When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped propel the band to a commercial and creative pinnacle. For the couple, though, joining the band was the beginning of the end of their love story. Nicks and Buckingham’s infamously tumultuous relationship, which began in the early 1970s, ended just two years into their tenure in Fleetwood Mac. Though they’ve been broken up for nearly 50 years, their mutual antipathy remains as legendary as their musical output. “I met her when I was about 16,” Buckingham said in a 2009 BBC documentary about the band. “It’s been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion’s share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else, too. It’s never been just one thing.” And yet, after decades of performing love songs onstage while ripping into each other backstage, Nicks and Buckingham seem to have paused their ongoing feud to rerelease the only album they made as a duo, 1973’s “Buckingham Nicks.” Whether the pair will do more to promote the album than share cryptic corresponding Instagram posts remains to be seen. Their acrimony fueled enduring, influential music, but any reunion between the two likely won’t be as effortless as their sound. 1966-1973: Classmates to bandmates to lovers Nicks and Buckingham met in 1966 as high school students in California’s Bay Area. Though they played guitar a bit together, it wasn’t until they were both attending San Jose State University that they officially teamed up musically, when Buckingham invited Nicks to join his first band, the psychedelic-folk rock group Fritz.
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The Fleetwood Mac co-founder discovered “Buckingham Nicks” at a pivotal time for the band, which was hemorrhaging guitarists and vocalists, including founding member Peter Green. Fleetwood was seeking a new recording space when he met an engineer who played him a record he had produced. It was “Buckingham Nicks. A few weeks after hearing the album, and shortly after losing yet another band member, Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join the band without having heard him play live. Buckingham remembered saying he wouldn’t go without Nicks. “Didn’t think about Stevie one way or the other, ‘cause I was looking for a guitar player,” Fleetwood said in the BBC documentary. “And very quickly we realized they were totally joined at the hip.” 1975: Buckingham Nicks joins Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 eponymous album was the first to feature Buckingham and Nicks –– and the group’s first No. 1 album in the US. Many of the album’s enduring hits were written by Nicks, including the heartbreaking ballad “Landslide” and “Rhiannon,” a haunting song about a Welsh witch. (Witchiness would soon become integral to Nicks’ onstage persona.) While Nicks and Buckingham were still dating when they joined the group, their relationship was already deteriorating under the weight of working together so closely, Nicks said in 2009. “I think we kind of all made a little silent vow — let’s fix these relationships for right now,” she said. 1977: ‘Rumours’ soars amid breakups Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship was on the brink of collapse throughout the recording of what would become Fleetwood Mac’s most successful record, “Rumours Nicks wrote “Dreams,” the group’s first and only No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single, about the imminent demise of her relationship, she said. But her take on heartbreak was mellow, if melancholy: “Say women, they will come and they will go,” she sings. “When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.” “In other words, we’re all gonna come out of this,” she said in 2009. “And Lindsey, you and I will come out of this, and we’ll be friends, and it’ll be okay.” Buckingham’s rebuttal, the upbeat “Go Your Own Way,” was “angry and nasty,” Nicks said. “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do,” Buckingham sings. “How can I ever change things that I feel?” Nicks said in the 2009 documentary that she had thought Buckingham’s lyrics accusing a lover of “shacking up” were “extremely disrespectful.” “It may be a rather truthful and blunt observation,” Buckingham countered. “But that’s the way you write songs.” Their fraying relationship ended during the recording of “Rumours,” after months of playing on tracks that were not-so-secretly written about the other. As Nicks recalled to the BBC, Nicks told Buckingham after one last fight that she would fly home without him.
