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Fleetwood Mac · S3 E1
Buckingham Nicks
A failed album, a struggling couple, and a phone call from Mick Fleetwood that changes everything
1966, a house party in Atherton, California. A sixteen-year-old Lindsey Buckingham is singing "California Dreamin'" on an acoustic guitar when a girl named Stephanie Nicks walks over and starts harmonizing without being asked.
Fleetwood Mac, "Landslide" (1975). Stevie wrote this in Aspen during the lowest point of the Buckingham Nicks era. A song about doubt, change, and whether the person she has built her life around is worth following into the unknown.
Fritz
Within a year they are in a band together called Fritz, a rock group playing the San Francisco Bay Area circuit. They stay for four years, learning to perform, to fight, and to write songs in hotel rooms after shows. By 1971, Buckingham is convinced they can do something bigger, and he talks Nicks into leaving Fritz to bet everything on the two of them.
TAP TO REVEAL: What legendary acts did Buckingham and Nicks open for before anyone knew their names?
Aspen, Colorado
The mountain town where Stevie Nicks spent the winter of 1973, broke and questioning whether to keep pursuing music. She wrote "Landslide" here while watching snow fall on the Rockies.
Landslide
Nicks wrote this during the winter of 1973, staying at a friend's house in Aspen after being dropped by Polydor. She was broke, considering going back to school, and asking herself whether the music was worth the sacrifice. That question is the entire song. Buckingham's acoustic guitar is the only accompaniment, fingerpicked so gently it sounds like breathing. There is no production trickery, no layered harmonies, nothing to hide behind. Listen for how her voice cracks slightly on "I'm getting older too." That is not a performance choice. That is the truth leaking through.
“I went to Aspen and I was broke, completely broke. And I sat there and wrote "Landslide" about whether I should go back to school or keep going with Lindsey and keep trying to make it.”
— Stevie Nicks, VH1 Storytellers, 1998
Bonus Listening
"I'm So Afraid", a Buckingham track from the self-titled Fleetwood Mac album that showcases the raw guitar ferocity Mick Fleetwood heard on that demo tape at Sound City. The song is built on fear and tension, with Buckingham's guitar climbing higher and more desperate as it goes. The clearest evidence on the album that this new guitarist could do things no previous Fleetwood Mac member had ever attempted.
I'm So Afraid, Fleetwood Mac (1975)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Buckingham channeling raw fear into words as sparse as the guitar line is ferocious.
Where did Stevie Nicks write "Landslide"?
The phone rings in a cramped Los Angeles apartment, and everything Lindsey and Stevie have endured for eight years is about to pay off. Next: the condition Buckingham sets, the first rehearsal, and the moment five strangers realize they sound like nothing else on earth.
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