buckingham have fuelled their own fire is one sure way to prove that it was a partnership just as doomed by ambition as it was by romance, but these also factor into the richness of their independent stories, and why their careers – alongside the cultural impact of Fleetwood Mac – became as longlasting as they did. After all, they were constantly at war through some of the band’s greatest material while also learning the power of angsty and tragedy in art, especially when it comes from a real place.
They’ve argued, fought, and betrayed one another, reconciled, fallen out again, and said some of the meanest things anyone could ever say about a former partner on record, but they’re also intertwined in each others’ paths like some kind of invisible vine, a mutual respect running so deep it’s hard to see where the toxic hues end and the adoration begins. Maybe, to them, it’s all one and the same, but mostly stems from working their way through an industry as young and aspirational as they once were while providing mutual support to make ends meet.
In the beginning, when Buckingham worked to Nicks could stay at home writing, the delicacy of watching a potential career plummet almost threw Nicks into the throes of despair, but once the opportunities came, they were a pair forever bound, for better or worse, often a mix of threats and promises manifested in the hostility in the studio, the unrelenting glares on stage, and through scathing lyrics of hearts scorned and dedicated to taking the other down. Like that one line in ‘Silver Springs’ where Nicks sings, “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”
But this kind of kindred spirituality was there from the beginning, despite the fundamental differences that made them each excellent musicians in their own right. Nicks first met Buckingham when she was 17, when at a small school get-together she observed Buckingham playing a rendition of The Mamas and The Papas’ ‘California Dreamin’. “Being the brazen brat that I was, I walked right up and, knowing the song as well as I did, just burst into song and I sang it with him,” she recalled.
He then disappeared until she was offered to join the band Fritz, to which Buckingham conceded, but the real moment that cemented their partnership – their “movie moment”, as Nicks described it – came when Bobby Geary and the rest came to pick her up in 1968 and whisk her away to the same thriving scene currently boasting talents like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. “Bob Geary comes to my house and picks me up in a white van, and I ride away, bye-bye – and I can just tell that my life is going to change,” she recalled.
Adding: “I lived in a gated community and so did Lindsey, so we get in the car and drive down one street and then another one, round the corner, and that’s it, we’re there. In the driveway of this big, beautiful house, I can hear all this music coming out of the garage. Inside there’s a full-on rock band setting up and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is the real thing.'”
Now, in spite of everything that came after, all of these moments seem more sweet than bitter, more perils of two younguns trying to figure it all out while falling in love with each other, an intertwining of worlds that was, as Mick Fleetwood recently put it, “magic then, magic now”. But most of the time, it works. Nicks once said that they will “always be antagonising to each other, and we will always do things that will irritate each other, and we really know how to push each other’s buttons.” They know exactly what to say “when we really want to throw a dagger in,” she said.
And while it seems sometimes their bickering is more fatal to their bond than any underlying understanding, it’s also a story far from over. But that’s less a plot to get people to keep paying attention and more a product of a deeply layered history, through backstabbing and lifting each other up, through moments when they hated each other and others when they couldn’t stand the sight of anyone else. It’s selling dreams and building lives around one another, no matter how much the empire crumbles under the pressure of decades-long intensity.
