Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were together again onstage, lit up in blue, performing a song that had helped fuel their rise so long ago.
They were nearing the end of “Landslide,” her singing about snow-covered hills, him strumming his guitar, when she turned and faced him. For a long moment, the rock-and-roll stars at the center of a highly public, decades-long romantic feud held each other’s gaze. Something passed between them. She beamed at him, and he raised a hand to his face, looking at her like she was the only person in the world.
It was that exchange, which came midway through the 1997 MTV Fleetwood Mac reunion special “The Dance,” that inspired the story behind the new television miniseries “Daisy Jones and the Six.” Taylor Jenkins Reid, the author of the best-selling novel the series is based on, first glimpsed it as a 13-year-old flipping between television channels.
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Years later, she was still thinking about it.
“I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing ‘Landslide,’” Jenkins Reid wrote in a piece for Hello Sunshine, the production company behind the show. “How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.”
The result is a work of fiction: the tale of made-up seventies rockers Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne and how their star-crossed attraction tore apart their band at the peak of its power. But the real-life relationship that gave rise to the book and now the series, which premieres Friday on Prime Video, was just as passionate and tumultuous. (Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon, which owns Prime Video.) Decades after Nicks and Buckingham began making music together in a partnership that would leave a lasting mark on rock, it still is.
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The two first crossed paths as Bay Area high-schoolers, 10 years before they would become part of Fleetwood Mac’s most successful lineup. At an event held by the religious group Young Life on a Wednesday night in 1965, Buckingham was playing “California Dreamin’ ” on the piano.
“Well, I just happened to know every word and could sing the harmony, and I thought he was absolutely stunning,” Nicks recalled in the biography Gold Dust Woman. “So I kind of casually maneuvered my way over to the piano.”
After singing together that night, they didn’t speak for a few years, until Buckingham suggested Nicks join his band, Fritz. Though she would later tell Rolling Stone she thought there was “always something between me and Lindsey,” her all-male bandmates had agreed none of them could date her. That lasted only as long as the band did. Then Nicks and Buckingham began collaborating as a duo — both romantically and musically.
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For some time after dropping out of college, they lived the life of starving artists in Los Angeles, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Nicks supported them by working as a waitress and house cleaner as they toiled away at an album, the eponymous Buckingham Nicks. Its flop, after all they had put on the line, inspired the lyrics of “Landslide,” which would become a hit for Fleetwood Mac.
“There were points during that time where I was, this is never going to work, this is just never going to work,” Nicks said in an Oprah’s Master Class episode about her life and career. “And we’re going to end up breaking up and everything we’ve worked for is going to be done and it’s all going to be for nothing. That’s really what the song ‘Landslide’ is about — to give that up.”
But months before a self-imposed deadline, Mick Fleetwood heard another one of their songs, “Frozen Love.” The band he founded had cycled through multiple lineup changes over the years and now needed a guitarist. He asked Buckingham to join.
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“He was standing there grooving to this searing guitar solo and he needed a guitar player. That was as far as his thinking went. I had to explain we came as a duo. Stupid me, eh?” Buckingham joked to Uncut in 2003.
If Fleetwood Mac had not come along, bringing with it all the trappings of fame, Nicks told the Guardian in 2011, she believed she and Buckingham might have gone on to marry and have a family, because “we were headed that way.”
“We didn’t really mess up till we moved to Los Angeles,” she said. “And that was when the whole world just ripped us apart.”
And yet, she added: “Fleetwood Mac was our destiny.”
With Nicks and Buckingham onboard, the band’s 1975 self-titled album shot to the top of the charts. But the personal lives of the Mac members became a mess as they worked on a second album. Buckingham and Nicks, who she once quipped “were about as compatible as a boa constrictor and a rat,” were breaking up. So were married bandmates Christine and John McVie. Fleetwood and his wife were divorcing. There was also the prolific — and sometimes debilitating — drug and alcohol usage.
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“We broke up because being in that band, was just too difficult to be in a relationship,” Nicks told Chum Radio in 2001. “I mean, I think it’s why Lindsey and I, and Chris and John, broke up; the band got so big, so fast, that we were all just like blown away, you know. And it was almost like, this, we can’t do this, we can’t, this is destroying our business. The business of Fleetwood Mac is being destroyed by these relationships. And we were none of us willing to give up the band.”
The emotional turmoil was famously at the heart of Fleetwood Mac’s enduringly popular 1977 album “Rumours,” which won a Grammy as album of the year and became one of the best-selling albums of all time, with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide.
A line from Buckingham’s breakup song “Go Your Own Way” — “packing up, shacking up is all you want to do” — particularly irked Nicks. It wasn’t true, she told Rolling Stone, and “every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him.” In her song “Silver Springs,” which was cut from the album and instead released as a B-side to “Go Your Own Way,” Nicks belted out an angry promise to Buckingham: “I’ll follow you down ’til the sound of my voice will haunt you.”
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For years they both remained in Fleetwood Mac, performing songs about their relationship and breakup night after night, at times clearly clashing as the music made it real again, until leaving for solo projects in the late- 1980s and early-1990s.
“Really, each one of us was too proud and way too stubborn to walk away from it,” Nicks told Uncut in 2003. “I wasn’t going to leave. Lindsey wasn’t going to leave. What would we have done – sat around in LA and tried to start new bands? It was just ‘grit your teeth and bear it.'”
There were other romances along the way: Nicks dated Don Henley of the Eagles and had a short-lived, much-regretted affair with Fleetwood. A brief marriage came in 1983, when, grief-stricken over her best friend’s death, she’d had what she later described as a “crazy” thought: that her friend would want her to become her baby’s stepmother. She and her best friend’s widower, Kim Anderson, divorced within a few months.
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Buckingham, meanwhile, had a long-term relationship with Carol Ann Harris. In 2000, he wed Kristen Messner, with whom he’d had a child two years earlier. The couple went on to have two more kids. That ended any possibility of Buckingham and Nicks being romantically involved again: “I knew that was it … that was the definitive thing,” Nicks told MTV in 2009.
She added: “The love is always there but we’ll never be together, so that’s even more romantic.”
The tension was seemingly always there, too, with Buckingham telling Dan Rather in 2015, “You would think after all these years, there would be nothing left to work on. But, oddly enough, Stevie’s and my relationship is still a work in progress, and I guess that says something, doesn’t it — about the care, about possibly the parallel motives that have driven us down the roads that we’ve been on.”
If they were always arguing, by 2018, they were openly feuding. Buckingham and Nicks had each made their way back to Fleetwood Mac following the 1997 special that brought the Rumours-era lineup back together. He requested a touring delay; Nicks said no. The final straw came months later during the MusiCares Person of the Year gala. Nicks believed that Buckingham was mocking her during her acceptance speech, the Los Angeles Times reported. Days after the event, he was fired from the band.
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Buckingham, who filed a now-settled lawsuit over his dismissal, claimed to Rolling Stone his ex made the band choose: him or her. Nicks said in a statement to the magazine she did not have him fired or ask for him to be fired, but decided she could no longer work with him. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2020, she called it “a long time coming.”
“I stayed with him from 1968 until that night. It’s a long time. And I really could hear my parents — I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really gonna do this for the rest of your life?’ And I could hear my dad saying in his very pragmatic way — because my dad really liked Lindsey — ‘I think it’s time for you and Lindsey to get a divorce.’ It’s a very unfortunate thing. It makes me very, very sad.”
She told the outlet she sent a short note to her former flame after his 2019 heart attack but otherwise hadn’t spoken to him. Two years later, Buckingham said in an interview with the New York Times that was all he’d heard from her.
But he was still hoping for a different ending.
“I’ve known Stevie since I was 16, so I would like to think there’s a better way for us to finish up than we finished up,” he said. “Not just for Fleetwood Mac and for the legacy, but just for the two of us.”
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