Buckingham Nicks pre tantrems and tiaras – gets reissued

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

By James McNair. 

Mojo Magazine November, 2025

Buckingham Nicks 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Buckingham Nicks 

RHINO CD/DL/LP 

“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 valid inclusion. 

Though best known as their serendipitous conduit to tenure in Fleetwood Mac after Olsen played 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 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 Stephanie, a pretty instrumental love-gift Buckingham reportedly wrote for Nicks while laid-up with glandular fever, is one of several songs deploying 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, drivetime- 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 modula- tions, as does that on the aforemen- tioned 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 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 an engaging blueprint for the classics

 Music Review: ‘Buckingham Nicks’ is an engaging blueprint for the classics to come

By: Hillel Italie, The Associated Press

“Buckingham Nicks” by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks
⭐⭐⭐ (3/5 stars)

• On repeat: “Races Are Run”
• Skip it: “Django”
• For fans of: You know who you are.

NEW YORK (AP) — There are two ways to review “Buckingham Nicks,” the long-awaited digital reissue of the 1973, pre-Fleetwood Mac album by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, their only recording project as a duo.

Imagine you had never heard of them, that they were an obscure 1970s act who made one album, broke up and left the business. You might think of “Buckingham Nicks” as a kind of period curiosity, a taste of vintage Los Angeles singer-songwriter pop, with its folkish stylings, well-crafted melodies and earnest sensibilities (“Do you always trust your first, initial feeling?/Special knowledge holds true, bears believing,” Nicks sings on “Crystal”). The scale is modest and nothing is likely to strike you as a lost classic, but you’ll probably take to at least a handful of the 10 songs — the strumming riffs on “Crying in the Night” and “Stephanie,” the catchy chorus of “Races Are Run,” the way Buckingham’s sensitive tenor is filled out by Nicks’ husky vibrato. You might end up wondering what happened to the two hippie-artists, who look out from the album cover naked, long-haired and unsmiling, as if the photographer had barged in without warning.

But if you’re in the great universe of Buckingham-Nicks obsessives, encyclopedic on their breakups and reunions and musical sparring matches, you’ll find (or rediscover) a trove of clues and portents in Friday’s release. The skillful acoustic picking that opens the instrumental “Stephanie” will remind you of Buckingham’s work on Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.” The opening gallop and heavy bass of “Don’t Let Me Down Again” looks ahead to “Second Hand News” and the slow buildup of “Lola My Lola” feels like a test run for “The Chain.”

Buckingham and Nicks were in their mid-20s during the album’s production and if they ever enjoyed a phase of easy, blissful love, they already seem past it. “Crystal,” the only song also to appear on the breakthrough “Fleetwood Mac” album of 1975, is a rare expression of devotion, or gratitude. Other tracks seem closer to the hard lessons of Nicks’ future chart-topper, “Dreams.” There’s the wary refrain of “Long Distance Winner” — “Yeah, you’re the winner/Long distance winner,” echoed on “Races Are Run” and its reminder: “Races are run, some people win/Some people always have to lose.” Buckingham’s “Don’t Let Me Down Again,” in which the singer fears his lover’s departure, feels like a prequel to the breakup narrative of “Go Your Own Way.”

The reissue adds clarity to the sound of “Buckingham Nicks” that you don’t get from the muddled, unauthorized downloads which turn up online. And the album has a solid cast of session musicians, including Elvis Presley veterans Ronnie Tutt on drums and Jerry Scheff on bass and LA fixture Waddy Wachtel on guitar. But the arrangements never quite anchor or amplify the songs the way drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie would after Fleetwood’s fateful invitation to Buckingham to join his band, and Buckingham’s fateful insistence that his girlfriend come along.

Give “Fleetwood Mac” a listen if you haven’t lately and the difference will grab you from the opening track, Buckingham’s “Monday Morning” — an instant leap into a future that Buckingham and Nicks had only begun to imagine.

Review Buckingham Nicks, takes us back to the beginning

THE ORIGIN STORY OF STEVIE AND LINDSEY

A long-awaited reissue of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham's 1973 debut, Buckingham Nicks, takes us back to the beginning of rock & roll’s ultimate dysfunctional romance

By ROB SHEFFIELD

Rollingstone - September 17, 2025

⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars)

When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham released Buckingham Nicks in 1973, they were just a couple of nobodies. Two hippie kids lost in L.A., doing an unfashionable folk-rock flower-child record. Nobody bought it. Nobody cared. Some might have heard it as a promising debut, others as a flop. But it’s safe to say that nobody heard it and said, “Not only are these two of the planet’s greatest songwriters, this is an album they’ll keep arguing about for the next 50 years!”

But in that way, as in every other way, the world underestimated how much drama these two had in them. Buckingham Nicks has taken its rightful place in history as their origin story for the ultimate rock & roll dysfunctional romance. The couple recorded it before joining Fleetwood Mac — before the fame, before the shawls, before the drugs, before anyone knew how much exquisite torture they’d keep dragging into all our lives forever. It’s just the Ballad of Stevie and Lindsey, back in the early days, when they didn’t even need three other lunatics in the band to make a cosmic emotional mess.

After the couple joined Fleetwood Mac for classics like Rumours, Buckingham Nicks became a footnote in their story. It’s been a rare collector’s item for decades, a lost gem never released on CD. Most of their fans never even heard it. But it’s finally back in this long-awaited reissue. No hits, no bonus tracks — just a charming little American beauty of a record. You can hear these two lovebirds learn their craft, alone in the tall grass, doing their stuff, with nobody to impress except each other.

For years, it seemed crazy to hope this Buckingham Nicks reissue would ever happen. They’ve spent years promising it, un-promising it, denying it, battling over it in public. But the exes’ long-running love/hate story finally exploded in 2019, when the band kicked out Lindsey. (What other band could manage to break up onstage in the middle of accepting a MusiCares award as humanitarians of the year? Only these guys.) It looked final, especially after the tragic death of Christine McVie.

Buckingham Nicks finally restored to its rightful place in the Mac story

Buckingham Nicks
Buckingham Nicks RHINO

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (8/10 stars)

Pat Carty (Classic Rock Magazine)

The Mac in all but name. In retrospect it seems preposterous that this album flopped in 1973, but then fate had other plans for Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Recorded while Nicks was still working day jobs to support them both, it looked like disappearing altogether, until Mick Fleetwood, shopping around for recording studios, heard glorious album closer Frozen Love – and his future opening up before him – at Sound City in Van Nuys. He swiftly brought the couple into Fleetwood Mac, and all worries were soon over.

Long deleted and widely bootlegged, Buckingham Nicks is finally restored to its rightful place in the Mac story, and it’s plain to see why this was a no-brainer for Fleetwood. The sound that would soon seduce millions was already here. There’s Buckingham’s unique Flamenco-tinged guitar sound, evident throughout, for a start, as well as Nicks’ already assured songwriting. The Mac would re-record her Crystal (and should have had a go at sure-fire hit Crying In The Night) but the version here is the stronger one, with those now familiar voices melding to perfection.

Pretty much everything here could have slotted onto the more famous records that followed – Buckingham’s guitar solo emerging out of Nicks’ Long Distance Winner, his country/blues picking on Lola (My Love) – but it’s Frozen Love that’s the real prize. A distant precursor to Mac’s The Chain, it has the voices dancing around each other, and Buckingham’s acoustic break gives way to an orchestral swell and stinging electrics.

A superb album rescued from the dustbin of history at last.

Buckingham Nicks is a nifty collection of floral folk cuts and quicksilver instrumentals

BUCKINGHAM NICKS

Buckingham Nicks (reissue, 1973) - RHINO

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (7/10 stars)

Fabled sketchbook for Fleetwood Mac’s imperial phase, reissued after so many lost decades.

By Piers Martin (Uncut Magazine)

Take it with a pinch of salt, but it’s a tough time to be a Fleetwood Mac fan. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are still at loggerheads after the guitarist was turfed out of the band in 2018 – Nicks declared she was “no longer willing to work with him”; he suffered a heart attack soon after being fired – and the window has all but shut on a Fleetwood Mac classic lineup reunion now that each member is pushing 80 and Christine McVie has gone. Holograms could be the answer.

But before the credits roll on this most enduring rock’n’roll saga, a key chapter in the band’s origin story from a more harmonious time 52 years ago is finally being reissued. Buckingham Nicks, the mythologised 1973 folk-rock debut by Buckingham Nicks, as Lindsey and Stevie were known back then, has been cleaned up and remastered from the original tapes and is in print for the first time since 1982, and on streaming services and CD for the first time (there’s also a limited vinyl edition with two reissued 7” singles). In some ways, this offers a sense of closure: let’s put it out properly before it’s too late.

Why such a pivotal record in Fleetwood Mac’s history has been ignored for so long does lead you to question the pair’s affection for the material. Surely any scheduling or legal issues preventing the release could have been resolved at any point over the past 40 years if they’d wanted it out, especially given the band’s multi-generational appeal this century. Indeed, it’s such fandom that has kept Buckingham Nicks alive all this time, when it pretty much sank without trace upon release and fared little better when reissued in 1977 and ’81 in attempts to capitalise on the Mac’s global domination.

The trouble is, once you’ve heard Fleetwood Mac or Rumours, Buckingham Nicks feels a little threadbare, like sketches for the main event – and that’s fine, because before fate or destiny intervened in the form of Mick Fleetwood in November 1974, this album captured the duo at their best. Taken on its own, Buckingham Nicks is a nifty collection of floral folk cuts and quicksilver instrumentals with one foot in Laurel Canyon, the other in Nashville, that show the duo’s songwriting promise. Aged 25, Stevie’s all-seeing mysticism is taking shape on “Crystal” and “Long Distance Winner”; her partner, a year younger, volleys between traditional composition (“Stephanie”, “Don’t Let Me Down Again”), bluesy rockabilly (“Without A Leg To Stand On”) and finger-picked flamboyance (“Frozen Love”). They’d already written “Landslide”, “Monday Morning” and “Rhiannon” before they formally joined Fleetwood Mac in January 1975, and would rework “Crystal” from this album for July’s Fleetwood Mac.

The pair had met as high-school students in the Bay Area in the late 1960s. Buckingham, a guitarist since childhood, played bass in a psychedelic outfit called Fritz, and soon enough Nicks became their vocalist. Fritz shared bills with the likes of Janis Joplin, the Steve Miller Band and even a festival show with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and were attracting industry attention. Keith Olsen, who’d recently set up Sound City studios in Los Angeles, saw Fritz in San Francisco and invited them to LA for a showcase. This spelled disaster for Fritz, because Olsen saw the potential of Buckingham and Nicks as a duo and proposed they record with him.

At the time, the couple had taken over a room in Buckingham’s father’s coffee roasting plant in the Bay Area, where they were figuring themselves out musically and romantically. They worked on songs and recorded four-track demos for a year before Nicks suggested they move to LA. There, in 1972, they stayed rent-free at Olsen’s house in Coldwater Canyon; he believed in them to the extent that he effectively supported them for a year, letting them use Sound City where he could produce them and shop them to labels. Still, they needed money, so Nicks worked three jobs – cleaning Olsen’s house, waitressing and hostessing – while Buckingham toked at home and zoned in on the music.

Olsen assembled classy players for the sessions: Waddy Wachtel, later a fixture in Nicks’ band, plays slide guitar on the album’s worst song, “Lola (My Love)”, a hokey Buckingham stomp; and Elvis’ rhythm section, drummer Ron Tutt and bassist Jerry Scheff, anchor Buckingham’s ecstatic riffing on “Don’t Let Me Down Again”. Throughout, you hear songs before their Mac upgrades: “Stephanie”, Buckingham’s sprightly ballad for Nicks, would muscle up into “Never Going Back Again”; “Without A Leg To Stand On” is the basis for “What Makes You Think You’re The One”. The seven-minute “Frozen Love” – the album’s sole co-write – pits duelling vocals and spectral folk against a looser second section and would be revamped as “The Chain”.

Olsen played “Frozen Love” and other Buckingham Nicks songs to Mick Fleetwood when he came by Sound City to suss out studios for the next Mac record, impressing the drummer not just with the room’s audio spec, but also the track’s spot-on production and freewheeling arrangement. When Bob Welch quit Fleetwood Mac a month later, in December ’74, Fleetwood needed a new guitarist and recalled Buckingham’s playing on “Frozen Love”. Having been dropped by Polydor after Buckingham Nicks’ poor sales, the guitarist agreed to join Fleetwood Mac on condition that Nicks came with him. Now, at least, we can hear what Fleetwood saw in Buckingham and Nicks all those years ago, and appreciate the wild ride they’ve taken us on.

Sleeve Notes:
Crying In The Night; Stephanie; Without A Leg To Stand On; Crystal; Long Distance Winner; Don’t Let Me Down Again; Django; Races Are Run; Lola (My Love); Frozen Love.

7” Singles:
Crying In The Night (Single Version); Stephanie (Single Version); Don’t Let Me Down Again (Single Version); Races Are Run (Single Version).

Buckingham Nicks Listening Parties

BUCKINGHAM NICKS

ALBUM LISTENING PARTIES

September 18th and 19th

Buckingham Nicks Listening Party

Amoeba Hollywood - September 19th @ 5:00pm

Amoeba celebrates the release of the long out-of-print Buckingham Nicks album!

Join us on Friday, September 19th at 5pm to hear it in the store, take home a free poster, enter to win some cool prizes, and pick up your copy of Buckingham Nicks, which is out that day via Rhino on CD, baby blue vinyl, and indie exclusive pink vinyl. Plus, you'll get a Buckingham Nicks slipmat with purchase of the album in-store only at Amoeba (while supplies last).

Raffle tickets will be given out beginning at 5pm. Raffle drawing happens at 5:30pm.

- Poster for attendees

- Raffle tickets to win a copy of the album on CD or vinyl, slipmat, Amoeba gift certificates and more...

- Gift with album purchase: Buckingham Nicks slipmat

• All items are while supplies last.
• Raffle tickets and poster are 1 per person.
• Must be present to win.
• No purchase or RSVP necessary to attend.

Buckingham Nicks is the only studio album by the iconic duo of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Produced by Keith Olsen, the album was released in September 1973, just a year prior to the pair joining forces with Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve 1974. Buckingham Nicks has achieved legendary status despite, and perhaps due to the fact, that it has never been remastered, reissued, or officially released digitally. Until now. This was the album that caught Mick Fleetwood’s attention and led them becoming one of the most successful bands of all time.