“I just was so disappointed”: The one show that made Stevie Nicks fire Lindsey Buckingham
There’s a good chance that Stevie Nicks will be tied to Lindsey Buckingham for the rest of her life.
As much as people like the idea of her being this musical witch that practically descends from the heavens every time she graces her audience with a show, it all stemmed from when she and Buckingham went quickly from two musical lovers to scorned bandmates when they started working on Rumours. And while it takes time for all that animosity to build up beyond repair, there was always going to be that one moment where Nicks felt like she couldn’t go on any longer.
But when you look at the beginnings of their time in Fleetwood Mac, Nicks was the last one to say that the band was breaking up. They had a massive opportunity lying at their feet, and if it meant dealing with a fair bit of heartache, that was fine so long as they were able to sing the best that they could on every one of their tunes. ‘You Make Loving Fun’ did have a shouting match going on in between the takes, but no one could complain when the actual vocals sounded so good.
As time went on, though, Nicks’s solo career was always going to be a point of contention. There was no rule that said she couldn’t go off on her own from time to time and make a new record, but since Buckingham’s solo career wasn’t really the same musical rocketship that hers was, no one wanted to sit on their hands and wait for her to get off the road. And once Buckingham blew up at the rest of the band after Tango in the Night, it only took a couple of days before he was booted from the group.
Nicks would stick it out for a few more years, but when the reunion happened with The Dance live record, it felt like those old wounds had finally healed. Some of the little microaggressions were still there, but Nicks was happy to be back home with her musical family when working on Say You Will. Everything seemed to be going fine, but even after trying to balance both her solo career and the band at once, Buckingham was out a decade later after those old tensions flared up again.
No one should really be holding onto those same petty arguments at this point, but when performing at a MusiCares benefit show, Nicks remembered that there was no reason for her to carry on with Buckingham any longer. Some say it was Buckingham mocking her onstage or that he had problems with the fact that the band played one of Nicks’s songs as their entrance music, but if there was one thing for sure, it was that Nicks was slamming the door and not coming back.
She had a far greater piece of Fleetwood Mac at this point, and she felt that it was going to be a better band if Buckingham wasn’t involved, saying, “[It was] straw that broke the camel’s back. I never planned for that to happen. Any time we re-formed to do a tour or a record, I always walked in with hope in my heart. And I just was so disappointed. I felt like all the wind had gone out of my sails.”
And while it sucks not being able to hear any of those classic Buckingham-fronted songs whenever they played live, getting Neil Finn and Mike Campbell in the mix was a much better call than anyone would have imagined. After all, Nicks had already been working with Campbell during her time performing with Tom Petty, and since they had more room to stretch, their music could dig back into the bluesy roots that ‘The Mac’ had started out with long before Nicks or Buckingham joined the group.
While Nicks was able to build some of those bridges with Buckingham after years away, it does feel like too little too late after Christine McVie passed away. It’s nice to see that they are on speaking terms again lately, but the fact that they could never have that original Rumours onstage one more time feels like a missed opportunity.
