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.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Paris at Year’s End, Nearly A Century Ago)

“The whole earth seemed to come to life at once. Now that [Francis] Starwick was here, this unfamiliar world, in whose alien life he had struggled like a drowning swimmer, became in a moment wonderful and good. The feeling of numb, nameless terror, rootless desolation, the intolerable sick anguish of homelessness, insecurity, and homesickness, against which he had fought since coming to Paris, and which he had been ashamed and afraid to admit, was now instantly banished. Even the strange dark faces of the French as they streamed past no longer seemed strange, but friendly and familiar, and the moist and languorous air, the soft thick grayness of the skies which had seemed to press down on his naked sides, to permeate his houseless soul like a palpable and viscous substance of numb terror and despair, were now impregnated with all the vital energies of living, with the intoxication of an unspeakable, nameless, infinitely strange and various joy. As they walked across the vast court of the Louvre towards the great arched gateway and all the brilliant traffic of the streets, the enormous dynamic murmur of the mysterious city came to him and stirred his entrails with the sensual premonitions of unknown, glamorous and seductive pleasure. Even the little taxis, boring past with wasp-like speed across the great space of the Louvre and through the sounding arches, now contributed to this sense of excitement, luxury and joy. The shrill and irritating horns sounded constantly through the humid air, and filled his heart with thoughts of New Year: already the whole city seemed astir, alive now with the great carnival of New Year's Eve.”— American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth (1935)

This description of Paris at New Year’s Eve reflected Wolfe’s own time in the city in December 1924.

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Galassi, With a Poetic Plea for ‘Some New Year’s Sense’)

“The tree is down, the star is stored,
the groaning at the groaning board
is over: no more rancid nog
or smoky, still-green Yule log.
Out, false cheer and de trop expense!
It’s time we showed some New Year’s sense.
Last year’s booty’s shook its shake,
so sniff the air, take a break—
at least until the bills arrive.”—American editor, poet and novelist Jonathan Galassi, “Greetings, Friends!,” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 5, 2015
 
Longtime readers of The New Yorker will notice that the rhyme scheme, the antic tone, and even the title of this poem is a tip of the hat (or, for the more cynical among us, a slavish imitation) of a popular holiday tradition at the magazine dating back to 1935, maintained (with only a 13-year gap) by writers Frank Sullivan, Roger Angell and Ian Frazier.
 
(In fact, it was during this gap that this particular poem was published in that other publication for what passes for the American intelligentsia, The New York Review of Books—perhaps a nudge to The New Yorker’s editors and writers to revive the tradition.)
 
Nevertheless, when I came across this by chance yesterday, I was struck, seven years after it appeared, by what a time capsule this represented. Jonathan Galassi mourned the passing of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Williams, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Rivers. 

His speculation about what might happen in the Presidential campaign nearly two years away (about Hillary, “Jeb the Stealthy,” and the “the toxic three/new tenors of the GOP:/Chris, Rand, and Marco”) can only make you shake your head about the black-swan event of November 2016.
 
And yet, so much of this poem still doesn’t date. Bill Cosby is threatening to make a comeback, and “Netanyahu, what a cad” already has.
 
Above all, Galassi's review of the prior year will bring a shock of recognition for those who’ve lived through 2022 (“Friends, last year was just the pits,/a conga line of slurs and snits”). And, though we will inevitably hope for moments of grace ahead, I believe his last rhyming couplet has more than a little truth to it, too:
 
“Keep trying, friends, ’cause never fear,
it’s going to be a trying year.”

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Holiday,’ With a New Year’s Eve Party for ‘Very Unimportant People’)

Linda Seton [played by Katharine Hepburn]: [Making introductions] “My brother Ned—Mr. and Mrs. Potter—they're friends of Johnny's.”

Mrs. Susan Elliott Potter [played by Jean Dixon]: “He used to live with us.”

Professor Nick Potter [played by Edward Everett Horton]: “We've come to warn his future bride about him—he never puts the cap back on the toothpaste.”

Edward “Ned” Seton [played by Lew Ayres]: “Mm-hmm. Then we'll drink a toast to Johnny—he needs it.”

[Fills champagne glasses]

Susan: “Needs it?”

Ned: “Oh. I'm wrong. He doesn't need it. Johnny's doing all right.”

Linda: “What's on your mind, Ned?”

Ned: “Nothing's on my mind.”

Linda: “What do you mean—‘Johnny's doing all right’?”

Ned: “I mean he's doing All Right. He's having a whirl. Julia's got his hair slicked down and Father's seeing that he meets the important people.”

Nick: “My word—are there important people downstairs?”

Linda: “Oh—frightfully important—that's why I want to give a party up here.”

Nick: [Quoting an imaginary society column] “'Miss Linda Seton—on New Year's Eve— entertained a small group of Very Unimportant People.'”

[Lifting champagne glass]

Nick: “To our hostess.”

[They all drink to Linda]

Linda: [Chuckles] “May I drink, too?”— Holiday (1938), screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, based on the play by Philip Barry, directed by George Cukor

The Philadelphia Story, a later Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant rom-com, may be more famous, but Holiday has its own charms—especially in this New Year’s Eve scene, with Lew Ayres, as the sodden truth-teller Ned, almost stealing the picture from its stars.

Most of all, what I love about this film (and the original play, by the marvelous Irish-American playwright Philip Barry) is the sobriety that keeps rising to the surface amid all the bubbly—the price and glory of Linda and Grant’s Johnny as they resist convention.

In recent years, some commentators have seen Ned’s flip but ultimately submissive descent into alcoholism as the retreat of a gay son in the face of an overpowering father. I dismissed that, until I noticed other lines of his that seemed to sink under the weight of family history and suppressed sexual orientation:

“You see, Father wanted a large family so Mother promptly had Linda, but Linda was a girl so Mother promptly had Julia, but Julia was a girl and the whole thing seemed hopeless. Then, the following year Mother had me, it was a boy and the fair name of Seaton would flourish….Drink to Mother, Johnny—she tried to be a Seaton for a while, then gave up and died.”

In this same dynamic of a wisecracking drunk who constantly disappoints his father, other movie fans may be reminded of Dudley Moore’s decidedly heterosexual Arthur.

Aficionados of real estate development—not to mention of Presidential history—will summon up a relationship more recent, crushing, and sad.

(While The Philadelphia Story was turned into a celebrated Cole Porter musical, Holiday was transformed into one that gained far less notice: Happy New Year. This 1980 Broadway production, while also featuring songs by the great songwriter, also demonstrated the importance of a musical “book”—or, in this case, with an awkward one constructed by Burt Shevelove, what can happen with an inadequate one.)

Quote of the Day (Maisie Ward, on God and Time for ‘Everything That Matters’)

“It is the chief character of a life lived for God that there is time in it for everything that matters.”—English publisher and writer Maisie Ward (1889-1975), quoted in Robert Ellsberg, Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses (2016)

(I took the attached photograph of London’s Big Ben while on a trip to London in January 2013. My, how time flies!)

Quote of the Day (Ann Beattie, on Years and Moments)

“People forget years and remember moments.” —Ann Beattie, “Snow,” in Where You'll Find Me: And Other Stories (1986)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Steward, on What Many Will Experience New Year’s Eve)

“There are six stages in getting drunk. Jocose, amorous, bellicose, morose, lachrymose, and comatose.” —Samuel Steward (1909-1993), Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist, edited by Jeremy Mulderig (2015)

(The image accompanying this post is from Jack Lemmon’s famous drunk scene from the classic 1960 film, The Apartment.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Seger, on How to Approach the End of a Year)

“Take it calmly and serene

It's the famous final scene.”— Bob Seger, "The Famous Final Scene," from his Stranger in Town LP (1978)