There’s never been a moment in Fleetwood Mac that didn’t involve drama of some kind. While everyone likes to go back to the Rumours lineup with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks as the moment where all of the tension kicked off, they had already gone through Peter Green losing his way to LSD and their manager trying to force a new version of the band to go out on tour in place of the original band so he could make a profit. People were practically lining up to see them, if only to see them survive, but even the best triumphs had a few asterisks next to them.
Throughout their back catalogue, Rumours will always be both the best and worst thing that could have happened to them. The recording sessions sound like the equivalent of hell on Earth looking at all of the baggage they had to plough through to get a song finished, but there was also some fantastic tunes that wouldn’t have happened were it not for that drama, like ‘Go Your Own Way’.
But if there was one stick in the mud most of the time it was Buckingham. He had a great vision for what his songs were supposed to be, but given his perfectionist tendencies behind the scenes, it was easy for him to tell everyone what they should be playing and be the least diplomatic collaborator anyone had ever seen. It’s fine when the records are great, but that doesn’t leave much room for diversity.
And when Tusk came out sounding like the ‘Lindsey Buckingham and Friends’ album, it was easy to see why Nicks wanted out for a while. She had no intention of leaving Fleetwood Mac, but when working on her solo album Bella Donna, she simply wanted to do her own thing and not have to worry about whatever Buckingham thought of the songs or whether one of her tracks would be cut from the record.
Hell, she was diplomatic enough to give Buckingham credit on some of the songs he worked on for the record, but when she showed up at a Fleetwood Mac session with the finished record, Buckingham was ice cold, with Nicks recalling, “He wasn’t ever able to revel in any kind of joy for my success for Bella Donna. I gave him a signed copy of [it]. He left it leaning against the recording studio wall for a month. I took it back, crossed his name out, and gave it to somebody else.”
It’s easy to see Buckingham as the petty ex who refused to acknowledge that Nicks had moved on, but it might have also been out of fear. No one expected songs like ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’ to be as big as they were, so there was a chance he was worried that the rest of the world would figure that Nicks didn’t need her old band anymore.
Nicks was always going to be loyal to her true musical love, but that’s not to say that she couldn’t find time to get away. Because if she had stayed behind and done a sequel to what Tusk was, we would have had to wait years before all of Bella Donna’s songs actually came out, let alone some of her later classics like ‘Stand Back’.
‘The Mac’ was supposed to be one big musical family in some respects, but the success of Bella Donna provided the best case of why some artists need a break from each other. And had Nicks not found this kind of spark so early in her career, it would have been a tragedy to miss out on some of her greatest hits.
