Next month will be forty-five years since the release of Rumours, my all time favourite album, and to celebrate I will be writing an article on the album and what it means to me. Rather than cover how Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks became members of Fleetwood Mac and changed the direction the band took I am covering their career and only album release in this article.
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks first met at Menio-Atherton High School in Atherton, California where she was a senior in high school and he, being a year younger, was a junior. It was at an after-school gathering in 1966 that they found themselves singing and harmonizing together although there are conflicting reports on what the song was. Most accounts say it was a Beach Boys song although Nicks, in a later interview, claims it was the Mamas and Papas classic hit California Dreamin'.
It would be another two years before they sang together again. Buckingham was playing bass with some high school friends in a band called Fritz and invited Nicks to join them as their singer.
Nicks recalled this in interview, "... he called me and asked me if I wanted to be in a rock & roll band. I had been playing guitar and singing pretty much folk-oriented stuff. So I joined the band, and within a couple of weeks we were opening for really big shows. All of a sudden I was in rock & roll."
Bands that Fritz were the opening act for included Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix.
Fritz gave both Buckingham and Nicks, who weren't given the chance to perform their own material in the band, the opportunity to gain some experience of performing in front of an audience and, as was often the case, large crowds who had come to hear the main acts. The bands manager at the time was David Forrester who worked tirelessly to secure them a record deal despite their music being far removed from current trends.
Fritz disbanded in 1971 and Buckingham and Nicks, who had become romantically linked, planned to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the hope of being discovered and signed up.
Nicks had been attending San Jose State University while in Fritz and Buckingham joined her with both managing to work on their studying while still pursuing their love of music. By 1972 they were writing songs and putting them down on tape on a four-track machine that Buckingham stored at his fathers coffee roasting plant. It was at this point they both decided to drop out of college and head for Los Angeles.
In LA, Nicks worked at various jobs to keep the money coming in. These included a waitress, hostess and cleaning lady for Keith Olsen, a record producer. This gave Buckingham the time to concentrate on his guitar skills and songwriting.
They met with Keith Olsen and the two owners of White Whale Records, Ted Feigin and Lee Lasseff, played them a selection of their music and all three were impressed with what they were hearing.
Lasseff secured a distribution deal with Polydor Records which Nicks recalled. "We had some great demos. We shopped around. Over a period of time we got a deal with Polydor and made our first album, Buckingham Nicks."
It could have been a different story had the record deal not happened. Nicks talked about quitting, "I had been thinking of quitting it all and going back to school because I was sick of being miserable and I hate being poor."
The album was recorded at Sound City Studios in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles with Keith Olsen as producer/engineer and Richard Dashut the assistant engineer. Along with Lindsey Buckingham (vocals, guitar, bass and percussion) and Stevie Nicks (vocals) the other musicians playing on the album were Waddy Wachtel (guitar), Jerry Scheff and Mark Tulin (bass), Peggy Sandvic (keyboards), Monty Stark (synthesizer), Jim Keltner, Ronnie Tutt and Hoppy Hodges (drums) and Jorge Calderon (percussion).
Recalling his working relationship with not just Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks but also Keith Olsen, Waddy Wachtel recalled on his website, "So Keith and I started working together. This was in like '68, '69 probably. And that's - from then on - that's when things started happening. That's where Keith Olsen one day came and said 'I'm bringing this couple down from North Carolina, named Stevie and Lindsey. And I want you to play on their record. "
The album opens with the first of four Stevie Nicks compositions Crying In The Night. Her other contributions are Crystal, Long Distance Winner and Races Are Run. Lindsey Buckingham provided four tracks, Stephanie, Without A Leg To Stand On, Don't Let Me Down Again, Lola (My Love) and co-wrote a fifth with Nicks, the 7 minute album closer Frozen Love. One other track, the short instrumental Django, was written back in 1954 and is a jazz standard written by John Lewis as a tribute to jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Lindsey plays just the introduction on the album.
A few tracks would be recorded again later on Fleetwood Mac albums. Crystal was on the breakthrough White Album while Don't Let Me Down Again was featured on tour and a 1975 live recording was included on the Fleetwood Mac Live album in 1980. Listening to the instrumental Stephanie you can hear similar guitar to the Rumours track Never Going Back Again.
Released in September 1973 Buckingham Nicks failed to create the success hoped for, failed to chart at the time and was soon deleted. However, it seems it did chart later reaching number 28 on the 'Billboard Midline Album Charts', which were created in 1982, for older and mid-price albums - (author note: I was unable to confirm this)
Two singles were also released in 1973, Don't Let Me Down Again/Without A Leg To Stand On and Crying In The Night/Stephanie, neither achieved any chart success.
Part of the albums failure can be directed at Polydor Records whose promotional staff ignored the album. It did create interest in the Birmingham, Alabama and surrounding areas where they had a reasonably large fan-following but nothing further afield.
The cover image was taken by photographer/art director Jimmy Wachtel (Waddy's older brother) whose photos have appeared on albums by Joe Walsh, Dave Mason, Warren Zevon and many more. Stevie Nicks had bought a new white blouse for the shoot, costing $111, a considerable amount back in 1973, but she is not wearing it on the album cover as both Wachtel and Buckingham coerced her to remove it for the photos. She was very unhappy as she recalled in a later interview, "I was crying when we took that picture. And Lindsey was mad at me. he said, 'You know, you're just being a child. This is art.' And I'm going, 'This is not art. This is me taking a nude photograph with you, and I don't dig it." She went on to say, "I thought, 'Who are you? Don't you know me?' I couldn't breathe. But I did it because I felt like a rat in a trap."
Several images from the shoot have appeared recently with and without the blouse...
To promote the album they toured the southern states during 1974/1975 and two concerts from Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, both in Alabama, have been heavily bootlegged over the years. Along with most of the tracks from the album they also performed several songs that would later appear on albums by Fleetwood Mac including, Monday Morning, Rhiannon, I Don't Want To Know and Blue Letter.
Their career as a duo and their concerts were to be short lived as they would soon find themselves part of a band whose career would see them achieving the kind of success they had longed for and deserved.
Unfortunately the 40th anniversary came and went without any sign of a reissue. Of course, 2023 would be the 50th so maybe we will finally have the album on CD, hopefully with bonus tracks and extensive liner notes.
The album has been bootlegged several times with the most popular being the South Korean release Buckingham Nicks: Deluxe Edition which featured twelve tracks recorded around the same time as the album.
A couple of tracks have escaped on various releases over the years. Long Distance Winner appeared on Stevie Nicks Enchanted box set while Stephanie was featured on Words And Music (A Retrospective), a promotional-only CD from Lindsey Buckingham.
Just after the albums release Mick Fleetwood happened to be looking around for a studio in which to record their next album. At Sound City, Keith Olsen played Frozen Love through the studio speakers and Fleetwood was instantly taken with the guitar playing. He wasn't actually looking for a replacement for Bob Welch who was leaving the band but fate would step in.
Olsen introduced Fleetwood to the guitar player who had impressed him so much. Lindsey Buckingham was at the studio that day recording some new material when he was asked if he wanted to join the band. He immediately said yes as long as his partner and musical collaborator Stevie Nicks was included. Originally the band were only looking for a guitarist to replace Bob Welch but following lunch at El Carmen, a Mexican restaurant, both Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks became the latest members of Fleetwood Mac.
This brings my look at the careers of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, pre-Fleetwood Mac, to a close and in a future blog I will be taking a look back at the album Rumours and why it is my all-time favourite album.
No comments:
Post a Comment