Buckingham Nicks Reviewed: Pre-Fleetwood Mac Album Reissued At Last

Buckingham Nicks - Buckingham Nicks

★★★★★

RHINO

“It was just a one-off moment,” Stevie Nicks recalled of her and Lindsey Buckingham’s duet on The Mamas & The Papas’ California Dreamin’ at a San Francisco Christian youth party in 1966. Two years later she’d joined the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, Buckingham’s psychedelic rock act. The pair weren’t yet an item, but support slots with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin seeded their romance with rock’s mythos. “I would stroll through San José State University with my guitar, thinking, Does everybody know who I am? Because I’m a rock star,” Nicks told this writer in 2013. “I felt it and really believed it.”

Despite the best efforts of Fritz’s manager David Forrester, no record deal was forthcoming. It was Keith Olsen, already a producer for The Millennium and Joe Walsh’s pre-Eagles band The James Gang, who helped secure Buckingham and Nicks’s contract with Polydor – but only after he’d persuaded them to ditch the rest of Fritz and make some demos as a duo. Recorded sporadically through much of 1973 at Sound City, Los Angeles, Buckingham Nicks proved to be one hell of a debut. Given that Nicks was working hamburger joints and as Olsen’s cleaner to support herself and Buckingham while making it, Long Distance Winner, a brilliant Nicks song about “living with a difficult musician” seems a wholly valid inclusion. Though best known as their serendipitous conduit to tenure in Fleetwood Mac after Olsen played Mick Fleetwood its magnificent closer Frozen Love on a whim, it seems astonishing that Buckingham Nicks is only now gaining re-release after languishing online in bootleg form for decades.

Quoted in David Fricke’s new sleevenotes and mindful, perhaps, that it was he and Nicks’s first experience of ‘proper’ studio recording, Buckingham understates that Buckingham Nicks “stands up in a way you hope it would.”  Buoyed by their precocious gifts and aided by such stalwarts as drummer Jim Keltner, Elvis’s TCB band bassist Jerry Scheff and sometime Everly Brothers session guitarist Waddy Wachtel, they clearly relished jumping in at the deep end.

Throughout the record, there are audible seeds of the sublime AOR sound that Nicks and Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac would further finesse. Stephanie, a pretty instrumental love-gift Buckingham reportedly wrote for Nicks while laid-up with glandular fever, is one of several songs deploying the fine claw-hammer fingerpicking technique he would later bring to Never Going Back Again, while Lola (My Love) has shades of The Chain (and a sexist lyric Buckingham would likely blush about today).

Buckingham Nicks often juggles familiar, sometimes slightly competing interests. Buckingham seems torn between facilitating pretty, drive-time-friendly Nicks doozies such as Crying In The Night and more ‘musicianly’ indulgences such as his cover of US jazz pianist John Lewis’s nod to the king of gypsy jazz, Django. That said, some of these Nicks songs also pack more quirk than was later usual. Her vocal melody on Races Are Run has gorgeous, slightly unusual modulations, as does that on the aforementioned Long Distance Winner, a fabulous thing with prominent, itch-scratching guiro. There, as elsewhere, Keith Olsen and engineer/future Rumours overseer Richard Dashut’s rich, vivid sonics give a mighty leg-up. It’s also easy to hear why Frozen Love – the proggy, shape-shifting holy grail of Fleetwood Mac’s most combustible couple – so impressed Mick Fleetwood.

Buckingham Nicks wouldn’t make the big splash they’d hoped for, but prior to its September 5, 1973 release, Nicks had one last hurdle to jump, namely the album’s nude cover-shot of herself and Lindsey, as conceived and photographed by Waddy Wachtel’s brother Jimmy.

“Everybody will tell you I’m modest,” Nicks told this writer in 2013. “I could not have been more horrified if they’d said, ‘We want you to jump off a speeding train.’ Meanwhile, Lindsey was like, ‘Come on. Don’t be a child – this is art.’ My dad didn’t like the photograph of course, and when he asked why I did it and I told him I was under pressure, he said, ‘Stevie, you always have a choice.’ That was a big lesson for me – a very useful one for my time in Fleetwood Mac.”

Buckingham Nicks is out now on Rhino.

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Tracklisting:

1. Crying In The Night
2. Stephanie
3. Without A Leg To Stand On
4. Crystal
5. Long Distance Winner
6. Don’t Let Me Down Again
7. Django
8. Races Are Run
9. Lola My Love
10. Frozen Love

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Photo: Jimmy Wachtel