Buckingham Nicks - The Album that was the genesis of the Fleetwood Mac that gave you Rumours

Introduction

For many people, Fleetwood Mac began with “Rumours”, or possibly, their breakthrough eponymous 1975 album. Fleetwood Mac for me have had three incarnations,

• Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac with such songs as “Albatross”, “Green Manalishi” and “Man of the World”
• Transitional Fleetwood Mac with Bruce Welch and I cannot recall anything worthwhile from this period
• Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band to become the band we know today.

After Welch left the band, Mick Fleetwood began searching for a replacement. While checking out Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, the house engineer, Keith Olsen, played him a track he had recorded, "Frozen Love", from the album Buckingham Nicks (1973). Fleetwood liked it and was introduced to the guitarist from the band, Lindsey Buckingham, who was at Sound City that day recording demos.

Fleetwood asked him to join Fleetwood Mac and Buckingham agreed, on the condition that his music partner and girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, be included. Buckingham and Nicks joined the band on New Year's Eve 1974, within four weeks of the previous incarnation splitting.

This is about that album that caused this to happen. I am not sure it has had an official digital release, so my own copy is probably a bootleg, the cover looks decidedly dodgy.

Buckingham Nicks - The Album

Everyone knows Lindsey Buckingham, the Welsh Witch, and his ex-girlfriend, Stevie Nicks now and I always thought it was amusing that the woman in the partnership had a name normally associated with men and the man had a name that I normally associated with women.

The cover features a very nineteen seventies image of the couple virtually naked (as you can see in the main picture). I bought this album because I loved Stevie Nicks’ songs such as “Rhiannon” from their first album with Fleetwood Mac., and Buckingham’s stamp was all over that and “Rumours” and he was responsible for the masterpiece, in my opinion, that was “Tusk”, but back to this album.

As I said, I don’t think there has been an official release of the album but a YouTube search will return full copies of the album that appear and disappear check this link here.

My copy consists of eleven songs (the final one being listed as a bonus track), and listening to it you would think that this was either an early Fleetwood Mac (V3) album or demos for a new album. They revisited the album in a live performance called “Never Going Back Again” and there are various live compilations on Amazon available which you can find here.

According to Wikipedia:

“The album was a commercial failure on its original release, and despite the duo's subsequent success, it has yet to be commercially remastered or re-released digitally.”

I am not going to provide any commentary on the songs but this is a wonderful album and shows how the duo started out and how they helped shape the sound of Fleetwood Mac which most of us are familiar with. If you can try and listen and if you are a Fleetwood Mac fan I am sure you will love this as well.

This is the running order of the album that I have:

No. Title Writer(s) Length

1. "Crying in the Night" Nicks 2:58
2. "Stephanie" Buckingham 2:12
3. "Without a Leg to Stand On" Buckingham 2:09
4. "Crystal" Nicks 3:41
5. "Long Distance Winner" Nicks 4:51
6. "Don't Let Me Down Again" Buckingham 3:51
7. "Django" John Lewis 1:02
8. "Races are Run" Nicks 4:14
9. "Lola (My Love)" Buckingham 3:44
10. "Frozen Love" Nicks, Buckingham 7:16
11. “Crying In The Night” (45 version) Nicks 2:58

I am sorry the track listing is a bit all over the place but the Vocal editor does not allow for table formatting.