The Origin Story of Stevie and Lindsey

When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham released Buckingham Nicks in 1973, they were just a couple of nobodies. Two hippie kids lost in L.A., doing an unfashionable folk-rock flower-child record. Nobody bought it. Nobody cared. Some might have heard it as a promising debut, others as a flop. But it’s safe to say that nobody heard it and said, “Not only are these two of the planet’s greatest songwriters, this is an album they’ll keep arguing about for the next fifty years!”

But in that way, as in every other way, the world underestimated how much drama these two had in them. Buckingham Nicks has taken its rightful place in history as their origin story for the ultimate rock & roll dysfunctional romance. The couple recorded it before joining Fleetwood Mac — before the fame, before the shawls, before the drugs, before anyone knew how much exquisite torture they’d keep dragging into all our lives forever. It’s just the Ballad of Stevie and Lindsey, back in the early days, when they didn’t even need three other lunatics in the band to make a cosmic emotional mess.

After the couple joined Fleetwood Mac for classics like Rumours, Buckingham Nicks became a footnote in their story. It’s been a rare collector’s item for decades, a lost gem never released on CD. Most of their fans never even heard it. But it’s finally back in this long-awaited reissue. No hits, no bonus tracks — just a charming little American beauty of a record. You can hear these two lovebirds learn their craft, alone in the tall grass, doing their stuff, with nobody to impress except each other.

For years, it seemed crazy to hope this Buckingham Nicks reissue would ever happen. They’ve spent years promising it, un-promising it, denying it, battling over it in public. But the exes’ long-running love/hate story finally exploded in 2019, when the band kicked out Lindsey. (What other band could manage to break up onstage in the middle of accepting a MusiCares award as humanitarians of the year? Only these guys.) It looked final, especially after the tragic death of Christine McVie.

But it was a shock this summer to see matching social-media messages from Stevie and Lindsey, teasing this project. They posted lyrics from “Frozen Love” — the first move they’d made together in years. On one hand, we’re all grown-ups here, and we know rock vets don’t necessarily do their own social media, right? But on the other hand, we also know that nobody speaks for Stevie unless Stevie says so. Hell, she’d show up in public wearing sweatpants before she’d ever let any of her team go rogue about Lindsey, a.k.a. Mr. Rulers Make Bad Lovers. So it looks like these two have sucked us all right back into their music, their madness, their whole glorious saga — just as they always do. 

That musical chemistry is loud and clear on Buckingham Nicks. “We write about each other, we have continually written about each other, and we’ll probably keep writing about each other until we’re dead,” Nicks told me in 2014. “That’s what we have always been to each other. Together, we have been through great success, great misunderstandings, a great musical connection.” Listening now, you can tell they already know what they’re doing. Lindsey is one California guitar boy who learned his tricks from Brian Wilson — he’s into verse/chorus/verse tunecraft, not sloppy jams. Stevie flexes her cowgirl side — they dedicated the album to her wild-ass grandfather A.J. Nicks, who played her country records when she was a little girl. 

They wrote the songs in L.A., after moving together from San Francisco — she worked nights as a waitress, while he sat on the couch, smoked hash, and played guitar. They met in 1965, at a teenage party where he sat in the corner strumming the Mamas and the Papas’ classic “California Dreamin’.” She walked over and sang along. “I just threw in my Michelle Phillips harmony,” she recalled. “He was so beautiful.” Considering all the sexual/chemical disasters in the Mamas and the Papas, this song might seem like an ominous way to meet — except Lindsey and Stevie went on to make Michelle and John Phillips look like total amateurs in the California-nightmare department.

“Crystal” is the closest thing to a famous tune on Buckingham Nicks — they redid it on Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1975 album, slightly overshadowed by Nicks’ other two contributions. (Those would be “Rhiannon” and “Landslide.”) There’s the finger-picking instrumental valentine “Stephanie,” the jazz standard “Django,” and the seven-minute show-stopper “Frozen Love,” one of the only official collaborations these tortured poets ever wrote together. Their friend Waddy Wachtel played guitar, alongside session pros like Jim Keltner and Jerry Scheff. Waddy’s big brother Jimmy did the artists a favor and took the cover photo, presenting them as a wide-eyed hippie couple in the Garden of Eden, before shirts were invented. (He later did classic covers like Bruce Springsteen’s The River.)

The result was a total commercial flop that nobody noticed — except for Mick Fleetwood, who recognized greatness when he heard it. In 1973, Fleetwood Mac was just another washed-up band of English blues hounds, scrounging for gigs, years past their Sixties heyday with their original guitar genius Peter Green. When Mick heard the album, from producer Keith Olsen, he figured maybe he could hire this Lindsey Buckingham guy to give the band a little taste of California sunshine.

But Lindsey had to make things difficult — which turned out to be his specialty. He refused to join unless they also brought in his girlfriend, even though the band already had another female singer-songwriter. No matter how much trash people talk about Lindsey, you have to applaud this heroic gesture of loyalty — he was willing to throw away his entire career rather than sell out Stevie. Mick could have laughed in his face — who did this punk kid think he was, playing hardball with the rock stars? But he decided to give in and hire them both. It’s one of the only rational decisions Mick Fleetwood ever made.

As everybody knows, the pair took the Mac to megastar level with classic songs about breaking up, making up, packing up, shacking up, and wreaking endless misery upon each other, along with the rest of us. Rumours just gets more famous all the time, as chronicled in Alan Light’s excellent new book Don’t Stop. Meanwhile, Buckingham Nicks got forgotten by history. In their iconic 2012 he-said she-said interview with Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene, they totally contradicted each other about reissuing it. “Next year is the 40th anniversary of Buckingham Nicks,” Stevie said. “And we’re hoping next year to get the record out.” She suggested doing a live Buckingham Nicks tour, calling it “a sparkly, special, extra present.” 

But for these two, sparkles only happen when the house is burning down, and they couldn’t get their heads together in time to make it happen for the 40th or even 50th anniversary. As Lindsey lamented, it “makes us the anti-Eagles, in terms of never, ever being on the same page.” Yet there’s something so beautifully poetic about finally reviving it for its 52nd birthday — a round number would be the pragmatic adult business move, and what fun would that be? Having these songs out there in the world again is a historic occasion to celebrate. If you listen to Buckingham Nicks in 2025, you can hear all their combustible chemistry, even in their young and innocent days. And you can hear why these two have spent the past five decades making the lives of music fans—not to mention their own—so much messier. No doubt we would all lead more peaceful, civilized, emotionally stable lives if this album never existed. But that’s all the more reason to be thankful that it does.