Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s Rocky Relationship: A Timeline of Love and War

Someone should write a song about the romantic drama that has ensued over the years between Lindsey Buckingham and Steve Nicks.

But, of course, both already have: Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” written by her, and “Go Your Own Way,” written by him, to name just two songs about their tumultuous relationship.

Their complicated dynamic is back in the spotlight this week after Buckingham’s new Los Angeles Times interview, and the details can’t be summed up in any four-minute single. So he reads on for the highlights and the downsides of one of rock’s most storied relationships.

The firsts years

Buckingham and Nicks met as a senior in high school near Palo Alto, California, in the late 1960s. He was in a psychedelic rock band, Fritz, and asked her to join as lead singer after two members went to college. At the time they were mutually interested in music, but were not yet romantically involved.

Fritz stayed together until the early 1970s, with Nicks and Buckingham dating other people all the time. By the time the two decided they would move to Los Angeles, the band had broken up, and Nicks and Buckingham suddenly became a romantic couple.

“I’m not sure we would have become a couple if it wasn’t for leaving that band. Somehow it brought us together,” Nicks would later say, according to Stephen Davis’s biography of her, “Gold Dust Woman.”

But Buckingham contracted mononucleosis, delaying his time in Los Angeles by almost a year, during which Nicks nursed him and the two continued to grow musically.

Moving to Los Angeles

When they finally arrived in the City of Angels in late 1972, “they were immediately perceived as a sexy, star-studded couple. The people who found them remember an aura about them, a glow,” Davis wrote. “It was Mr. and Mrs. Hot, him with his curly locks and ice blue eyes and her with her long straight hair and her piercing gaze when you talked to her.”

In the star-studded atmosphere of Los Angeles in the early ’70s, they formed a folk-rock duo called the Buckingham Nicks and released a self-titled album in late 1973. Despite the fact that the album cover iconic photo of them toplessthe record flopped and the label dropped them.

They had begun to feud and money was tight, but the music making didn’t stop, with the beginnings of the later hits “Rhiannon” and “Landslide” among the fruits of their labor. But the two were colliding. Nicks was exhausted from working as a waiter and cleaning houses to make ends meet. Buckingham had gone on tour with Don Everly which had ended badly.

Join Fleetwood Mac

On the last day of 1974, having recently moved to Los Angeles and without some members, Fleetwood Mac, then consisting of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie, met Buckingham in a studio. Fleetwood wanted his guitar skills in the group. Informed beforehand that Buckingham and Nicks were a package, he asked both of them to team up.

The duo took a few days to decide. Buckingham was apparently ambivalent, considering Fleetwood Mac to be a meat grinder that was driven through the band members. The British-American group’s sound was markedly different, rooted in the blues and anchored by Peter Green, before Nicks and Buckingham teamed up.

“I said, OK, this is what we’ve been working towards since 1968,” Nicks told Buckingham, according to “Gold Dust Woman.” “So, Lindsey, you and I have to rebuild this relationship. We have a lot to lose here. We have to leave our problems behind. Maybe we’re not going to have any more problems, because we’re finally going to have some money. And I won’t have to be a waitress.

They all ended up going out to dinner and the deal was sealed.

The break(s)

While writing and recording the album “Rumours,” which was released in early 1977, Buckingham and Nicks ended their love affair. Band members John and Christine McVie, who had been married since 1968, also parted ways. Mick Fleetwood’s divorce was also almost final, although he would continue remarry Jenny Boyd in 1977 and divorce her again in 1978.

Out of that cauldron of discontent came songs like “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way,” much to the delight of fans. “Rumours,” which won a handful of Grammy Awards, remains one of the best-selling albums of all time.

“I think one day John and I will write a book about what happened,” Fleetwood told Robert Hilburn of The Times in 1976. “The only problem is that no one will believe us.”

Forward

“In Lindsey’s mind, all the other women that came after me were after the rich rock and roll star Lindsey,” Nicks once told Rolling Stone. “No one was looking at the heart that I had looked at. No one was seeing the guy before he was famous. We knew each other before. That’s what makes us unique among us.”

Nicks had a short-lived relationship with Fleetwood in 1977 (yes, during her second marriage). Buckingham, for her part, embarked on an eight-year relationship. with carol ann harris. Although he and Harris became engaged, they were never married.

Fleetwood told Hilburn in 1976 that it was “an unusual situation” for a band to stay together after so many divisions among its members. But things seemed to be working out fine.

“When we go on stage, the band is very close…” Fleetwood said at the time. “There are many bands that hate each other. We are not one of those.”

learning to live with it

The band continued, of course, though over the years, as Nicks told The Times last year, Buckingham and Nicks “looked eye daggers at each other” in front of packed stadiums during performances of breakup anthems like “Silver Springs.” . That song, written by Nicks, was intended for “Rumours” but ended up as the B-side to the “Go Your Own Way” single. Lyric example: “Then I’ll start not to love you / Turn around, you’ll see me running / I’ll say I loved you years ago / And tell myself you never loved me, no.”

Nicks dated musicians Don Henley, JD Souther and Joe Walsh, all affiliated with the Eagles, another red-hot band in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1983, he married, very briefly, Kim Anderson, the widow of his best friend who had just died, but never had children of her own. He has said that he manages with his niece and her godchildren.

Buckingham, who broke up with Harris in 1984, had a son with photographer and interior designer Kristen Messner in 1998. They married in 2000 and have two daughters.

Moving forward again, career wise

An undated photo of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham performing.

(Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)

In the 1980s, Buckingham began releasing solo albums, preferring the studio to touring. He left Fleetwood Mac in the late 1980s and stayed away for a decade. Nicks followed him out the door a few years later and was already working on his solo career, which produced the hits “Edge of Seventeen,” “Stand Back” and “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” (with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). ).

But both eventually returned to the Mac. And why not, when Fleetwood Mac tours regularly grossed hundreds of millions of dollars?

the final break

In early 2018, with the band’s tour schedule already outlined, Buckingham asked for a three-month delay so he could promote his solo work. While the rest of the group was flexible, he said, Nicks was adamant: dates were dates and they didn’t change.

Tensions were high that January, with the ex-lovers trading blows, and Buckingham rolled his eyes during Nicks’ lengthy speech, after picking up the MusiCares Person of the Year award.

“Ironically,” Buckingham recently told The Times’ Amy Kaufman, “nothing happened that night that was (as controversial) as the things we’d been through for 43 years.”

But it led to the apparent final split between Buckingham and Nicks: Shortly after that night, he was fired from the band. He later sued him for millions, and the lawsuit was settled in late 2018. Nicks has said in the time since the breakup that he didn’t get his ex-partner fired.

In 2019, Buckingham suffered a heart attack and underwent bypass surgery. She recently said that she heard from Nicks after that and sent her an email and text, but she rarely responds.

the pandemic

The threat of contracting COVID-19 has been crippling for Nicks, who has said she fears using a ventilator will make her hoarse and ruin her voice. The vaccinated singer has been cloistered in her house, and just last month she canceled the five shows she had planned for 2021.

“Because singing and acting have been my whole life, my main goal is to stay healthy so I can keep singing for the next decade or more,” he tweeted last month.

Meanwhile, after Buckingham spent the last few years focused primarily on recovering from his heart problems, his wife She filed for divorce after 21 years of marriage, and just a few days after the musician early june announcement of a new solo album and a 30-date solo tour.

“I’ll tell you what, between Fleetwood Mac and the heart attack, it’s all been very humbling,” he told The Times. “I never suffered from a lack of confidence and could sometimes get carried away by that in the process of leading the band. But everything has thrown me a little. I’m not as aggressive a person as I used to be, which probably isn’t a bad thing. It made me look around more and hopefully become less selfish.”

Buckingham said he was disappointed that no one in the band, which he says would like to get back together one day, if Nicks would allow it, stood up for him during that last fight.

But he understood.

“It would be like a scenario where Mick Jagger says: ‘Either Keith (Richards) goes or I go,’” he told The Times. “No, none of you can go. But I guess the singer has to stay.

“The figurehead,” he said, “has to stay.”