THE BUCKINGHAM STOPS HERE
Former Fleetwood Mac frontman has turbulent history with women and band
It’s rare for Fleetwood Mac — formed in 1967 — to make headlines in 2018. The news that Lindsey Buckingham reportedly was fired shook the rock community.
There’s little question the iconic band is losing a visionary musician in Buckingham. As pop culture re-examines its heroes, it’s important to remember that the guitarist and songwriter’s personal reputation is littered with allegations of controlling, belittling and abusive behaviour.
Rock ’n’ roll is often steeped in mythology, so, like any stories about the genre, it comes down to who you choose to believe: the camp that thinks Buckingham is a misunderstood genius or the camp that believes he’s a jerk.
Many of the stories concerning Buckingham come from former romantic partners. Buckingham and fellow band member Stevie Nicks might be the most famous star-crossed lovers since Romeo and Juliet, only their story ends with them playing in the same rock band and singing songs about each other. The dissolution of their years-long relationship added creative fuel to the writing and recording of 1977’s Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s most successful album.
But tension existed between the two long before the breakup. The young lovers released a single, eponymous album as Buckingham Nicks two years before joining Fleetwood Mac. The couple appeared nude on the album cover, something Nicks was highly uncomfortable with.
The studio said it wanted a sexy cover, so Nicks “with her last hundred dollars bought a loose, filmy white blouse that exposed a little skin, figuring that would do it,” according to her biography, Gold Dust Woman by Stephen Davis.
It wasn’t sexual enough for the photographer, who asked her to remove it and bare her breasts for the camera. Nicks protested, calling herself a prude and saying her family wouldn’t approve. The photographer pushed and Buckingham eventually snapped at Nicks, according to the book.
“Don’t be a f--king child!” Buckingham yelled. “This is art!”
Eventually, feeling “trapped,” Nicks removed her shirt and bra for the shoot. Nicks felt “mortified” by the cover, particularly when it hit shelves in 1973 and her father disapproved. She almost quit music at the age of 25.
“From the beginning, Lindsey was very controlling and very possessive,” Nicks said in the biography.
Things didn’t improve after their breakup. Buckingham wrote Go Your Own Way in 1976 about Nicks, even though Nicks had to help perform the song. The lyrics are full of vitriol, from the bluntly cruel (“Loving you isn’t the right thing to do”) to the characterquestioning (“Packing up, shacking up’s all you wanna do”).
“I very, very much resented him telling the world that ‘packing up, shacking up’ with different men was all I wanted to do,” Nicks told Rolling Stone. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing he said. Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’”
Things grew worse. During a 1980 tour for Tusk, Buckingham allegedly mocked Nicks onstage, tried to trip her and attempted to kick her. Bandmate Christine McVie was furious. She found Buckingham after the show and hit him.
“I think he’s the only person I ever, ever slapped,” McVie told Rolling Stone. “I actually might have chucked a glass of wine, too.”
He later threw “a Les Paul (guitar) at Nicks’s head during the show,” McVie and Nicks told the magazine. While tension continued to grow, both Buckingham and Nicks said it fuelled their creativity.
“Relations with Lindsey are exactly as they have been since we broke up,” Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1981. “He and I will always be antagonizing to each other, and we will always do things that will irritate each other, and we really know how to push each other’s buttons. We know exactly what to say when we really want to throw a dagger in.”
Also concerning are the stories Buckingham’s next serious girlfriend, Carol Ann Harris, shared in her memoir, Storms: My Life with Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac. In one, Harris hung out with the band’s crew members only to discover that a jealous Buckingham had ordered them not to talk to her. “And in their eyes I saw a sense of fear that I recognized — fear of Lindsey’s anger. Nobody wanted to be the target of Lindsey’s fury — and this I understood.”
Throughout the book, Harris described in great detail Buckingham verbally and physically abusing her. In one instance, he “raised his arm and hit me hard enough to knock me off the staircase into the wall.” In another, she wrote, he grabbed a fistful of her hair, got in a car and drove down the driveway, dragging her across the pavement.
Eventually, Harris said, a doctor told her she had to leave Buckingham for her own safety. So she did.