The creation of Fleetwood Mac’s most notable line-up hinged on Christine McVie liking Stevie Nicks. By 1974, McVie had been within the band for a number of years, becoming a member of quickly after she married founding member John McVie. She was the one woman within the band of males, a dynamic she was used to.
Mick Fleetwood was the primary member of the band to listen to a Buckingham-Nicks track and urged they invite Lindsey Buckingham to be their new guitarist. However Buckingham informed the group that he and Nicks have been a package deal deal.
“Mick got here to me and stated, ‘They’ve a lady concerned right here. You’re gonna have to fulfill her and see should you like her,’” McVie recalled in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone. “And we met and I immediately preferred her.”
Nicks and Buckingham would official be part of the band on New Yr’s Eve, a life-changing choice for all the group. From 1975’s Fleetwood Mac on, the band would turn into one of many largest on the planet. On the helm have been three vocalists, every distinctive of their efficiency fashion and approaches to songwriting, however unified in creating soulful, evocative rock music with a pop sensibility that might take them to the highest of the charts for over a decade till their first correct cut up on the finish of the Eighties.
Fleetwood Mac would crumble and return to one another repeatedly, because of their decadent, drug and alcohol-fueled excursions and the dramatic double-break-ups that might encourage 1977’s Rumours, an album so enduringly widespread that it topped Billboard’s year-end rock charts simply this yr.
Braving all of it have been McVie and Nicks, a unified female power within the face of rock’s overwhelmingly masculine vitality of each the period and their very band. To be a girl in music is to be continually in contrast and solely upheld in opposition to different ladies in music. It doesn’t matter what style, feminine performers are considered as competing in a slender competitors the place few are supposed to succeed, even when all of them carry one thing distinctive to the desk.
However McVie and Nicks discovered the key, reveling in the truth that there was energy in sisterhood. They didn’t see one another as competitors, principally as a result of they have been each so totally different from each other in nearly each manner. On stage, they supplied such distinctive energies and within the studio their types diverged nearly fully. Mixed, they have been capable of play off their divergent personas on one another’s songs, offering the yin to the opposite’s yang, relying on the monitor or the day. They weren’t solely musical allies however finest associates, discovering companionship and belief in each other as their relationships with their exes/bandmates threatened to derail the entire thing.
“We have been cool onstage,” Nicks recalled of the Rumours period break-ups in a joint interview with McVie in 2013. “However offstage all people was fairly offended. Most nights Chris and I’d simply go for dinner on our personal, downstairs within the lodge, with safety on the door.”
On the core of Fleetwood Mac’s success was the pair’s love and respect for each other. Nicks reiterated that that McVie was her finest pal in a heartfelt, handwritten tribute following McVie’s sudden demise this week. Through the years, Nicks has praised and celebrated what McVie was capable of present for her, particularly through the band’s early days. 5 years aside, McVie had a leg up on expertise and knowledge that she readily gave to Nicks. And so they supplied essential emotional help through the hardest instances.
“She was my therapist and my go-to individual for almost every part,” Nicks informed Vogue in 2020. “We had one another to get by that basically troublesome state of affairs the place nobody was gonna stop the band. Christine and I stored the entire thing collectively by telling the three males, ‘You stop as a result of we’re not stopping.’ Thank God I had her, however on the opposite aspect of that, thank God she had me.”
Whereas Fleetwood Mac’s story gave romantic turmoil for the ages, it gave us one true, nice love story. It was the love between two finest associates, an unbreakable bond that made everybody round them even stronger.
As Nicks put it: “We actually have been a power of nature.”
