Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks reunited (almost)

Lindsey Buckingham smiled wistfully as he stroked Stevie Nicks’ right breast. Ahh, sweet youth, he might have been thinking as he gazed at Stevie’s innocent doe-eyed visage. Simply exquisite. It was 2008 but his mind was in 1973, for that was the year he and his girlfriend at the time released their only album as a duo, Buckingham Nicks.

Some 35 years later, I looked on as a friend presented a vinyl copy of that album for Buckingham to sign, and for his wandering index finger to explore. It was a lighthearted incident all in good humor, but who could blame him?

The cover depicts the couple topless. Buckingham, who would have been about 23 at the time, shows off the vestiges of his swimmer’s chest and there’s enough hair on his head to mop all the floors of the namesake palace his family owned in the 1940s.

But Nicks, almost 18 months his senior, catches the eye. She wasn’t thrilled when Lindsey and photographer Jimmy Wachtel ordered her to remove her top, but she did so like a good soldier — and the rest is artistic history. You can see the outtakes from the photo session here.

The album sold bupkis, but it caught the ear of a certain rock star named Mick Fleetwood who invited the pair to join his wee band Fleetwood Mac. And they all lived happily ever after. Apart from all the nasty breakups and general bad vibes. The Buckingham Nicks record did not advance to the digital era, to the annoyance of a few die-hard fans who constantly pester Buckingham and Nicks about the oversight.

But there are quality bootleg CDs around, and I bought the best of the bunch at Tower Records in Tokyo last year. It’s a South Korean production with a dozen bonus tracks. The pristine sound seems to indicate it was sourced from the master tapes. (By the way, you don’t need to fly to Japan to get the Buckingham Nicks CD; just buy it on Amazon for $30-odd.)

I’ve given it a few spins. It’s OK, pleasing folk music of its time. No indication that they would give us “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way” just four years later. I can understand why Lindsey and Stevie might be reluctant to ruin the album’s mystique by reissuing it for a cult following. At any rate they’re at WWIII with each other and fast approaching their 80s, so it’s also a question of priorities.

As for the 2008 gathering, it was a radio station event for Lindsey’s fifth solo album, Gift of Screws, held at the old Ocean Way recording studio on Sunset a day after I saw Lindsey play a formal show with his band at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus.

This time it was just him. He took the small stage, joked that “this is the antidote for arenas,” and played five songs (only the first and last from the new album): “Time Precious Time,” “Never Going Back,” “Big Love,” “Shut Us Down,” and “Did You Miss Me.” The latter, he commented, “reflects a new resolve … I have to be creative.”

It seems I prepared a bunch of questions to ask him just in case we found some alone time together, but evidently no interview took place. We did catch up in 2011 for his follow-up CD, Seeds We Sow. Interestingly both these albums cracked the top 50 of the Billboard 200, his best performance since 1984’s Go Insane. A couple of quotes for the record:

“Generally my life has changed a lot in the last ten to fifteen years. After leading a fairly reckless lifestyle for years, I was lucky enough to met someone relatively late and to have children … I’ve got a twelve-year-old son and two daughters who are ten and six. All of that happening after all the other garbage was out of the way put me in a whole other mode and I think a lot of the songs get filtered through looking at the world a little differently, perhaps a little more philosophically. It draws from life, but it draws from the world as well, I guess.”

“One of the things that I’ve been able to have the luxury of doing, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to function and live in two worlds, creatively. You would think they would somehow be in opposition to each other but over a period of time that hasn’t turned out to be the case. When it’s time to work on a solo record there’s never any sense, ‘Oh I really should save this for Fleetwood Mac or save it for a situation in which more people will hear it.’ Somehow that’s a line I’ve been able to hold and been able to maintain both of those worlds simultaneously. As time has gone by I think it’s become clear that they’ve helped to feed each other. There was never any sense that any of this should have been saved for a Fleetwood Mac situation because they each have their own validity. They are two completely different things, really.”

(On covering the Rolling Stones’ 1967 album track “She Smiled Sweetly”) – “I love that period of the Stones, when Brian Jones was really at the top of his game and was infusing all of that experimentation into what they were doing and taking it in a more European direction. They lost a lot, I think, when he went away. Obviously he had a lot of trouble functioning in other ways, dealing with the politics of the band and all of that kind of stuff. He seemed like he was on some other plane.”

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