This Day in Rock Music History (Buckingham, Nicks Join Fleetwood Mac)

Dec. 31, 1974—A California folk-rock duo accepted an invitation from Mick Fleetwood to join the British band Fleetwood Mac, helping it reach its greatest success to date.

The offer came because the British rock combo had just lost Bob Welch, whose marriage was breaking down and whose alienation from his bandmates was cresting. 

After listening to an album provided by producer Keith Olsen, Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood hoped, would, as its seventh guitarist in as many years, stabilize a position that had become a revolving door. (Founding member Peter Green was among those who had moved on.)

The original invitation was extended only to Buckingham, whose guitar prowess had impressed Fleetwood. But Buckingham told the drummer that he would only accept the offer if it was a two-fer—i.e., Buckingham’s girlfriend of the time, Stevie Nicks, had to come along for the ride.

After checking with the “Mac” part of the group, bassist John McVie, Fleetwood approved the idea.

The personnel change did for Fleetwood Mac what Tom Johnston’s replacement by Michael McDonald did for the Doobie Brothers around the same time: it maintained the group’s commercial viability while taking it in a different creative direction.

With Buckingham and Nicks, Fleetwood Mac now had a couple who could share singing and songwriting responsibilities with McVie’s wife, Christine McVie (who had already, according to Buckingham’s October 2024 interview with Dan Rather on YouTube, okayed the idea of another woman in the group).

Moreover, Buckingham’s skill in the recording studio moved the group further away from its original blues orientation and further along the pop path pursued by Welch over the past few years.

As part of the process, Buckingham and Nicks brought with them three songs they had planned to use for their own album: "I'm So Afraid," “Monday Morning" and " Rhiannon." The last became one of the four singles from the eponymous album they would record in January and February 1975, along with Christine McVie’s “Over My Head,” “Say You Love Me” and “Warm Ways.”

In the studio, John McVie took exception to the influence that Buckingham was already wielding on their sound, including his constant suggestions about instruments, telling him, “The band you’re in is Fleetwood Mac. I’m the Mac. And I play the bass.”

But the change in direction was approved by Olsen, who shot back, “We’re doing pop rock now. It’s a much faster way to the bank,” according to Allison Rapp’s 2021 article for Ultimate Classic Rock.

Thirty years after the original band’s formation, upon its induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, critic Jim Farber catalogued their soap-opera travails, including the “religious conversions, spells of madness, ‘incestuous’ liaisons within the band, drug freak-outs, alleged brainwashings, impersonations, everything short of murder [that] have spun Fleetwood Mac’s legacy into a story worthy of Scheherazade.” He might have added abortions, ego trips, and bankruptcy (Fleetwood’s, which I discussed in this prior post).

Ironically, though Buckingham pushed for Nicks’ inclusion in the band in the first place, she became the catalyst for his removal in 2018. Fed up with his ego and inability to control his temper, she told the other bandmates on the brink of their next tour that it was either she or he.

They chose her, sparking a retaliatory lawsuit by Buckingham that ended up settled at the end of that year.

The one certainty about Fleetwood Mac is that, if it ever tours or records again, it will be without the personnel that electrified fans, off and on, for 40 years. The 2022 death of Christine McVie at age 79 only underscored how age and physical frailty were taking a toll on its members. 

John McVie had already been ailing a few years before that, and Nicks disclosed earlier this month that she is suffering from wet age-related macular degeneration.

In any event, Nicks’ fractured professional relationship with Buckingham makes it unlikely they will ever share a stage again. Since New Year’s Eve is about the passage of time, it might be best to close out this post about the most significant chapter of their careers with Nicks’ lyrics from “Silver Springs”:

Time cast a spell on you
You won't forget me
I know I could've loved you
But you would not let me.

Song Lyric of the Day (Fleetwood Mac, on Love’s Ire)

“Packing up, shacking up’s all you wanna do.”—“Go Your Own Way,” written by Lindsay Buckingham, performed by Fleetwood Mac, from their Rumours LP (1977)

This lyric isn't sung so much as spit out; more than an accusation, it’s an all-out, red-faced, vein-popping shout of rage. Stevie Nicks, whose turbulent romantic relationship with Lindsay Buckingham inspired the song, vented her own resentment to about her ex-lover‘s line every time she sang its backup vocals: “He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing that he said. Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him," she told Rolling Stone.

“Go Your Own Way” was the first of four singles from Rumours, released 35 years ago this month. It had been two years since Fleetwood Mac’s prior, eponymous pop smash, during which time the two couples in the band—husband and wife John and Christine McVie, and POSSLQs Buckingham and Nicks—had split. (Complicating matters further, drummer Mick Fleetwood's marriage was crumbling, and sometime after the divorce he would take up with Nicks.)

If the album title acknowledged tumult, "Go Your Own Way" pointed fingers, found fault. Deal with it, it said. It reeked of disbelief (how could you do this when I loved you?), even as it unconsciously hinted why the relationship went awry ("maybe I'd give you my world"--then again, maybe not). It was the love song turned inside out--as a piece in The Daily Beast noted, one of the classic “F--K You Songs.”

It’s hard to believe that the members of the group have managed to live all this time since without killing themselves or each other. Indeed, with their drug abuse, their egos, their sexual roundelays, and the creative use they made of all this, Fleetwood Mac can be thought of as a Seventies counterpart to The Mamas and the Papas.

“Go Your Own Way,” though topping out lower than the other three Top 10 Rumours singles (“Dreams,” “Don’t Stop” and “You Make Loving Fun”), feels more powerfully at the center of the LP than this trio. In fact, it made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll"--the only Fleetwood Mac tune to make the cut.

For my money, no other tune on the LP (which went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year and to go multiplatinum) surpasses it for sheer, unvarnished, blistering fun. In a way, it all starts with the opening chord—left unresolved throughout the rest of the song, like the relationship that Buckingham can't leave behind. You can practically feel the singer-songwriter, the studio mastermind behind this and the rest of the album, attack the guitar strings until his fingers bled.

Contrast this with the Wilson Phillips cover version, the centerpiece of their 2004 comeback album, California. All of these gorgeous harmonies have everything except what made the original great in the first place: love and pain and the whole damn thing.

This Day in Rock History (Mick Fleetwood Files for Bankruptcy)

May 1, 1984—Demonstrating far worse talent for finance than for supplying the backbeat for Fleetwood Mac, drummer Mick Fleetwood filed for bankruptcy in a Federal court in Los Angeles. The news astonished fans of the rock group, who, for the last several years, had read how the band’s 1977 LP Rumours had become one of the bestselling albums of all time.

Rock ‘n’ rollers have varied wildly in their ability to retain and manage their money. Some just have a natural talent for it—and in at least one case, the need to make money gave rise to the urge to make music. I’m talking here about Dave Clark, who, because his soccer team, the Tottenham Hotspurs, needed money in 1960, brilliantly thought of starting a rock ‘n’ roll band, buying himself a set of drums and learning how to play.

There’s also Mick Jagger, who used his acumen from the London School of Economics to ensure that the Rolling Stones remained a moneymaking machine even after their creative peak had long passed.

On the other hand, there’s someone like Billy Joel, who, after the breakup of his first marriage to a wife who doubled as his manager, turned around and, in a move of supreme illogic, hired as his new manager his ex’s brother, who promptly swindled him out of millions. Or Bruce Springsteen, who, in signing with first manager-producer Mike Appel, agreed to an insanely low royalty rate of three percent of retail price.

At least Joel and Springsteen were naïve young men. Fleetwood had been a working musician for nearly two decades by the time of his bankruptcy filing—he’d been around.

Maybe, in a sense, that was part of the problem—he’d been around too much, in very fast company.

If you listen to Fleetwood, his insolvency resulted from faulty Australian real estate investments. Especially in light of recent events, that has a surface plausibility—and, indeed, the bankruptcy came before Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee films and “shrimp on the barbie” commercial had made Americans sit up and take notice of the coolness of Down Under. In that sense, you could make an argument that Fleetwood was just a bit ahead of his time.

Yet, in the same interviews where he blames his problems on these ill-advised speculations, Fleetwood has also admitted to putting $8 million in cocaine up his nose. If you ask me, I think substance abuse cost him far more than that.

Think of all the following ramifications of the rock ‘n’ roller’s self-indulgence:

* Without cocaine, do you think he would have been quite as likely to have even more fun with groupies—and break up two of his marriages and thus incur expensive divorce settlements?

* Without cocaine, do you think he would have made such risky investments in real estate in the first place?

* Without other forms of substance abuse (i.e., alcohol), would he have done insane things such as breaking a $7,000 Rolex with his beer bottle?

* Without the general insanity this induced all induced—the hangovers, the argumentativeness, the depression—would Fleetwood Mac have broken up so readily in 1982?

* Without the depression induced by his bankruptcy, would Fleetwood have written a memoir that made his old bandmates even more ticked off at him than before—and even less likely to hold the Fleetwood Mac reunion he wanted and needed so badly?

Fleetwood, of course, was not the only member of his group with all kinds of issues (Lindsey Buckingham is a mad genius, with the madness often overcoming the genius part). But he was the one most likely to be wrecked by a bankruptcy because a) he was not a songwriter who could collect royalties and b) as a drummer, he could not simply tour on his own—it had to be with others.

Ten years after the bankruptcy filing, Fleetwood finally was able to confront his substance abuse and begin to get control of his life again. In videos I’ve seen of Fleetwood Mac, he seems to be the one group member not in it for the prospect of another paycheck—quite simply, he looks blissed out that, in his early 60s, he’s still alive to do what he’s always loved.

None of this is to say, though, that he’s done with scrapes with financial ruin. In the past few months, Fleetwood and some business partners have become embroiled in a lawsuit with a former attorney who, it’s claimed, failed to give them the right advice about a dispute with the BBC. (It seems that the attorney did not tell them they could be personally liable for more than $4 million in legal fees.)