The self-titled 1973 album released by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before they joined Fleetwood Mac will be reissued Sept. 19 by Rhino after being out of print and embroiled in rights issues for nearly 50 years. The long-bootlegged Buckingham Nicks is resurfacing on vinyl and will also be available digitally and on CD. The Nicks-sung “Crying in the Night” is available at DSPs now.
In 1973, Fleetwood Mac released Mystery to Me, their fifth album to feature Christine McVie and guitarist Bob Welch in tandem with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. Simultaneously, unknown musicians Buckingham and Nicks were recording their Polydor debut with producer Keith Olsen at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles. The project was released on Sept. 5 but made little to no commercial impact in real time and found Buckingham and Nicks on the verge of becoming destitute.
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When Welch quit Fleetwood Mac the following year on the eve of recording an album, Fleetwood was desperate for a replacement until Olsen happened to play him “Frozen Love” from Buckingham Nicks. The album is in many ways a sonic blueprint for Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits — far more than anything on the band’s first nine albums — and Nicks’ voice and persona were already fully formed on songs such as “Crying in the Night” and “Long Distance Winner.”
Fleetwood was so impressed with what he heard that he offered Buckingham the gig without an audition, but the guitarist insisted Nicks join him as well. The first Fleetwood Mac single featuring her on lead vocals, “Rhiannon,” helped the band’s 11th album climb to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 more than a year after its release, setting the stage for the record-breaking success of the follow-up, Rumours, in 1977.
In a rare show of solidarity following Buckingham’s nasty exit from Fleetwood Mac in 2018, he, Nicks and Fleetwood all posted social media teasers for the Buckingham Nicks reissue in recent days, fueling speculation that the band was reuniting. Fleetwood Mac toured minus Buckingham in 2018-19, but Christine McVie’s death in 2022 seems to have scotched any plans for future band activity.
“It stands up in a way you hope it would, by these two kids who were pretty young to be doing that work,” Buckingham says of the reissue, which was sourced from the original analog master tapes. “It was a very natural thing, from the beginning,” adds Nicks.
The vinyl is limited to 5,000 copies available through Rhino.com, one version of which includes replica seven-inch vinyl singles featuring original mixes of “Crying in the Night” b/w “Stephanie” and “Don’t Let Me Down Again” b/w “Races Are Run.”
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