Stevie Nicks Partly Expected to ‘Use’ Fleetwood Mac and Quit After a Few Months
Stevie Nicks is approaching her 50th year in Fleetwood Mac. Though she was not part of the original lineup, it’s difficult to imagine the group without her. While she wanted to join the band when they extended an invitation, she didn’t necessarily think of it as a long-term commitment. Her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham wasn’t sure he wanted to be a part of the group. Nicks told him that they could use Fleetwood Mac to make connections in the music industry before quitting.
Lindsey Buckingham wasn’t sold on Fleetwood Mac even though Stevie Nicks was
When Mick Fleetwood offered positions in Fleetwood Mac to Nicks and Buckingham, they were struggling musicians. The album they released as a duo was a commercial failure, and their label dropped them, so Nicks worked multiple jobs to support them. She saw Fleetwood’s offer as a lifeline. Buckingham wasn’t so sure.
He believed that they would eventually find success as a duo and thought that they’d be selling out if they joined Fleetwood Mac. He wanted to give their band another chance.
“I said, ‘You wait around,'” Nicks explained, per the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis. “‘I’m sick of being a waitress. We are joining Fleetwood Mac, and we are going to be great!'”
Stevie Nicks thought Fleetwood Mac could be a temporary situation
Nicks was also able to convince Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac by selling it as a temporary solution. She exasperatedly explained this to him when he expressed his hesitation.
“Had I been able to throw him against the wall, I would have, because it’s like, Lindsey … we have nothing!” she said in a 2020 interview with The Face. “We aren’t gonna be able to pay next month’s rent! And if we join Fleetwood Mac we can work with them for six months and then we can quit. But we can make some money and put it in the bank!”
As Fleetwood Mac was already an established band, Nicks figured they could use it as a way to make industry connections.
“When you’re short on money, and if you’re the person who’s providing the money, you’re saying like, hey, I’m not gonna be a cleaning lady forever,” she said. “And we need money, so really, we don’t really have to stay — I was really being cold, I was like, we don’t have to stay in this band. We can totally use this band and it’ll just take us to another place, we’ll meet a lot of people, right, we’ll make a lot of money, make a lot of friends in high places, and then we’ll just quit. So Lindsey’s like, OK, alright, I’ll do it. And that was that.”
She doesn’t see herself leaving the band
Clearly, Nicks and Buckingham stayed in the band for much longer than six months. Despite all the breakups, affairs, shouting matches, and temporary exits, Nicks thinks it has been worth it. She doesn’t see herself leaving the band.
“You get to a point in your life where some things have got to go if anything else new is going to come in. Then you face the fact that the Fleetwood Mac tickets sold out in three weeks for 80 shows,” she told Macleans in 2015. “I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I don’t want the audiences to be disappointed. I want everybody to be happy. I want the people in Fleetwood Mac to be happy.”
