“That made it OK”: The one musician that made Stevie Nicks join Fleetwood Mac
There was always a certain magic in the air when Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac alongside Lindsey Buckingham. Although she may have been a package deal when Mick Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join, her mystical ways of working with a song are still the band’s calling card to this day. While Nicks has Buckingham to thank for getting her into the group in the first place, she needed to do some homework before she realised that this was the right choice.
Because listening to where Fleetwood Mac started and what Nicks was doing, it was never going to be a perfect fit. The whole band started out as an experiment with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie playing blues covers, and even when Buckingham and Nicks joined, McVie remembered being a little bit sceptical about their sound drifting too far from their original vision of the band.
Then again, nothing Fleetwood Mac ever did was by the books. Although Christine McVie could get that bluesy tone out of her keyboards when she played, bringing in someone like Bob Welch into the group in the early 1970s meant they could flirt with more jazz stylings as well. Their roots may have been in the sounds of Chicago and Delta blues, but you’d have to really squint your ears to convince yourself that anything blues-related is going on in a song like ‘Sentimental Lady’.
Even when they were a pure blues act, though, Peter Green was going for something a little bit different in his playing. Tracks like ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ and ‘Oh Well’ might still be considered staples of British blues rock, but listening back to a song like ‘Black Magic Woman’, there was a darker spirit in a lot of Green’s playing that worked its way into the song construction half the time.
And while the band didn’t know what to make of Green’s strange persona back in the day, something like ‘Albatross’ had the same kind of musical magic that appealed to Nicks. And even though she had to take an in-depth look at the group after being offered the job, she felt that she had a spiritual friend in Green the minute she put on some of the early Fleetwood Mac albums.
She may not have had a proper role in the group yet, but Nicks heard someone who fit perfectly with her brand of songwriting, saying, “[Lindsey and I] listened to [those albums] back to back to see if we could add anything to the band or if they could add anything to what we were doing. We wanted to know if this was something we were gonna do just for the money or if we were gonna do this because we could improve upon it in some way. And what we connected to, of course, was Peter Green. It was his mystical influence that drew us in, that made it OK to stop doing Buckingham Nicks and join Fleetwood Mac.”
And despite their rootsy approach to the genre, some of Nicks’s finest moments weren’t that far removed from what Green was doing. Although the styles had changed, there’s no doubt that the same band who made off-the-wall songs like ‘The Green Manalishi’ ultimately found a home making songs like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ work as well.
Even on the band’s poppier stuff, there’s a certain spectral spirit looming over songs like ‘The Chain’ or ‘Rhiannon’, almost like some ghostly aura is coming out of the speakers whenever it plays. While Nicks has played up her witchy persona in the past, it turned out that Fleetwood Mac already had a resident musical wizard before she had even joined.
