Stevie Nicks has been as much an enigma as a consistent platinum-selling act

Stevie Nicks

Since she first exploded on the rock scene in 1975 as the seductive focal point of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks has been as much an enigma as a consistent platinum-selling act 

By Steven P. Wheeler 

Music Connection July 18, 1994

While her star may not be as high in the black night sky as it was in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Stevie Nicks' career has spanned three decades — twenty years (including eight platinum albums) with Fleetwood Mac and five multi-platinum solo albums - with her latest, Street Angel, likely to follow suit. In short, the lady still commands respect. 

Now, five years after her last solo album the rather lackluster The Other Side Of The Mirror the 46-year-old Nicks has returned to her roots. A sparkling album, Street Angel, harkens back to her Number One solo debut, Bella Donna, and even more so to her days as rock's reigning queen at a time when her former band, Fleetwood Mac, was the biggest act in the music world. 

Recovering from recent eye surgery to correct her lifelong poor vision, we spoke with Nicks from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, where she has been since the infamous Northridge quake earlier this year.  

While Nicks may have kept busy with a greatest hits album (TimeSpace), two solo tours, one Fleetwood Mac album (Behind The Mask), as well as a Mac tour over the past half-decade, the somewhat reclusive superstar agrees that with such a long period between albums, it was time to speak up with the release of Street Angel.

However, she did make clear that there are certain things she never wants to share with her public. "I usually don't do a lot of press, but with this record, I figured that it would only be to my benefit to talk about it a little bit.

But I don't really like people knowing everything about me. I like being a mystery, and I even think I'm pretty mysterious to the people who know me really well. There is a part of me that isn't available to the public, except in my songs. When I'm writing I really do strive to be totally honest. I never make up a song. They either come right from my journals or straight out of my head because of something that is happening. It's always been important to me that people think of me as more than just a 'tune-sayer.'"

The obvious difference between Street Angel and her more recent solo projects is the abandonment of a synthesizer-based sound in favor of the more guitar-oriented influences of her past.

guitar-oriented influences of her past. "I think it has a lot to do with what you start out with," states Nicks in a girlish voice which moves in a machine gun rhythm at times. "On The Other Side Of The Mirror, I started out with Rupert Hines, who is an amazing keyboard player, so that whole album sort of went the way of the airy, surreal keyboard and synthesizer thing. It was like being in the twilight zone at times |laughs|. This album was started with (former Eagle] Bernie Leadon and Andy Fairweather Low. So I had two acoustic guitar players and myself for two months at my house in Los Angeles, playing all the songs that I showed them, which was many more than the thirteen on the record. 

"The ones that ended up on the album started to show themselves," continues Nicks. "We were sitting in my English Tudor-style library playing my songs and it was almost like we were preparing to go out on the road as a Kingston Trio kind of act, where we would go out and play little clubs and set up the equipment ourselves (laughs). So this album just started out from a guitarist's point of view, as opposed to piano or synthesizers."

For her part, Nicks hasn't made any final assessment about the album, saying, "I think it's too soon for me to make a judgment, but I think it's a great driving album." 

While she has spent the last twenty years in the often-blinding media spotlight, little is known of Nic ks' formative years when she lived like the gypsy that she would sing about decades later, and something which obviously set the pace for her professional life.

Born in Phoenix, Nicks' family moved to Los Angeles (her other hometown) before popping into a succession of cities due to her father's successful executive career. The cities flew by like the pages of a calendar—first, there was Albuquerque, New Mexico, then El Paso, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The clan headed back to Los Angeles for Stevie's first three years of high school, before heading north to San Francisco for her final year of high school. 

"It was my senior year, which is a really rotten time to have to move into a new school," recalls Nicks. "You couldn't try out tor cheerleader. You couldn't try out for song leader. You couldn't try out for flag twirler. You couldn't do anything because they had all tried out the previous year. So I was totally crushed because that was my dream at that point."

While Nicks' voice seems to carry a twinge of childhood regret, it's hard to imagine what would have happened if she had been twirling flags on the gridiron, instead of crossing paths with another flower child of the sixties, Lindsey Buckingham, during the summer of 1966. 

"I met Lindsay at the end of my senior year," explains Nicks. "We were at a party and Lindsay and I sang 'California Dreamin" together that night."

However, it wasn't until two years later in 1968, when the twenty-year-old hippie girl would speak with Buckingham again, this time it was over the phone as her future love interest asked her to join his band Fritz. "I had never sang rock before," admits Nicks, "and I certainly had never been in a rock band, but I thought, 'Why not?' So I ended up being in that band with Lindsay for three and a halt years. We practiced every day, and we played some really big shows."

Those early years with Fritz turned out to be perfect training for the future, but Nicks admits that she had no idea of it at the time. "I don't think I would have ever been able to just walk into Fleetwood Mac and been cool about being center front stage if it hadn't been for those three and a half years in Fritz. I would have been totally nervous and 'stagefrighted out.' But Fritz was like an incredible amount of preparation experience, which I didn't really know was preparation at that point." 

Like many unsigned bands, it was the very goal of being discovered which ultimately led to the demise of Fritz, as Nicks and Buckingham got a quick lesson into the ways of the music business. "This producer named Keith Olsen who would go on to work with Fleetwood Mac and Nicks during her solo years! invited the band down to L.A. to do some recording, but it was very obvious that everybody wanted to break Lindsay and I away from the rest of the guys in the band." 

In fact, Nicks now says that it was the dissolution of the band that brought the musical partners into a more personal relationship. "It was the guilt that drove us together," Nicks says with a laugh. "That's why Lindsey and I started going out. We just felt so bad because everyone in Los Angeles was trying to kill our band. I mean, after three and a half years together, these guys were our best pals in the world and they were just being shut out, and it was very obvious."

With the other Fritz members gone, Buckingham/Nicks made their first and only album. While this self-titled cult classic has grown to become one of the most in-demand vinyl albums, it was anything but a commercial success at the time of its 1973 release.

As for the possibility of the album ever coming out on CD, Nicks points an accusatory finger at her former partner. "If Lindsay would just call me back, we would release the album because there are a lot of labels, including Atlantic, who are very interested in it. But Lindsey has just been incommunicado lately, and if he doesn't call me back soon I'm going to put a huge ad in Billboard that says, 'Lindsey Buckingham is the reason that Buckingham/Nicks hasn't been released on CD,' because it's all him. So sign the petition because I'm doing what I can." 

As their debut album basically flopped, the two struggling musicians had no indication of the stardom that was just around the corner. In fact, Nicks was working as a waitress in Hollywood, while Buckingham worked on the music at their apartment near Canter's Restaurant on Fairfax. 

Meanwhile, in another part of town, as Buckingham and Nicks struggled through this period of shattered dreams, an English blues drummer by the name of Mick Fleetwood happened to be visiting Sound City Studios at the tail-end of 1974. 

Fleetwood was searching for studios to record what would be Fleetwood Mac's next album, while at the same time searching for a new guitarist to replace the recently departed Mac guitarist/vocalist Bob Welch. 

During his trip to Sound City, producer Keith Olsen wanted to show Fleetwood the sounds that the studio was capable of producing, so he grabbed a tape that happened to be laying on the console and turned it up. 

The song that came on was the seven-minute epic "Frozen Love" from the Buckingham/Nicks album. Fleetwood was instantly grabbed by the guitarist on the tape and inquired as to who it was. Olsen explained that the guitar player was part of a duo, who probably wouldn't leave his musical partner, who also happened to be his girlfriend. 

Not to be dissuaded, Fleetwood made the call anyway. Nicks picks up the story from here: "We got a call from Mick on New Year's Eve night of 1974 going into '75, asking us to join Fleetwood Mac. At that time, Lindsay and I were really poor. I mean, we were like really starving. We were totally disillusioned, we were both miserable, totally unhappy with each other and the world in general, and I told Lindsay that I thought we should do anything that was going to raise our lifestyle, and he agreed." 

Ironically, Nicks had no idea who or what Fleetwood Mac was at the time. "I went down to the record store that night and bought every Fleetwood Mac album and we listened to all of them from front to back. I was looking to see if there was something that I could add to this band, and I felt that there was a kind of mystical thing throughout the band's history from Peter Green's bluesy guitar to Bob Welch's 'Bermuda Triangle' to Christine's sort of 'airy-fairy' voice, and I thought that it might work. Of course, they didn't need another singer, they needed a guitar player, but they couldn't get Lindsay without me, so they had to take us both." 

As the band hit the road for an extensive tour behind Fleetwood Mac (which became known as the band's White Album), their powerhouse performances brought more converts to the band, with the charismatic and mysterious singer with the strange little voice quickly becoming the center of attention, as the album eventually topped the charts fueled by the Top Ten single "Rhiannon."

However, success didn't come easily, as a series of internal breakups threatened to destroy the band before it had a chance to discover its full potential. First, the marriage of bassist John McVie and keyboardist/vocalist Christine McVie dissolved, as did drummer Mick Fleetwood's marriage and finally Nicks' long-term relationship with Buckingham. 

As Nicks explains, it was anything but a walk in the park during the making of their classic album Rumours in 1976. "In a normal situation, you don't break up with someone and then see them the next day for breakfast. But within Fleetwood Mac, you saw that person the next day, so the sarcasm level went way up and the little digs got to be thousands a day, and people would just slam out of the studio.'' 

Then, Nicks adds this obvious aside, "Great tragedy definitely led to great art. You had five people who were very high-strung and over the edge really easy. Everybody was really screwed up, but we got the greatest rock & roll soap opera out of it." 

The result of this personal turmoil was an album that would spend an incredible 31 consecutive weeks at the top of the charts. In the process, Rumours became the biggest-selling album in history at the time with more than 20 million copies sold to date. 

Following the seemingly endless touring that helped propel Rumours into the record books, the band returned to the studio for work on their Sgt. Pepper-like opus, simply entitled Tusk. 

The recording took longer than the previous two albums combined, as Buckingham's creativity took on a meticulous, almost scientific approach, something that didn't exactly endear him to the rest of the members. 

Yet, a steady diet of booze and Peruvian Marching Powder enabled the group to get through it and may go a long way in explaining the double album's somewhat scattered focus. 

"Tusk took thirteen months to make, and you had to be there every day," Nicks says without a hint of exaggeration. "There was no calling in sick, you were there from two in the afternoon straight through to seven the next morning, and sometimes we didn't even go home. It was really intense, and it probably was as nuts as we got. The only thing that Fleetwood Mac ever did in abundance was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drinking, and luckily we never did anything else."

Nicks goes on to say that the pressures of following up two consecutive Number One albums, along with the band's notoriously intense touring schedule, led toa lengthy ride in the fast lane. "Everybody was so tired all the time and really haggard. That's why cocaine was so much a part of our lives; we were just too tired every day to go on. We had commitments here and commitments there, and the record company barking down our backs, asking why the album was taking so damn long. To this day, I don't even know what Tusk was; it was just this intense thing. It's a great story to tell but it wasn't much fun to live." 

Following another extensive worldwide tour behind the multi-platinum Tusk, which failed to top the charts like its two predecessors, Nicks began to look seriously at a solo career. After five years with Fleetwood Mac, Nicks had amassed a large backlog of material and presumably, an equal amount of artistic frustration, which became obvious when the down-to-earth singer explained the reasons behind the launching of her hugely successful solo career.

"I realized that two or three songs every two to three years wasn't enough for me," states Nicks. "Not only was it just two to three songs, it usually wasn't even my favorite two to three songs. The band would hear fifteen to twenty of my songs when we'd do a Fleetwood Mac album, and they'd invariably pick out the two songs that were my least favorite. So my favorite songs would never get used." 

Nicks goes on to say, "By the time I got to Bella Donna, I had tons of songs that I really loved, and nobody was ever going to hear them. It was like I was working for nothing. That's absolutely why I decided to do Bella Donna; to look for other avenues outside of Fleetwood Mac." 

What Bella Donna did was show that Stevie Nicks was not some sort of Lindsay Buckingham puppet, as the album topped the charts in 1981 on the strength of three Top Ten hits—"Leather And Lace," "Edge Of Seventeen" and the Tom Petty-penned "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around."

Returning to the Fleetwood Mac fold a year later, Nicks began to feel the strain of balancing her solo career with the band that made her famous. 

"I had to give up everything to be in Fleetwood Mac for more than fifteen years, and that's not a lie, that's really true. You couldn't have any kind of a normal life to do what I've been doing all these years." 

Nicks goes on to cite the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. "The reason I finally left Fleetwood Mac was that having to go back-and-forth, and back-and-forth got to be too much. This is the first time that I won't have to go back and forth. It was always a pain. I made it work but it really took its toll on me because when Fleetwood Mac got to go to Hawaii for two months and rest, I had to go in the studio for my own thing. Then when all the people who toured with me got to take some time off, I had to go back in the studio with Fleetwood Mac. This will be the first time in fifteen years that I haven't had two demanding jobs."

Having officially quit Fleetwood Mac after their much-publicized performance at the Clinton inauguration, Nicks seems more than a little enthusiastic at the prospects of the future. "I'm totally excited about this because

I don't have to be dreading the fact that I have a whole other job to go home to." 

In the meantime, it's nice to know that Stevie Nicks has returned with arguably her finest album ever, and is set to hit the stage in the coming months and embark on a whole new chapter of her solo career. 

Review/Pop; A Musically Mad Scientist - Lindsey Buckingham

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: April 06, 1993
The New York Times

Lindsey Buckingham might be described as the mad scientist of California pop. The singer, songwriter and guitarist who masterminded the gossamer folk-rock harmonies of Fleetwood Mac's biggest hits is a notorious perfectionist in the recording studio. And at Town Hall on Wednesday evening, in a concert that was part of his first solo tour, he worked with considerable success to recreate the layered textures that have made both his Fleetwood Mac and his solo albums models of a certain kind of meticulous craft.

Especially on his solo albums, Mr. Buckingham has applied his wizardry to the creation of tortured psychodramas in which every sigh of pleasure is balanced by a primal scream or a Gothic nightmare. His newest record, "Out of the Cradle," is an autobiographical song cycle describing a midlife crisis with many characteristics of a nervous breakdown.

In introducing songs from the album on Wednesday, the wiry, frizzy-haired singer talked about their personal associations. A brooding acoustic version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "This Nearly Was Mine," which he said was his father's favorite song, prefaced "Street of Dreams," a reflection in which a visit to his father's grave sets off howls of loneliness and despair.

Since Mr. Buckingham plays most of the instruments and sings most of the parts on his own recordings, even to begin duplicating what he does by himself in the studio required a nine-member band. He was joined by four guitarists doubling as backup singers, a drummer, a keyboardist, a bassist and two percussionists.

Even though the sound had an impressive clarity, there was something bizarre about finding the stage of Town Hall jampacked with tons of electronic equipment that dwarfed the performers. This sort of technological barrage befits a heavy-metal concert in which the goal is to create a sonic explosion. But it seemed excessive for an artist as quirky and introspective as Mr. Buckingham.

Pumped up to heavy metal levels, such Fleetwood Mac songs as "Go Your Own Way," "The Chain" and "Tusk" sounded overblown, although they had an undeniable visceral clout. When things quieted down, as in "Street of Dreams" and "All My Sorrows" (Mr. Buckingham's freewheeling adaptation of "All My Trials"), the layered voice, guitar and percussion found a blend that was almost as refined as the texture of the recording.

REVIEW Lindsey Buckingham's First Live Solo Show - The Wiltern

LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM

The Wiltern Theatre

Los Angeles

CHRIS MORRIS 

Billboard Magazine March 20, 1993

FLEETWOOD MAC'S onetime axe-slinger/singer /songsmith enchanted an adoring crowd of fans at his first-ever solo show in L.A. proper on Feb. 22. 

Forging a live style that dramatically re-created the opulent studio architecture of his records, Buckingham alternated between solo performances of breathtaking intimacy and full-blown band numbers that

showed off the well-drilled skills of his nine backup musicians.

Performing with always apparent delight, the highly animated Buckingham received a local hero's welcome. He kicked off the evening with richly detailed acoustic versions of "Big Love," the last major hit he penned for his former group, and "Go Insane," the title track from his 1984 solo album. Proclaiming his intention to "reclaim some sense of creativity for myself," he then introduced his truly startling group.

Featuring five guitarists, three percussionists, and six singing voices, the tentet was adept at re-creating the densely layered vocal and instrumental overdubs that have made works like last year's Reprise release, "Out Of The Cradle," such engrossing rococo pleasures.

Buckingham led the group through its stormy paces on memorable Mac oldies like "The Chain" and "Tusk" and solo album numbers such as "Trouble" and "You Do Or You Don't." The concert hit a raging midshow peak with "I'm So Afraid," in which Buckingham constructed one of his few extended solos with near-mathematical precision and heart-halting emotion. 

After this show-stopping display, Buckingham dropped the energy level again with a couple of solo turns, then shifted into high gear again (with the remark, "All these guitars -give me a break! "), rampaging through "Doing What I Can," "This Is The Time" (in which all five guitarists traded furious fours) and the inevitable set-closer "Go Your Own Way."

Buckingham obliged the crowd with a pair of encores that included a spirited "Holiday Road" and a wrenching solo "Soul Drifter." No doubt about it: One of America's best-known studio hermits has acquired the band and the on-stage attitude to deliver his eccentric, ornate pop music totally live. Buckingham's show is one of the best on the boards at the moment.

Lindsey Buckingham's first solo National Tour

Buckingham's Out Of The Cradle Again

Lines Up Dates With 10 -Piece Tour Band

BY CHRIS MORRIS

Billboard March 13, 1993

LOS ANGELES - Warner Bros. is optimistic that a tour by singer/guitarist Lindsey Buckingham's 10-piece band will ignite fresh sales of Buckingham's much-lauded 1992 Reprise album "Out Of The Cradle." The group, which performed two shows at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., in December and a concert at the Wiltern Theatre here last month, launches the monthlong first leg of a national tour of clubs and medium-sized halls Monday (8) in Solana Beach, Calif. 

On Tuesday (9), the Buckingham band will be showcased on the half-hour VH1 show "Center Stage "; an hourlong version of the broadcast, co-produced by BUCKINGHAM by the cable network and PBS and taped live at WTI'W -TV in Chicago will be aired on the public broadcasting network later this spring. 

Westwood One aired 90 minutes culled from the group's Dec. 10 and 11 Coach House performances (Buckingham's first-ever live solo shows) on its Feb. 27 "Superstar Concert Series" broadcast.  Although two singles from "Out Of The Cradle" failed to chart last year, the company will release a third, "Don't Look Down," within the month to coincide with the tour. Says Buckingham of the tour, "Best case scenario is that we might pump life into the record, and this is basically what [Warner president] Lenny [Waronker] and Warner Bros. would like to do. I think it's to their credit that they're even willing to do that at this point because it would be just as easy for them to say, 'Yeah, go out and do the [tour] leg, and then make another album.' " While "Out Of The Cradle" won wide favor in critical circles it came in 10th in BAM's poll of national critics and 33rd in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Poll the eccentric pop album stalled commercially following its release last June. 

It spent only nine weeks on The Billboard 200, peaking at No. 128 in August. The first two singles, "Countdown" and "Soul Drifter," failed to hit the Hot 100 Singles chart; the track "Wrong" logged seven weeks on the Album Rock Tracks chart, peaking at No. 23. 

Buckingham had enjoyed some solo success in the early '80s when he was still a member of Fleetwood Mac. His 1981 Asylum album "Law And Order" hit No. 32 and spawned a top 10 single, "Trouble "; that album's 1984 successor, "Go Insane," on Elektra, rose to No. 45.

But Buckingham admits that his past association with Fleetwood Mac may not have done any good for his own distinctly different brand of music: "On the one hand, the name is gonna get your foot in the door, but maybe it's the wrong foot."

Buckingham says that the promotion of "Out Of The Cradle" focused on "normal publicity stuff ... and then we ended up going out for like five or six weeks and doing what I call radio ass-kissing."

Buckingham didn't begin to audition band members until late last summer. He says, "I didn't really expect that the thing would take as long to put together as it did. There was sort of a lag time, which obviously didn't work to our advantage, but I guess better late than never."

The 11-piece touring unit, including Buckingham, which features five guitarists and six singing voices, was designed to parallel the detailed, heavily overdubbed sound of Buckingham's albums that the studio-obsessive musician has essentially recorded by himself. 

He says, "[Rather than] having to paraphrase that [sound] down to the point where that had very little relation to what the recorded idea was, I wanted to get into a position where you had the flexibility to get into at least some level of nuance [on stage] ... It's a level of orchestration that was never possible in Fleetwood Mac."

Waronker says, "He's actually got a guitar orchestra up there, which is something he's talked about for as long as I've known him -maybe not completely seriously because I'm not sure he felt he could do that."

He adds, "The idea of taking his guitar parts and orchestrating them, giving each guitar player a part, really makes it special, and it gives you a little bit more insight into the record, too."

Buckingham is sticking to clubs and theaters during the first leg of his tour because "we need to reintroduce ourselves out there. I'm a little disenchanted with the larger places. I'm kind of interested in getting close, making as much contact as possible."

He says that later dates on the tour will be booked into "slightly larger places."

Even if the tour fails to fire sales for "Out Of The Cradle," Buckingham says his experience with his big band may bring about a change in his record-making style.

Lindsey Buckingham's Out Of The Cradle is a wildly impressive coming-out party

Lindsey Buckingham: Post-Mac Attack

The wayward Fleetwood singer continues on – solo

BY DAVID WILD

Rollingstone - Published June 25, 1992

I'm not trying to compete with Kris Kross now, just like I didn’t try to compete with Christopher Cross in the old days.”

Lindsey Buckingham – the pop genius and sonic architect behind Fleetwood Mac‘s string of platinum successes in the Seventies and Eighties – is sitting under a velvet Elvis portrait in his home studio in the lovely hills of Bel Air, California. Buckingham has spent a substantial portion of the last four years in this room. Now, however, he’s finally on the verge of sharing with the public some of the music that he and Richard Dashut, his coproducer and writing partner, have been creating here, and he’s considering the question of how popular his eccentric brand of melodic pop will be these days.

“I guess it’s obvious that making this album hasn’t been an especially speedy process,” says the master of the understatement. “But I had to let a lot of emotional dust settle. People might think I’ve been off on some island getting my ya-yas out. The truth is, I’ve basically been here twelve hours a day. I’ve been goofing off only in the most productive sense.”

Asked if he’s grown sick of the windowless room, Buckingham pauses as if he hasn’t considered the issue before. “Well, I’m not really sick of it,” he says finally. “But I haven’t come inside here for a while, and I’m not sure why. A couple of weeks ago, I opened the door and just looked in. And I couldn’t relate to having spent the amount of time I did in here. This room became more my reality than the rest of the house. At times the whole thing seems like a weird dream to me.”

Buckingham pauses again and looks around the room. “You know,” he adds, “actually, I guess I am pretty damn sick of this place.”

Happily, all of Buckingham’s work has paid off. Out of the Cradle – his first release since he decided to go his own way and leave the Big Mac shortly after the release of 1987’s album Tango in the Night – is a wildly impressive coming-out party for the forty-two-year-old Buckingham. A veritable one-man show, the album is an artfully crafted song cycle whose romantic lushness is effectively balanced by a healthy dose of ripping guitar. More ambitious than the two solo albums he squeezed in between Mac projects – 1981’s Law and Order and 1984’s Go Insane – Out of the Cradle represents Buckingham’s finest work since 1979’s Tusk, the album that established a creative high-water mark for his former group. That album – the controversial follow-up to 1977’s Rumours, one of the best-selling records of all time – was also, according to Buckingham, the beginning of the end for him and Fleetwood Mac.

Buckingham and his then creative and romantic partner, Stevie Nicks, joined Fleetwood Mac in late 1974. At the time, Buckingham was already a “complete studio rat.” He first caught the bug when he set up a recording room at his father’s coffee plant, in Daly City, California, after dropping out of college in the early Seventies. Around the same time, he and Nicks started playing together with a Bay Area group called Fritz. They moved to Los Angeles in 1973, recording an album as Buckingham-Nicks the next year. “Our record company had no idea what to do with us,” says Buckingham. “They said something about wanting us to be the new Jim Stafford, and they wanted us to play steakhouses.” Opportunity knocked when Mick Fleetwood went to check out an L.A. studio and producer Keith Olsen played a track from the record he’d done with Buckingham-Nicks as a demonstration. Impressed, Fleetwood asked the pair to join his band a week later. It would prove to be a savvy decision. The reconstituted Mac – with Buckingham and Nicks joining bassist John McVie; his then wife, keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie; and Fleetwood – debuted with 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, a multiplatinum smash that sold nearly 6 million copies worldwide, followed by the classic Rumours two years later.

Yet Buckingham says it was never an easy fit – though at first the tensions within the band fueled the music. “Fleetwood Mac was one big lesson in adaptation for me,” says Buckingham. “There were five very different personalities, and I suppose that made it great for a while. Obviously, having two couples – and soon enough, ex-couples – added a lot more tension and some great subject matter to the mix. But the problems really kicked in when you started adding five managers and five lawyers to the equation. Once Stevie was singled out and selected as the star of the band, the machinery of the rock business clicked in, and things really got stupid. By the time of Tango, you could hardly fit all these people in one room for a band meeting. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch, until it became almost comical.”

Musically, however, things just got better and better for Buckingham until the release of Tusk, an under-appreciated pop epic that met with a mixed response commercially, selling only 2 million copies. “It was a bizarre left turn,” Buckingham says. “But I knew if we made Rumours II that we’d have to make Rumours III and Rumours IV. We’d sold 14 million copies of Rumours [21 million worldwide], so we were in that mega-Michael Jackson area, and that’s a dangerous place to be. There was a big backlash. It wasn’t like the people around me at the time were saying, ‘Hey, Lindsey, let’s keep going in that interesting direction where we sell a lot less records than we used to.’ I really had the wind taken out of my sails, and I felt set adrift for a while.”

In 1982 the band returned to the top of the charts with the more user-friendly Mirage, but for Buckingham the thrill was gone. “It became more and more this big machine that had to have hits to keep working,” he says. “There was no room to grow. After Tusk, it was basically all disappointment for me. It became a soap opera.”

Partly in an attempt to give Fleetwood Mac a more fitting swan song, Buckingham and Dashut returned to help whip Tango in the Night into shape. In the end, that record became the group’s biggest album since Rumours, with sales of 8 million. Still, the experience was hardly an easy one. “It was a mess,” he says. “Whatever was going on in people’s personal lives, I can’t really say. I was never the one up all night creating shenanigans and high jinks anyway – I was the one who went up to my room to work on songs. But for whatever reasons, there was no camaraderie left. Just getting people in the same room to create more semblance of a group became a huge hassle. Especially with Stevie, who was probably around for something like ten days for that whole record.”

Buckingham’s split with the band came when he decided he couldn’t tour to support the album. “They’d smoothed things over and coerced me, and I’d kind of agreed to go,” he says. “Then I realized I just couldn’t do it. I called another meeting, and they were shocked and hurt. I knew they wouldn’t leave it at that, so basically you could say I was let go.”

The group added two new members, Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, in an attempt to fill the void left by Buckingham’s departure. Diplomatically, Buckingham says only that Behind the Mask – the 1990 record the group made without him – was “not an album I can say I took to heart.” Buckingham did, however, take to heart some of the slights meted out by Fleetwood in his 1990 tell-all tome, Fleetwood. “I didn’t read the whole book,” Buckingham says, “but I did skim it, and there were a lot of . . . untruths, shall we say. Mick was basically trying to underplay my contribution, but the thing that really upset me is the incident he describes of the night I left the band. He had this thing in there about me slapping Stevie. I mean, she probably deserved to be slapped. But it never happened that way. I don’t know what Mick was talking about.”

“Wrong,” one of the tracks on Out of the Cradle, was inspired in part by Buckingham’s reaction to Fleetwood. The rest of the album reflects Buckingham’s experiences with the group in a much more vague and positive manner. “There’s no sense in my hiding from the association,” he says. “I feel like fifteen years with Fleetwood Mac was like working on my thesis, doing research for some kind of paper. And I wanted to make an album that sort of put it all in a real healthy perspective with maybe a little more maturity in there somewhere. Because even though I feel younger than I did ten years ago, the fact is, I’m not eighteen and there’s no point in pretending I am.”

Buckingham decided to bury the hatchet with his former band mates and made a cameo appearance onstage at the end of Fleetwood Mac’s last concert in 1990. More recently, he agreed to work with the group on some new tracks for an upcoming box set, if time permits. “Going up onstage with them one more time wasn’t any sort of nail in the coffin for me emotionally,” he says, “because I already felt pretty detached. Still, the minute I saw Mick, the chemistry was still there, and that was pretty much the case with everyone. It was a gas.” As for the new songs, Buckingham says: “There’s no reason for me not to do it. I’d have to feel a lot of animosity toward those people not to work with them, and I don’t feel that way.

“I left Fleetwood Mac to make myself happy,” says Buckingham, “and fortunately it worked. That’s why I spent all this time in the garage – trying to make something that made me happy.” And though Buckingham says that “so much in my life is work right now,” he admits to having left the studio occasionally to spend time with longtime girlfriend Cheri Caspari, whom he met while making Go Insane.

Still, Buckingham says, he’s more than willing to leave his home long enough to support Out of the Cradle by hitting the road. “It’ll be great to get out of the studio, get some air and play with some other musicians,” he says. “In the Fleetwood Mac days we got used to the private jets and everything when we toured, but this time I’ll take the public bus if I have to.”

At the same time, Buckingham wouldn’t mind selling some records, too. “My other solo records were made quickly as sidebars to a more mainstream situation,” he says. “That’s not the case anymore, so there’s no point in my being esoteric just for the sake of it now. I’m certainly not interested in making a cheap-shot sellout. This is no longer the sideshow, this is the main event, and I hope there are hits on there somewhere.”

Lenny Waronker, president of Warner Bros. Records, Buckingham’s label, believes there’s no shortage of hits. “It’s the height of great songwriting and record-making,” he says, “and I think the power and quality of the music will bring people in.”

Buckingham named the album Out of the Cradle after the Walt Whitman poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” “The phrase just had a certain resonance,” Buckingham says. “Some people thought there was an unnecessary reference in the title to my leaving Fleetwood Mac, and I suppose you could make an argument for that. You could also argue that there’s something ironic and weird about a guy over forty thinking of himself as leaving any sort of cradle. But that’s the way it feels. And it feels very good.”

RECORDINGS VIEW; A Studio Wizard Takes a Psychic Journey

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: June 21, 1992
The New York Times

In "Street of Dreams," the most anguished song on Lindsey Buckingham's third solo album, "Out of the Cradle," the narrator visits the grave of his father, who has been dead for 10 years, and prays, "Will I ever stop dreaming dreams?" His father's ghost answers, "Never, never, never!" in a vengeful primal scream.

The tormented father-son dialogue, which revolves around the word "lonely," is cast in a dank, echoey setting that suggests Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" transformed into a surreal dirge. As much as any cut on "Out of the Cradle," it demonstrates Mr. Buckingham's brilliance at using the recording studio to create intricate interior dramas in which ambiance and an allusive pop sensibility matter more than the actual words and music.

The most elaborate and ambitious of Mr. Buckingham's solo recordings, "Out of the Cradle" is an album-length suite that describes a young musician's descent from innocence into a dark night of the soul and his eventual re-emergence into a slightly shaky autonomy. Mr. Buckingham plays most of the instruments on the record, which took two years to record in his home studio with his longtime collaborator and songwriting partner, Richard Dashut. His labors have produced one of the most exquisitely textured rock albums ever made.

The style that Mr. Buckingham has refined on "Out of the Cradle" is a personalized extension of the sound he devised for Fleetwood Mac in the late 1970's. The ultimate studio distillation of harmonized California folk-rock, his technique mixes carefully layered guitars and other stringed instruments with voices (both real and electronic) into a scintillating orchestral fabric. His master stroke has always been his ability to buoy these rich, three-dimensional textures with rhythms that have the feel of streamlined Celtic folk dancing. Their brisk, airy bounce keeps the productions from seeming overworked.

As the sonic architect of Fleetwood Mac, Mr. Buckingham used this studio wizardry to create the rock equivalent of a nighttime soap opera, starring the flighty, sexy Stevie Nicks and the stalwart, long-suffering Christine McVie.

The sound Mr. Buckingham has created for his solo albums employs the same ingredients but adapted to suit his passionate yet pinched vocal style. Where Fleetwood Mac's albums were glamorous comedies of manners, "Out of the Cradle" is one long, brooding interior monologue. The psychic journey begins on a note of frightened euphoria ("Don't Look Down"), takes a look at music-industry crassness ("Wrong"), then descends into despair ("All My Sorrows") and borderline insanity ("This Is the Time," "You Do or You Don't," "Street of Dreams"). With "Surrender the Rain" and "Doing What I Can," the narrator begins to recover, and the last songs, "Turn It On" and "Say We'll Meet Again," express an almost giddy affirmation.

Mr. Buckingham writes charming folkish melodies, and his best lyrics make serviceable use of archetypal symbolism, but his manipulation of instrumental atmosphere is what makes "Out of the Cradle" memorable. Mr. Buckingham's psychological changes parallel an exploration of his musical roots.

His influences range from Rodgers and Hammerstein (an acoustic instrumental rendition of "This Nearly Was Mine") to the Kingston Trio (a haunting adaptation of their version of the traditional "All My Sorrows") to rockabilly ballads ("Street of Dreams") to good-timey mid-60's folk ("Say We'll Meet Again"). "Countdown" momentarily echoes the Turtles, while "Soul Drifter," a gorgeous folk-cowboy song, ends with quotes from the Tokens' "Lion Sleeps Tonight."

The sum total of all these fragments, reflections and echoes is an impressionistic, if eccentric, memoir of his own painful loss of innocence and musical evolution.