“Buckingham Nicks”: The lost album that lit the fuse for Fleetwood Mac

Finally enjoying rerelease more than 50 years after its original debut, the “Buckingham Nicks” album is pure magic, a bright light in a fraught contemporary world sorely in need of hope.

Originally released in 1973, the LP marked the vinyl debut of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The couple recorded the album some seven years after meeting at a youth club, where Stevie sang “California Dreamin‘” with Lindsey playing his guitar. A few years later, Buckingham was invited to play bass with the Bay Area band, Fritz. After insisting that Nicks come on board as lead singer, they began opening shows for the likes of Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane.

By the early 1970s, the couple dropped out of San Jose State University to make a run at an honest-to-goodness musical career. Nicks famously cleaned houses to afford her boyfriend the requisite time to master the guitar. Empowered by steadfastness and a shared devotion to rock ‘n’ roll — and to each other — the duo parlayed their stint with Fritz into a bona fide record contract with Polydor.

Working with producer Keith Olsen at LA’s Sound City Studios, Lindsey and Stevie threw everything they had into their debut album. “Buckingham Nicks” is alive with hidden gems, especially Nicks’ sizzling opener “Crying in the Night” and accomplished rock turns in “Long Distance Winner” and “Races Are Run.” Meanwhile, Buckingham’s virtuosic guitar comes into its own on “Stephanie,” his instrumental valentine to Nicks, along with “Crystal” and “Without a Leg to Stand On.” The album comes to its searing, anthemic conclusion with “Frozen Love.”

To the couple’s dismay, the record barely made a ripple in the marketplace. Attempting to regroup, Lindsey and Stevie took a series of odd jobs to make ends meet, with Nicks serving as a hostess at Clementine’s. By this juncture, she had made up her mind to return to San Jose State. But as luck would have it, veteran English drummer Mick Fleetwood was auditioning studios for Fleetwood Mac’s next album. When Olsen cued up “Frozen Love” at Sound City, Fleetwood couldn’t believe his ears.

(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, 1970

With Fleetwood Mac caught up in its own malaise after singer-songwriter Bob Welch’s recent departure, the drummer invited Buckingham to join the longtime blues band’s ranks. But as with Fritz back in the 1960s, Lindsey and Stevie were a package deal. And so it was that when New Year’s Eve ushered in 1974, Buckingham met with Fleetwood and Christine and John McVie at Mexican bistro El Carmen. Nicks strolled in later, fresh from her stint at Clementine’s and still donning her flapper costume.

The quintet could never have imagined what lay before them. In many ways, “Buckingham Nicks” was the blueprint for Fleetwood Mac’s world-beating success, not to mention the evolving sound of Southern California rock. It’s all there on Lindsey and Stevie’s debut. Even in its earliest manifestations, there was a peculiar combination of grooving energy and inherent sadness in their music that would pervade their hitmaking efforts with Fleetwood Mac and beyond. Even still, that remarkable LP has been commercially unavailable for decades. Until now.

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As with Fleetwood Mac in its heyday, “Buckingham Nicks” doesn’t sound dated. It is well-crafted So Cal rock at the cusp of the singer-songwriter era. The new bandmates’ slow burn took flight with “Fleetwood Mac” (1975), an album that demonstrates the duo’s easy musical blending with Fleetwood and the McVies, who had cut their teeth during the 1960s British Blues Boom. The American couple swiftly transformed the band into a juggernaut.

But make no mistake about it: Fleetwood Mac’s new sound was pure “Buckingham Nicks,” with the duo’s impassioned vocals arrayed over Lindsey’s soaring guitar lines. In 1976, as the group prepared their follow-up LP to “Fleetwood Mac,” a new mix of Stevie’s “Rhiannon” took the radio airwaves by storm, and the quintet threw themselves headlong into the creative maelstrom that would produce “Rumours” (1977), the project that transformed their collective lives into the stuff of rock legends. While Lindsey and Stevie’s romance expired in the process, igniting decades of tension in the bargain, “Rumours” has sold some 40 million copies and counting.

But it all started with “Buckingham Nicks,” the sweet, magical elixir that fueled one of rock’s most enduring fusions.