Buckingham Nicks

There they are on the cover, in a black-and-white photograph: young and naked and impossibly beautiful, two people whose early work, in the popular imagination, was viewed almost exclusively through the prism of their mutual desire. We came to know Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks through music that, we were told, cataloged their conflict and heartbreak; here, on this sleeve, they are one, practically a single being.

By the time that Buckingham Nicks came out in September 1973, Lindsey and Stevie had been making music in bands and as a duo for five years, and had known each other for longer. They first sang together in 1966, when they both attended Menlo-Atherton High School in Palo Alto, at a church function for aspiring musicians. He banged out the chords to “California Dreaming” on piano, a current hit by the Mamas and the Papas, and she joined him on harmony. Two years later, Lindsey invited Stevie to join a band called Fritz with two of his boyhood friends. She was fronting the group by the summer of 1968.

Nicks was 19, and her heroes included Janis Joplin and Grace Slick; Buckingham was 18, a Beatles nut who also had an ear for folk music, particularly the Kingston Trio. Fritz was a catch-all of the various styles in the Bay Area at the time—some organ-backed garage rock, a bit of psychedelia that bled into cosmic blues.

You can listen to some of their music online, including a cover of “Born to Be Wild” and a studio session of one of the group’s original songs, “Take Advantage of Me.” Even this early, Nicks has one of the most immediately identifiable voices in rock, low and deep, like it’s bubbling up from her unconscious. She can sound vulnerable but rarely fragile, and when she’s singing something upbeat, as she does here, she sounds commanding.

Fritz scored some big opening gigs—Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana—and they had enough buzz by 1971 that Keith Olsen, a young record producer from Los Angeles who worked out of a dumpy studio called Sound City, flew up to see them. Olsen wasn’t particularly impressed with the band, but he liked Lindsey and Stevie and offered to work with them as a duo. That was the end of Fritz, and the start of Buckingham Nicks.

The pair spent the first few months working on their own, making demos on a four-track reel-to-reel in a spare room at the coffee plant in Daly City owned by Buckingham’s father. Every night, after the workers left, the two would gather with their instruments to write and record. Buckingham became obsessed with the possibilities of recording, experimenting with how sounds were layered and mixed. Nicks had a feel for the shape of melodies and an ear for words that drew from her interest in mysticism but also seemed applicable to everyday life. By the time they made their way down to Los Angeles to work with Olsen in 1972, they had a seven-song demo.

Olsen dubbed the tape and circulated it, but there were no takers, so they continued to hone their material, often at Sound City, where Olsen gave them free studio time. Nicks was the breadwinner—she cleaned Olsen’s house, waited tables at the Copper Penny, and hostessed at Big Boy while Buckingham smoked enormous amounts of hash in their apartment, working through musical ideas. They fought, and Lindsey could be verbally abusive, but they stayed focused. After about a year of this, Olsen finally secured them a deal, and Buckingham Nicks made its way into the world.

James Taylor and Carole King were stars, Joni Mitchell was a critic’s favorite, and Buckingham adored Cat Stevens: This was the context in which Buckingham Nicks operated. Loosely, it was folk-rock, but they brought a primal energy to it that would inform their later work. Listening now, you get the uncanny feeling you’re hearing vintage Fleetwood Mac hits that you just somehow forgot about. Nicks’ “Crying in the Night,” about a woman in a relationship who has a wandering eye, stands alongside her best Fleetwood Mac contributions. Her “Long Distance Winner” is also Mac-like, while Buckingham renders finger-picked guitar as if it were three-chord garage rock.

Buckingham’s finest songs point to his later triumphs. His voice strains in its higher register on the chorus of “Without a Leg to Stand On,” while the tune itself feels effortless, as if built by machine. This tension between methodical craft and drunk-on-music abandon would become his signature. To that end, “Don’t Let Me Down Again” sounds like a dry run of Rumours’ opener “Second Hand News.”

This pair was famous for writing angry music about each other, but Lindsey titled “Stephanie” after Stevie’s birth name, and said everything he wanted to say through his guitar. The delicate piece glimmers like a rose window and offers a microcosm of Buckingham’s painstaking approach to composition. In the last decade, Buckingham has taken to playing it in concert.

The gentle ballad “Crystal,” written by Stevie but sung by Lindsey, would get another life when it was carried over to Fleetwood Mac, and remains a moving example of how their voices blended together. Their harmonies embodied multiplicity: one voice conveying acceptance, the other wondering about what else might be out there. Each could play either role. Lindsey is the steadying force on “Crystal,” outlining the shape of Nicks’ song as she colors outside of it. Christine McVie’s keyboards would give it an extra twist of feeling on the more famous version, but everything the song needs is found here.

There was a lot of competition in the singer-songwriter field in 1973, and Buckingham Nicks wasn’t the best of the lot, but it’s excellent, and it’s still puzzling how swiftly it vanished. It’s packed with top-flight session musicians—Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Jim Keltner on drums—and was recorded by Olsen, a producer with dozens of gold and platinum records ahead of him, but it was a complete failure. Promotion was light, the few reviews were mostly bad, and Polydor dropped the duo a few months after the album came out. After a five-year build-up, the moment was over as quickly as it started.

But Stevie and Lindsey were writing for their next album even before this one was finished. Lindsey had penned “Monday Morning,” and Nicks, inspired by a passage in a book about a Welsh witch, had a stunning new song called “Rhiannon.” There was another ballad called “Landslide.” They weren’t ready to give up on Buckingham Nicks, which made the next decision difficult.

In December 1974, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac received news that his guitarist, Bob Welch, was quitting the band. Line-up changes were nothing new—in their seven-year history, they’d already been through several—but Fleetwood’s band was due back in the studio soon. He’d heard Lindsey play once, and Keith Olsen, with whom he was friendly, mentioned his name. It didn’t take long before he offered Buckingham the job. Lindsey was reticent, afraid of giving up what he and Stevie had built together. He said that Nicks would have to be part of the deal. After having dinner with the members of Fleetwood Mac in January 1975, they both agreed to join.

After this, things would get both easier and harder. Everything about Fleetwood Mac would be soap operatic—grand pianos carted into luxury suites while on tour, a road manager with onstage cocaine at the ready, intra-band couplings and breakups that kept the group on the edge of dissolution, even while they were selling millions of records. But here it was just the two of them, years deep into their dream of a life in music, writing songs that mattered to them and that they dared to hope might matter to someone else.