Debut LP by the Mac’s golden couple – pre tantrems and tiaras – gets reissued. By James McNair.

Buckingham Nicks
★★★★★

“ 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.

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