The song that made Stevie Nicks want to join Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac were always going to be a different band once Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had come on board.
They had started out as one of the main heavy hitters in the blues scene in the late 1960s, and even if Nicks was a far cry from the blues, her voice had the potential to resonate with anyone that heard her sing tunes like ‘Rhiannon’. But while Buckingham Nicks were still a humble duo at that point, Nicks wasn’t going to simply jump into a band without doing her research first.
If anything, there needed to be some sort of sign that they could even add anything to the group. There were certainly commonalities between how Buckingham and Peter Green played guitar, but it’s not like Buckingham’s signature finger-picking style was going to gel whenever they played tunes like ‘Oh Well’ or anything. But as far as Mick Fleetwood was concerned, they already had the magic.
Buckingham Nicks was far from a smash success, but the track ‘Frozen Love’ was more than enough to prove that Buckingham was a fantastic guitarist. And while listening to an album like Then Play On next to Rumours is like listening to two completely different acts, the road that it took for them to get there was a bit more mellow than a lot of people would have thought.
Nicks may get the credit or the blame for turning the group into a pop act, but are we all going to ignore the music that Bob Welch made with them? Sure, he wasn’t exactly Paul McCartney in the hooks department or anything, but a song like ‘Sentimental Lady’ didn’t sound remotely like the blues, and yet hearing him and Christine McVie trade songs felt like listening to a group finally discovering their powers.
But the real clincher was having someone like Christine in the group. She could play blues piano with the best of them, but underneath all of that rough exterior was one of the finest songwriters of her time, and when listening to a track like ‘Bermuda Triangle’, something about the moodiness intrigued Nicks enough to go after the group as fast as she could.
The blues was never her forte, but the entire vibe of this tune moved something in Nicks’s heart that nothing else could, saying, “My mission was finding out whether there was anything I could add to this band. Is there anything I can grab onto here? And I came out of it feeling that there was a whole mystical thing within there; from Peter Green’s bluesy guitar to Bob Welch’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’ and Christine’s kind of airy-fairy voice. So I started thinking that this could work, this could definitely work.”
And considering how ominous ‘Bermuda Triangle’ can sound in spots, there was at least a blueprint for their eventual classics with Nicks. It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but a track like ‘Gold Dust Woman’ felt like them capitalising on the kind of dark feeling that came from this one tune and brought it to an even darker place, which would be increased tenfold when they performed it live.
There were bound to be people still missing the old version of ‘The Mac’ with Green, but it’s not like Nicks’s take on the band was ever going to suffer. She had that spectral power that few artists are able to possess, and for the rest of her career, she would spend every album session trying to match that kind of musical perfection.
