‘Frozen Love’: The song that got Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks into Fleetwood Mac
The biggest hits that Fleetwood Mac would ever have wouldn’t exist without Lindsey Buckingham. Although he may not have been in the trenches with the original lineup, his contributions to albums such as Rumours and Tusk have left a gigantic impact on what the future of rock guitar playing was going to sound like.
While the band had initially thought about working with multiple guitarists before Buckingham, it took one song to get them hooked on his trademark guitar playing.
Then again, Buckingham’s style was unusual for its time. When approaching the instrument, Buckingham came from a more bluegrass perspective, creating a cascading barrage of notes by never playing with a pick. While Fleetwood Mac was keen to make different music, it came at the expense of being one of the biggest blues acts in the world.
For the first half of the group’s career, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie had been used to playing electric blues that fell more in line with acts like The Yardbirds. Once original guitarist Peter Green left the fold, the band would have a revolving door of musicians working on their albums, leading to a wilderness period where their manager put two different versions of Fleetwood Mac on the road.
Even though jazz guitarist Bob Welch seemed to be working out fine, things began to fall apart after the album Heroes Are Hard to Find. As the band settled into Sound City Studios to create their next album, though, Buckingham was working with his girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, on an album of their own a few rooms over.
Being a singer-songwriter duo in the vein of Simon and Garfunkel, Buckingham Nicks was the first sign of the duo’s chemistry, with Nicks flexing her vocal chops on ‘Crying in the Night’ and Buckingham putting the finishing touches on what would become The Mac’s ‘Crystal’. Although the guitarist had no intention of switching bands then, he recognised one of his songs echoing through the studio halls after they finished.
‘Frozen Love’ and a new era of Fleetwood Mac
When discussing joining the band, Buckingham told Sound City, “I walked out of Studio B, and I heard our song ‘Frozen Love’ coming from one studio over. And I see this gigantic man sitting in the chair with his eyes closed, just grooving, and I thought, ‘Who is that?’”. That mystery man was Mick Fleetwood, who was interested in hearing music from the studio to know whether the band would record there.
Given how visceral the solo sounds towards the end of the tape, Fleetwood asked producer Keith Olsen whether or not Buckingham was available to join the band, explaining, “I said, ‘The tape that you played the other day. Tell me [who it is]…we’re looking for a guitar player”. Even though Buckingham was keen to get into a mainstream rock band, he had one caveat before he joined: Nicks needed to come with him.
Despite going through every single incarnation under the sun, bringing in Buckingham’s fingerstyle guitars made them stick out much more compared to the other bands in California. Rock and roll had come a long way from the blues, and now that there were people like Eagles and Crosby, Stills, and Nash fast becoming one of the biggest names in rock, so having Buckingham’s bluegrass roots gave them the kind of crossover potential that they needed.
But even if Buckingham was the one they were after, Nicks was really the true face of this era of their career. Her boyfriend may have had the technical chops and pop smarts, but listening to her smokey voice over songs like ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Landslide’ took them to new heights that they had never imagined before. It was a long way from Green’s era of the group, but everyone knew this was not a time to dwell on the past.
Turning Fleetwood Mac into a five-piece, Buckingham would infuse his country-led style into the band’s self-titled album, featuring a reworked version of ‘Crystal’ and pop marvels like ‘Monday Morning’. That playing style Fleetwood was enamoured with would also become a fixture of later Mac tunes like ‘The Chain’. Even though Buckingham had already found his voice on his instrument, he was about to face some of the biggest emotional struggles once the band entered the studio for their next record.
