hate gave you me for a lover
on buckingham nicks
I spent last summer and early fall reworking an old proposal from 2016 for a Buckingham Nicks entry into the 33 1/3 series into something more substantial for my second book. Then, at the eleventh hour, I changed my mind. I was feeling more drawn to John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands in this moment of my life, and uncertain if I still had the same passion for Buckingham Nicks in my 30s that I did as a babyfaced 24 year old. I wondered if I was maybe insane for getting myself into another project with subjects who hold onto their own narratives with a white-knuckled grip—and also change it whenever they want—after swearing I wouldn’t do that to myself again. I wondered if I’d be able to channel the amount love for my subject required to spend years of my life immersed in it, or if I was simply too cynical for it now. So I tabled it.
But in the wake of the bizarrely slapdash news of the album’s reissue after all this time—For the 52nd anniversary? Press release and single drop on a Wednesday? Not even hitting the same release day (9/5)as the original even though luck would have it that’s also a New Music Friday this year? A messy ass social rollout? No bonus tracks (which very much do exist!)? Liner note excerpts that seem as if the pair were interviewed separately, indicating they have not buried the hatchet after all, by a boomer Rolling Stone alum when the spectacular not-ancient-journalist-and-friend-of-Lindsey-Buckingham Amanda Petrusich is right there? Okay! Go girl, give us nothing!—I found that myself back in that aw shit, here we go again mindspace. I can’t keep away from Buckingham Nicks, try as I might to remove myself and relieve my brain of this obsession.
Maybe I’ll do something with that would-be book after all, maybe I won’t. I’d be pissed as hell if someone else wrote this book, but I also don’t know if I still have it in me to write it myself. Who knows. All I know is that this is a reworked standalone excerpt (it’s still long as hell though) from this new proposal about an old album that meant a lot to me when I was impossibly young and makes me nostalgic for my youth (if you’re older than me please, I’m begging you, do not roll your eyes at that) now. I like writing about it, and the people who made it, and I maybe always will. I hope you’ll like it, too.
“Before fame and all the creepiness creeped in, there was a really sweet girl and a really sweet boy that sang together and made beautiful music.” – Stevie Nicks, 2013
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham thought 1973 was going to be their year. They were 24 years old and their two years in LA had put them through the wringer: Stevie was working as both a maid and a waitress, Lindsey was painting houses, and the couple had so little between them that they sometimes shared a single hamburger for dinner.
But they had their music. Their music was a gift they had both been given, the thing that drew them together. The sum of the pair, they knew, was better than the individual parts, and what they created together would make all this struggle worth it—sooner, hopefully, than later. They had certainly put in the time: First, nearly three years spent performing in a San Francisco psych-rock band—The Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, later shortened to just Fritz, but no less counterculture leaning—playing everything from high school dances to local festivals with Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. Then, after the group dissolved, countless late nights in the eerie dark of a coffee plant Lindsey’s father owned, honing and recording their own songs on a four track Ampex tape machine. They had waited another year or two to move to Los Angeles in 1971, once they were certain the demos they had in hand were good enough for a record deal. By the time they released their first album two years later, the eponymous Buckingham Nicks, they were sure that their efforts were about to secure them two one-way tickets from their dire straits to stardom. They had worked too hard and had too much desperate faith in their talents to imagine things working out any other way.
They had no reason to believe that the album would have lukewarm reviews and even more tepid sales, or that they would be dropped by their label within months, or that they would end 1973 no further ahead than they had started. They didn’t know that success would come two years later in the form of a struggling British blues band that they would interject with a breezy California pop sensibility, steering them all to astronomical success. They didn’t know that their relationship had an expiration date, and would not so much spoil as spectacularly burn, or that they would spend the next 50 years playing the main characters in a great American soap opera, or that the album they had spent all this effort on would all but disappear. They just knew that they were two kids in love and bouncing checks at IHOP who had made art that was truly good. And they were placing all their bets on that being enough.
In the stretch of fall and winter of my 23rd year, I spent six months following Fleetwood Mac up and down the East Coast. In the twilight of the Obama era and the dawn of my young adulthood, I saw the classic Rumours Five perform more than half a dozen times between the end of 2014 and the dawning of 2015. That previous summer, I had gotten my first credit card to buy floor seats I couldn’t afford for a forthcoming Madison Square Garden show in the fall. By the time the snow was beginning to thaw, I had become so adept at charming my way to a spot at the foot of the stage that I bought the cheapest tickets in the worst nosebleeds possible. It didn’t matter what was printed on my ticket; I knew I’d always have the best spot in the house.
It seemed, at the time, like there were far worse things on which I could be spending what laughably little money I had, though if you asked my parents, I had become a foolishly irresponsible and reckless person. It seemed, at the time, like the appeal of a Fleetwood Mac concert was more than obvious, but if you were one of my coworkers or not-extremely-online peers, I was a strange and bewildering anomaly. Everyone had the same kind of puzzled reaction to my wannabe Almost Famous existence: “It’s the same show. I don’t get it—why see it over and over again?”
Well, yes, that was just it: It was a show. I didn’t just go because I loved the music—which I did, fervently, and still do. I went for the drama. By which I mean: I went to see what that evening’s episode of the Buckingham/Nicks soap opera had in store. Would they be on good terms, touchy-feely and flirty—stoking rumors of something more going on and feeding into the audience’s gullible glee? Or would they be frosty, giving each other the silent treatment, barely making eye contact—also stoking rumors of something more going on, of course, just in a different way. What story were they going to tell that night?
And did Stevie Nicks like to tell stories. Long-winded meandering ones, full of stardust and grit in the same sprinkle, stories that have grown the haze of faded film across them as the years have stretched on. “Gypsy” is both a song that is a story and a song that has a story, one which she shared before every performance in an ever-lengthening introduction. Across two, three, four—sometimes even five—minutes, she’d wax nostalgic about her earliest dirt-broke years with Buckingham, her younger and more starry-eyed self’s dream of what success would look like, and her fierce belief that she’d get it. Nostalgia warps memory; in recounting our past, every most mundane experience is luminous and prophetic. Our raw, naked ambition doesn’t embarrass us. We always arrive at an epiphany at once, and never little by little. Every night the story’s ending varied just enough to seem like I was hearing it for the very first time, and that each time it was meant for just me:
“If you have a dream, and you believe in yourself, and you know you’re good, and you have a passion — and hopefully you do have a passion — you follow that passion, because otherwise you’re gonna be so bored in your life. You need to do what you love. And you need to not let anyone get in your way and tell you it can’t be done. So do it. Follow it. Love it. Be it.”
At least, that’s how one of them went.
Only a few years before, I had fished a well-worn vinyl copy of Buckingham Nicks my father had owned as a teenager out of one of the many crates of long-unplayed albums relegated to the back corner of our basement. Now, I had become obsessed with their story, fascinated and fueled by their nonlinear path and eventual trajectory.
The albums we typically associate with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are all ones recorded from a place of success. Sure, there may be heartbreak and addiction and ego coloring all of them, but, for the most part, they are albums recorded by people who have nothing left to prove. At least, not really. Records may not sell as well, tours may not be as big as the last, singles may not break every chart. A flop may make the next few years a bit harder, but not impossible. Since 1975, every album has been made, more or less, with the secure knowledge that they were successful enough to never have to worry about not making anything ever again. Buckingham Nicks, though, is not that kind of album. It’s the young and hungry album, the work of two kids who had both everything to prove and everything to lose. So you can see why someone else in their 20s, even if decades later, would be so enamored of its story.
Of course, I had no right, at 23, to dejectedly feel like I had boundless ambition and nothing to show for it. I had no right to feel as if none of the doors I was banging on would ever open for me. But I did, and perhaps driven by the knowledge that I was now the age Stevie (you see, we were on a first name basis by then) was at the time Buckingham Nicks was recorded, and because I knew what happened next, I so desperately needed to hear those words. I needed to hear someone tell me that it was going to be okay, that I had time, that no person is built in a day. I needed to hear, from the source herself, that Stevie Nicks wasn’t always Stevie Nicks. I needed, in short, to consider the fact that my icons were not always icons.
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If Buckingham Nicks is the young and hungry album, it’s also the album that first establishes the symbiotic (and codependent) artistic working relationship between the pair. Across the album, we see their individual talents—Buckingham’s unique style of applying Spanish-style fingerpicking to rock guitar, Nicks’s intensely emotional and at times mystical lyrics—emerge in their earliest variations. But what makes it truly shine is the blending of the two. Buckingham is a more gifted musician than songwriter; Nicks is a talented songwriter with a barebones ability to arrange her own work. Each is territorial over their craft, though willing to trust the other in order to fully breathe life into their creations.
“What he does is take the skeleton [of my songs] and then he goes in for hours that we never see him and he plays parts and parts and more parts. He arranges right underneath my little skeleton,” Nicks said in 2003. “[His] songs are like beautiful, handcrafted Russian boxes with enamel and cloisonne and sound like [he’s] worked on them for seven years, and my little songs are like pine boxes.”
Put simply: They need each other. Try as everyone—the industry, the press, the fans, even, perhaps especially, themselves—might to pit the two against each other, with Buckingham as the tortured tormenter and Nicks as the victim-turned-victor, it just doesn’t work. The narrative is too black and white, too casually ignorant of the intricate complexities and multitudes of minor atrocities on both sides of a human relationship. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are not each other’s antagonists; they’re each other's forever entwined partner, two dueling and dueting egos who have hurt and helped each other in equal measure and together pulled the puppet strings of public persona.
To write about Buckingham Nicks, both the couple and the album they created, is to write a love story. There’s no other way about it. But this love story is neither fairy nor cautionary tale. It’s a love story about the state of becoming, a love story about icons who were not always icons. It’s a love story about love before it was razed and rebuilt as a Love Story™ for public consumption. It is a love story about the history we share with other people, whether it’s Buckingham and Nicks, joining hands to play one on stage long after they were a couple in real life, or it’s us, creating a sort of history with musicians from the art that becomes an indelible part of our lives.
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The way Lindsey Buckingham tells it, the naming of the second track on Buckingham Nicks—a guitar instrumental that lasts barely two minutes—was merely a coincidence. He had been noodling around on his guitar, working out a complex, fingerpicked layered melody. “What do you think we oughta call it?” he asked Stevie when he finished. “Why don’t you call it ‘Stephanie’?” she suggested, after her birth name. Years later, he would laugh when telling the story: “That’s Stevie for you.”
Happenstance or not, it seems impossible, in retrospect, to listen to “Stephanie” and hear anything other than a love song written by someone more adept at expressing his feelings through his guitar than with words. It’s delicate, warm, and bright; it sounds the way the sun feels when it begins to peek through the curtains and casts itself across the room at dawn.
You can hear, in the music, that there was a love both profound and simple at some point in time. You can hear, in the music, the memory of the moment they met: A sixteen-year-old boy playing his guitar in the corner, singing “California Dreamin’” and the seventeen-year-old girl who “brazenly walked over and burst into song” to harmonize. “I think he was a little surprised because it really was kind of a gutsy thing to do,” Stevie later recalled. “But luckily I’m a good singer and I knew the words.”
Even their earliest meeting is not free from either’s stake planting of narratives: “I probably said ‘Hi, I’m Stevie Nicks’ and he probably said ‘Hi, I’m Lindsey Buckingham.’ He tells a different story. He says that I actually reached down and kissed him on the cheek or something. I don’t remember that. But he says that happened. So maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t.”
And isn’t that maybe it did, maybe it didn’t one of the reasons why we remain so fascinated with them, why their rocky relationship continues to stick in pop culture after all this time? They are not the first famous couple with a tumultuous history, nor will they be the last. But they seem to be one of the few who we refuse to forget. Maybe it’s because they possess a larger-than-life dramatic arc of a relationship that so rarely plays out in real life, the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of rock and roll, able to tell their stories in a way that the movie stars we tend to expect this dynamic from cannot. It’s not just on the screen; it’s in the songs. And the songs are in us, forming parasocial links with the people who wrote them, rooting for a relationship between two people we don’t know as if they’re our divorced parents we still think will get back together eventually. An audience loves a narrative, and as entertainers, Nicks and Buckingham know how to play into it—and they love the attention it grants them.
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“You may not be as strong as me, and I may not care to teach you,” sings Buckingham on the Nicks-penned show stopping finale that is “Frozen Love.” A seven-minute-long epic of lust and tension—the pair sharing lush harmonies that are constantly trading off between competing and complementing—cushioned by a frenzied extended guitar solo, “Frozen Love” is the song that is maybe the best, and most accurate, portrait of Buckingham Nicks, both as lovers and musicians. It sets the stage for the darker and more biting tracks they would pen and perform in Fleetwood Mac, their vindictive nature out in full force. It’s both nascent artists at their best. Nicks’s lyrics put the contradictions we will come to love on full display: she’s both vulnerable and fierce, beaten down but not broken, hurt but still self-assuredly confident. Buckingham’s pizzicato guitar work is intricate and contemplative one moment, searing and intense the next. Together, they’re almost too good to be believed. The song that closes the door on Buckingham Nicks would, ironically, be the one to open the door to Fleetwood Mac.
In December of 1974, Mick Fleetwood—drummer, partial namesake, and band leader—of Fleetwood Mac was at an unexpected crossroads. Just a few weeks before, he had gone out to the Valley to tour Sound City, feeling the studio out as a possible location in which to record Mac's next album. Producer Keith Olsen had walked him into the shitty studio’s slightly-less-shitty studio A, and began to blast “Frozen Love.” But it was no attempt to show off the artistry of Buckingham Nicks; he simply wanted to play an example of how Buckingham Nicks sounded, wanted to show off both that Neve sound that could be found at Sound City, and his own capabilities behind the board. Now, Bob Welch, the latest in a string of guitarists who didn’t last long, had quit, and Fleetwood needed a replacement.
Fleetwood remembered that solo Buckingham ripped, remembered how it had made him close his eyes and stomp his feet on the studio floor, how he was locked in by its hypnotic groove. He got Buckingham’s number and gave him a call: Would he want to join Fleetwood Mac?
“This speaks not only of Mick Fleetwood’s intuition, but it speaks of a time when the sense of possibility and risk taking was far greater than it is in the business today,” Buckingham would say decades later. Buckingham couldn’t give him an immediate answer; he and Stevie had spent the past year and a half pursuing their music at night again, getting free time in Sound City’s Studio B during off hours, barely making it once again, but unsure if they were ready to give up just yet. He’d have to consult her before he made any decision, but, as the oft-told story goes, he had one condition: “Well, you’re gonna have to take my girlfriend, too.” By New Year’s Day 1975, it was official: Buckingham Nicks were the latest additions to the ever-changing lineup of Fleetwood Mac. At the time, they thought it was only temporary, a way to pay their bills and get back on their feet before returning to their own work. They had no idea the heights it would climb.
Listening to Buckingham Nicks is like getting a glimpse at this alternate version of the timeline, one in which they actually succeeded on their own path. It’s romantic to imagine what would have happened if the bubbling regional popularity they had experienced continued to slowly build, nice to imagine that the second Buckingham Nicks album would have been the one that broke through, maybe not to the stratosphere but enough for them to call it a success, enough to finally make a living through their art and not through their odd jobs. It’s nice to imagine that Buckingham Nicks made it as a duo, both in music and in love. That, as Nicks has often surmised, they got married, moved to Nashville, and raised a lot of babies while continuing to be working class musicians.
But that isn’t what happened. And maybe that’s why their revisiting this album will perhaps never happen. Maybe, to them, it’s not that it signifies the start of something big, but the ending of something good. Maybe it’s a reminder of the parallel lives they could have lived, just thirty-seven minutes of what ifs. The breakup songs and drugged out songs that came later they can perform again and again without much problem; the memories of bad times can remind them how much better off they are now. But reminders of good times that are no more? Maybe for all their musing about their love for the album is just lip service; maybe revisiting it is just too painful for that to ever happen.
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Or maybe revisiting Buckingham Nicks is just an exercise in revisiting youth. Not always un-painful, but not always a pleasant experience, either. If we just let the past lie, if we try to imagine the people we used to be as people we knew only for a single night at a party—forgettable, unremarkable—rather than acknowledge that we knew them well, we can pretend we were never cringey or chaotic, overly earnest or overexcited, immature or inappropriate. We don’t have to miss what we no longer have if we don’t think about it. We can get by. Or, rather, we can pretend to get by. Because it’s no secret that those past versions of ourselves are never fully exorcised into non-existence. They’re still hanging out on certain street corners, tucked into the pages of our books, harmonizing along to the old record we once loved. And they want us to know that they’re still around.
The first time I spoke to the late producer Keith Olsen, I was a month shy of my 25th birthday and many credentials short of being able to call myself a serious writer. But there I was on my bedroom floor, convincing enough in my drive to write a book about Buckingham Nicks to get him to take the time to talk to me. Or maybe I was just endearing enough in my precocity.
“Let me ask you a question first,” he asked at the top of our first call. It was a warm, beautiful spring day where he was in Lake Tahoe, and he had spent most of it inside trying to place tom-tom drums on a mix he’d been sent. It was tedious work—like trying to Photoshop a bad picture, he explained—but he’d worked with worse in his more than 40 years in the industry.1 And, anyway, my call was a welcome distraction.
“Sure,” I responded. My voice in the recording is high and tight. All nerves, no chill.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why?” I repeated.
“Yeah. Why? Why are you writing about Buckingham Nicks? Do you really love that record?” He seemed surprised. It was a simple question, but I didn’t have a simple answer for it.
When I first heard Buckingham Nicks in the spring of 2013, nearly four decades had passed since its release. I didn’t know what it was like to have been one of the few who originally purchased Buckingham Nicks, then heard their familiar harmonies burst forth unexpectedly on Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album two summers later, comparing notes on the backs of both LPs to confirm my suspicion that the voices were the same. I was just a kid home from college for a weekend searching through my father’s seemingly endless record collection that sat untouched in our basement for albums to make mine. Never mind the fact that I didn’t even have a turntable of my own yet; I was building out my own personal library ahead of time so I’d actually have something to play when I finally got one.
“I think you’ll really like that one,” my father said when I showed him my selections. He wasn’t singling out his copy of Berlin or Excitable Boy, not Some Girls or Combat Rock or More Songs About Buildings and Food—all far better known albums lying in the pile I took with me that day. He pointed to the old, faded LP with a wind-blown, half-naked, young unknown couple on the cover. The corners were tattered, the inner sleeve torn, but when I pulled it out, the record itself was in perfect form. “It’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham before they were in Fleetwood Mac.”
With the pair having fed into their carefully curated melodramatic narrative for so long that it was now bleeding into the Tumblr generation, I was well acquainted with the lore of Buckingham Nicks. Later, I would find bootleg digital rips on the internet, but at the time, I only knew it as an elusive, almost mythical cult favorite long out of print on vinyl that went for hundreds on the secondhand market, and never made officially available on cassette, CD, or any streaming service. Somehow, it seemed like I had effortlessly stumbled upon the holy grail of records, one that you were either lucky enough to find and hear or not.
Maybe that was part of its enduring magic. There was no instant gratification, no shrink-wrapped reissue at Target or quick download on iTunes or stream on Spotify. It wasn’t music that presents itself to you. It had to be found, the same way I found it digging through crates of forgotten old records in a damp basement one day.
Buckingham Nicks isn’t a perfect album, not even a great one. But that’s not why I fell in love with it. I fell in love with it because it was pure and un-jaded in the way it captured life at such a specific, tumultuous time of young adulthood—and all the passion and frustration that comes with it. In it, I heard music free of the darker, thornier themes that would arise in their later work, only the innocence of youth. That raw vulnerability changed the way I looked at the Buckingham and Nicks we know now, the ones I was first introduced to as a teenager who had, until then, lived in my mind simply as two aging figures of rock and roll who, for the most part, have their shit together: Lindsey Buckingham playing the role of the aging father who tells tales of hedonistic glory days with a newly mellowed and nostalgic outlook, if not some regret for who he was in the past. Stevie Nicks playing the mystical role of the self-proclaimed fairy godmother to thousands of women and girls who find safety and comfort in her music, whose voice consistently serves as a lighthouse when you feel like you have lost your way.
But for 37 minutes, I was able to slip this record on and have those people disappear. Whenever I felt like I was flailing—which was nearly always—I could fish this record out of its safe spot, put it on my turntable, and feel comforted by their impossible youth, by the way they seem to hang suspended in time and acetate as my peers. My peers, I say, though this status is fading by the day, prolonged only by the kind of arrested development that is inherent to my generation. Still, for 37 minutes, we are more or less the same: kids masquerading as grown-ups, trying to be heard, looking at others doing what we want to be doing with a mixture of envy, fear, and admiration as we stumble towards a self-determined finish line that just keeps moving further and further away.
Records don’t change, at least not technically; people do. In many ways, Buckingham Nicks is a constant, there to make me feel less alone when I need that the most. But that’s not to say I haven’t begun to feel its limitations. When I first discovered the album, I was younger than Nicks was when she made it. That version of myself inadvertently used her timeline as a barometer of my own success. It’s okay that I’m not exactly where I want to be just yet, I used to say to myself. Stevie didn’t even join Fleetwood Mac until she was 27. At the time, 27 seemed so old. Now, looking at the age in the rearview mirror, it seems so young.
I can feel myself becoming like every adult with whom I’d spoken about this album: forever unable to listen and hear anything other than my own distant, naive youth. I hoped I’d find it more romantic in hindsight than it really was, but mostly I just find it a little bit funny. I’m not the same girl who was obsessed with Buckingham Nicks, but I’m not not her, either. That era of my life feels like the decade ago it really was, but it also feels close enough that I wouldn’t have to strain too hard to stretch my arm out and touch it if I really wanted to. This is where I wonder what it’s like to be someone like Buckingham or Nicks right now, wonder how it feels to look back on things with more than 50 years of perspective.
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On October 26, 2016—the opening night of her 24 Karat Gold tour in Phoenix, AZ—Stevie Nicks announced something historic: She was about to sing “Crying in the Night,” a track she had not performed live since 1973. She did the math out loud: “‘73, ‘83, ‘93, 2003, 2013, ‘14, ‘15, ‘16—that would be 43 years. This was gonna be the single off the Buckingham Nicks record. It was so long ago, I don’t even know if it made it out.”
That night in Arizona, Stevie performed the first track on an album that hadn’t even sold out its original pressing of 35,000 copies, or played live to audiences bigger than 5,000 kids in college towns to a multi-generational audience pushing 20,000. Printed out like that, it’s the kind of trajectory that seems nearly impossible today: for an artist to have time to progress and grow over decades, without early failure putting a premature end to their career.
A few shows later, trotting out a similar speech in front of a sold out audience at Madison Square Garden, Nicks interjected a long pause in response to the piercing shriek a small sample of the audience—the ones who were there for the deep cuts, not the same well-worn hits Nicks and Fleetwood Mac had filled their shows with over the past decade—let out. Fourteen rows back, separated from the friends I had gone with, I was surrounded by middle aged women in flowing black blouses clutching plastic cups of wine. From where we stood, Stevie looked every bit the ageless rock goddess you’d expect, her skin luminous and her long, blonde hair flowing in perfect waves, as if a Disney princess had come to life and decided to join a band. And while everyone else around me fixated on that—“God, her hair is great,” I overheard one woman marvel, “it’s gotta be a wig.”—I swear I saw a surprised smile creep its way across her face, a delight in the reception for a song she wrote at 23. And in that moment, I think I got a small idea of what it was like to look back that far. I felt like she knew how strange and special that moment was, too, because something about her demeanor ever so slightly, but visibly shifted.
In 1973, Nicks was a maid for Olsen and a waitress at Bob’s Big Boy, the Copper Penny, and Clementine’s, driving a Toyota Corolla that was constantly breaking down and perpetually without reverse, trying to support herself and Lindsey Buckingham. Forty-three years later, as a 68-year-old woman, she had sold out Madison Square Garden as a headliner and was performing “Crying in the Night” live to an audience of 18,000.
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“There were a lot of firsts with them,” Keith Olsen said.
Olsen had not heard from Buckingham and Nicks since producing a demo session for Fritz at Sound City in 1970 until he got a call from Stevie nearly a year later. Lindsey came down with mononucleosis and quit the band; Stevie had been nursing him back to health, she explained. They had begun writing songs together, cut their own demos on a four track machine, and wanted to visit Olsen in LA to play them for him.
“They came to my house with their four track machine and their little mixer and they set it up and pressed play and I was astounded. I said, ‘Yeah…Yeah, I think we can get a deal.’ So, I took those demos and I started shopping around,” Olsen remembered.
In the span of six weeks, Olsen secured a $35,000 budget and a backing band that would find itself switched up more than once throughout the recording process. Guitarist Waddy Wachtel was a staple, lending additional guitar parts and harmonies. Ronnie Tutt and Jerry Scheff, known at the time as Elvis’s rhythm section, snuck into sessions when they had spare time, but eventually had to leave to tour, only to be replaced with musicians like Warren Zevon collaborator Jorge Calderón and Jim Keltner, who had been building a reputation as a go-to session player for everyone from George Harrison to Carly Simon. With a brand-new Neve console arriving at Sound City around the same time, Nicks, Buckingham, and Olsen were ready to start recording.
The sounds that have come out of Sound City studios defy the looks of it—even before it became better known for being a grimy, run-down hole-in-the-wall with stained brown shag carpets and chipping paint. For starters, it simply wasn’t built to be a studio. The layout has been compared to a barn: empty and cavernous, too open to contain sound. Somehow, the studio has produced an impressive list of albums, from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Damn the Torpedoes to Nirvana’s Nevermind, all recorded on the same magical analog Neve console that captured drum tracks like no other could and gave warmth and depth to an otherwise empty space.
“Buckingham Nicks was the first album ever recorded on that Sound City console. The very first one,” Olsen explains. “I mean, it came out of the box, we plugged everything in that afternoon and into the early evening and it looked like everything was okay. I called in the guys and we cut ‘Crying in the Night.’ When we came in and listened back to the first playback, I remember Lindsey looking at me with a smile on his face saying, ‘Oh my God!’ Because that’s the Neve console. That was that English sound that we wanted to get really bad and there it was.”
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There it was, and just as quickly, there it was gone. Over the past 50 years, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks became household names, but their unsuccessful Buckingham Nicks languished in obscurity, seemingly destined to forever be an elusive, cult classic collectors’ item.
When you have a career as long as Buckingham and Nicks, your work travels with you over time, constantly evolving until it can’t anymore, until it eventually stagnates and becomes rote. But the Buckingham Nicks songs never really got that chance. Unlike the “Landslide”s and “Go Your Own Way”s of their catalogs, there haven’t been different iterations as they were performed night after night, seeing them though rock ingenue to hedonistic superstars, washed-up has beens to reformed elder statesmen beginning to strain under the endless routine of it all. For decades, it was as if Nicks and Buckingham were allergic to the songs they wrote as 20somethings. It seemed like those scant ten tracks were destined to stay trapped in 1973, lying inert in forgotten dusty grooves of vinyl for eternity, and no one really knew why.
“I don’t know that anybody really has an answer,” said Lori Nicks, Nicks’s friend, sister-in-law, and backup singer who first met Buckingham and Nicks in 1973 when visiting the studio with then-boyfriend and promoter Gordon Perry, and has worked with Nicks since 1978. “It’s the $64,000 question. I think that Keith would probably have a version of what happened or why it hasn’t happened yet. I think Lindsey would. I think Stevie would. And then their managers, probably, would have something to say about it, as well.”
It turns out, that’s exactly how it is: everyone involved with Buckingham Nicks met the question of its still unreleased status with a different take, the only similarity between stories being a fuzziness recalling details of deals worked out decades ago and uncertainty of what has happened to the rights or the master tracks or the personal and professional relationships since then. That, too, is likely part of Buckingham Nicks’s appeal: The head-scratching question of how the origin story of two of our most well-known and influential musicians of the twentieth century—and the failure of an album that nearly derailed them, only to change everything—could slowly be forgotten over the course of 50 years.
a short selection of more of me on buckingham nicks (some of which was worked into this but not all!):
and i would ask for you to consider the fact that your icons were not always icons, words and guitars reading series, 2018
am i the drama? notes on fleetwood mac on film, bright wall/dark room, 2022
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After that call, Olsen would send me his remasters of 9 of the 10 Buckingham Nicks tracks made from the first generation EQ tape copy of his original mastering (technical difficulties left out “Frozen Love”), which, by the comparison of the newly released version of “Crying in the Night” and his, are the ones which will be used in this reissue. They sound great.
this is so special. discovered the album on YouTube when I was like 18 and fell in love, then found it on vinyl about a year or so later at a shop in st. augustine for $40. I called my mom to ask if I could get it. don't think I ever really sat with the mythos of youthful ambition you describe so well. reading this, and hearing those words you heard Stevie say at her concerts about our dreams.. I needed to hear it too :,) thank you for this
i would buy this book