The one album that made Lindsey Buckingham hate Stevie Nicks: “Drugs affect everything”
There are hardly too many times in Fleetwood Mac when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks weren’t having it out with each other.
Both of them complemented each other perfectly whenever working on their songs, but even when that musical chain was keeping the band together, there was hardly any moment when they had a nice thing to say about one another behind the scenes. The fallout of their breakup had to be more than a little bit messy, but Buckingham felt that there were some moments playing with Nicks that he never wanted to go back to ever again.
At the same time, would the songs have been the same had the band members not been at each other’s throats? That might sound terrible, but when listening to the majority of Rumours, there’s a certain burst of energy that comes out of everyone singing about their real-life relationships with each other whenever the tape rolled. Not everything was cordial, and there were more than a few arguments right in the middle of recording songs, but they could put their cares aside, if only for a few minutes.
But whenever looking at the subjects of the songs, Buckingham could be a lot more cynical than his bandmates. The melodies that he wrote were absolutely fantastic, but outside of a song like ‘Go Your Own Way’, even some of his later tunes like ‘Murrow Turning Over in His Grave’ are still a clear example of him being a lot more cutthroat and vicious towards anything that was pissing him off at the time.
By comparison, Nicks was a much softer touch even when talking about her broken heart. ‘Silver Springs’ is still an emotional wrecking ball whenever it comes on, but the fact that she managed to take the high road on a song like ‘Dreams’ and wish both herself and Buckingham peace at the end of their relationship was the best outcome they could have asked for. It all seemed to be friendly, but things took a bit of a turn when Nicks started aiming for a solo career.
On paper, her decision to go solo makes perfect sense, but Buckingham often had too much of a problem with it. She had a lot more songs than what made it on the actual album, but when she started taking off as a solo artist and leaving the rest of the band behind to some degree, there had to be a few moments when the guitarist needed to eat some humble pie. But during Tango in the Night was where everything came to a head in the worst possible way.
Buckingham had had enough of Nicks spending too much time devoted to her solo career, and he felt that it had grown to the point where he could hardly work with her, saying, “As far as being creative, it kept getting worse and worse as did the way the individuals in the band conducted their lives. Drugs affect everything, because your priority becomes to do drugs. It was tough in the end. Stevie, you really couldn’t talk to her, you couldn’t make eye contact. It was hard to recognize someone I had known and lived with a few years before, and there were a lot of hurtful things going on.”
If you look at what was going on, though, both of them seemed to be wrong to some degree. Nicks could have definitely contributed more to the album than simply coming in a few weeks every month and laying off of her drug intake, but Buckingham’s response of not wanting to help her with her songs and eventually quitting before they went on tour does come off as a bit childish in retrospect.
And while the couple haven’t been together onstage in a long time, there’s always going to be that certain electricity in the room whenever they perform together. They are far from the romantic partners that they were when they started working with Fleetwood Mac, but the point behind all of those great songs was about making something that lasted a lot longer than any romance ever could.
