Fifty years ago this month, Fleetwood Mac released their self-titled 1975 album, which featured two new members: a young couple named Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
As the story goes, the two musicians — who performed as the duo Buckingham Nicks — released their self-titled 1973 album, but it flopped and they were dropped by Polydor. Nicks began working at the Beverly Hills restaurant called Clementine’s, until their Buckingham Nicks producer Keith Olsen played the album for Mick Fleetwood. When Bob Welch left the group, Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve 1974. “I said, ‘That’s it, I’m never looking at another price tag,’” she recalled in 2015. “And I meant it.” The rest is history.
Fleetwood Mac, which opens with Buckingham’s “Monday Morning” and features Nicks’ “Rhiannon,” was released on July 11, 1975. In a new Instagram post, Fleetwood reminisced about this moment that changed the band forever, playing the Buckingham Nicks’ closer “Frozen Love” on headphones.
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“Woo! Unbelievable!” he said. “The marriage of Stevie and Lindsey, the marriage of coming into Fleetwood Mac when they did, it’s all in the song. It’s in the music that played on for so many years. It’s magic then, it’s magic now. What a thrill, what a thrill. Amen.”
This particular lineup of Fleetwood Mac played their last full concert together in July 2017, though their final performance was technically their brief set at the MusiCares event at Radio City Music Hall in January 2018 — which wasn’t pleasant for the band.
“That’s when he wasn’t very nice to anybody; he wasn’t very nice to Harry Styles,” Nicks said of Buckingham, in her expansive Rolling Stone Interview last fall. “I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could. You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”
The band fired Buckingham shortly after, replacing him with Mike Campbell, the former guitarist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Crowded House’s Neil Finn. The last show of that tour was in November 2019, and Christine McVie died in Nov. 2022. As Nicks told us, she has no plans to reunite the band without her “music soulmate, my best girlfriend.” But as Fleetwood said in his video, the magic of Fleetwood Mac lives on.
From Rolling Stone US
