Meanwhile, somewhere on the West Coast...

While Fleetwood Mac were busy transitioning from one type of band to another to another to another, across the big pond and  continent inbetween two young aspiring musicians were trying to make ends meet. Stephanie, dite Stevie, Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were trying to make a living on music, something that had hit something of a snag. After leaving Bay area bar band Fritz who for years had try to break through but never did, Nicks and Buckingham in the early 70s were not quite ready to take over the music world. Nicks famously worked as a cocktail waitress and a cleaning woman, while Buckingham infamously stayed at home honing his guitar-playing skills. And also, uh, getting stoned on eleven pounds of opiated hash with other music friends/hanger ons/stoners, including a pre-fame Warren Zevon. Like Warren, he went out on the road with Don Everly, albeit on a short club tour. Like Nicks, he finally had to join the working population before Fleetwood Mac came calling, working in a PR Agency. 

But in between these periods of odd jobs and busy-doing-nothing, there was Buckingham Nicks. Nicks had met enginer Keith Olsen in 1971 while cleaning his house, and with him the band cut their album for Polydor. Assisting Olsen was Richard Dashut, one of the architects of the California Mac sound later in the decade. Drums were manned by Elvis' backing band member Ronnie Tutt and pro's pro Jim Keltner, future Warren Zevon collaborators Jorge Calderon (percussion) and studio pro Waddy Wachtel (guitar) filled out the sound. Buckingham Nicks is a lush-sounding album that presages a lot of the million-sellers Fleetwood Mac would produce just a couple years later. But in 1973, with the record being more or less completely ignored by the Polydor PR team, no one would buy an album featuring virtual unknowns Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, despite the added attraction of Stevie being topless on the cover. So Polydor quickly deleted Buckingham Nicks from their catalogue. 

You would think considering the success of Fleetwood Mac and Nicks solo that Buckingham Nicks never got officially rereleased. Weird from Polydor that as soon as Fleetwood Mac or at least Rumours became hits they wouldn't run out to release this. And then for years Lindsey talked about the possibility of officially releasing it, giving it its first digital release, but alas...and considering the terms on which Buckingham and Nicks left things between them a couple of years ago, I think there is little hope that we will ever get an official release from this. The version I have is, I believe, a high-quality vinyl rip. 

This is a carefully curated version of Buckingham Nicks. You can get a bunch more of periphelia from places like Paul's Albums That Should Exist blog, but not every outtake is worth hearing, or hearing more than once. So for this edition I kept only the best and best-sounding outtakes/demos, on par with the album itself. Basically you won't hear a difference when the album segues from closing track "Frozen Love" into first outtake "Garbo". On top of the five top outtakes you'll also get five live tracks from a concert in Tuscaloosa, one of the last to feature Buckingham Nicks under that banner after they had already joined the Mac and wrapped up contractual obligations. They run through early versions of "Monday Morning", "I Don't Wanna Know" and "Blue Letter", plus another unreleased Buckingham original, "Heartbreaker" and the only mini-classic to come out of this album, the propulsive "Don't Let Me Down Again". For an album which sold, like, a couple of hundred copies, it must have at least ended up in the hands of some musicians, yielding cover versions of that song from Richard Torrance and Eureka (coming up on an All Pearls, No Swine comp in a couple of weeks) and Rusty Wier (probably also coming up in some form on this blog in the near future).  

Oh well, if you have some love for the Cal Mac and the Buckingham Nicks duo, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Liddy Buck has two instrumental fingerpicking showpieces, and generally speaking these songs are about as well constructed as most of their Mac stuff. Buckingham Nicks deserves better than being a half-forgotten juvenilia curiosity, with this version of the album hopefully doing its humble part to remedy that situation.