How Fleetwood Mac Won the Classic Rock Wars

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, capitalizing on the enduring public fascination with their ancient toxic romance, recently announced a reissue of their first album. Buckingham Nicks, the duo’s pre-Fleetwood Mac folk-rock LP from 1973, has long been out of print; this hasn’t prevented it from achieving cult classic status. (My most treasured vinyl is an original pressing in good condition. Though slightly overproduced, it’s an impressive debut where their signature styles start to come into view. “Frozen Love” is the highlight.) Billboards were erected around L.A. last month featuring the album’s iconic cover, a windswept black and white portrait of Stevie and Lindsey in the nude. It was a surreal sight even on social media, the feathered hair of a baby-faced Nicks rising just above the hills, especially because she’s on record as hating that photo. Treating the announcement almost as if the album were new, Stevie and Lindsey teased Buckingham Nicks lyrics on their Instagrams in romantic cursive. 

Meanwhile, fans hold out hope for a proper reunion between the legendary exes, whose working relationship crashed and burned when Buckingham was fired and replaced on the 2018 Fleetwood Mac tour. The most-liked comment on Stevie’s IG post about Buckingham Nicks sums up the sentiment: “This is even better than the Parent Trap.” They haven’t been together since the mid ’70s, and y’all freaks online still ship them. 

I’m surprised it took this long for Buckingham Nicks to go through the legacy machine. I’m not surprised it faces competition from another upcoming vinyl reissue: the 50th anniversary edition of Fleetwood Mac. That album, released in 1975, introduced the world to Stevie and Lindsey, the quintessential California couple making their home within this established British blues-rock band. Theirs was something like the eighth iteration of Fleetwood Mac, but since the LP’s release, and the gangbusters success of 1977’s Rumours, hardly a year has gone by without the band making headlines. The solo projects, the reissues, the reunions, the fighting behind the scenes of the reunions. Up next is an authorized documentary for Apple TV+, touted as the “definitive” Fleetwood Mac movie.

This mining of lore is also external. The Fleetwood Mac story is Boomer Shakespeare at this point, destined to be retold and remixed for eternity. Blatant homages to Rumours-era drama have resurged across entertainment in the last few years. I’m thinking of the best-selling novel Daisy Jones and The Six and its middling TV adaptation starring Elvis’ granddaughter, Riley Keough, in the Stevie-type role; and the Tony-winning play Stereophonic, currently on London’s West End and headed for a U.S. tour in the fall. The latter takes place inside of recording studios in Sausalito and Los Angeles in the mid ’70s, as the British and American members of a rock band are all breaking up, snorting down, popping off, and toiling over a future masterpiece LP chronicling the mess. Sound familiar? 

Most striking to me, however, are the memes. I’m not even referring to the Ocean Spray-chugging skateboarder listening to “Dreams,” who went viral on TikTok early in the pandemic. Now there’s an entire cottage industry surrounding “Silver Springs,” Nicks’ searing breakup song that, in a criminal act, was left off Rumours. A 1997 performance, from Fleetwood Mac’s live album and DVD, The Dance, has become eternal on social media. “Probably needed therapy but rented a private karaoke room and made my husband act dejected while I screamed ‘Silver Springs’ at him instead,” reads one mildly viral IG reel. There’s also bootleg merch. Recently I saw the song’s kiss-off—“You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you”— hand-stitched onto a sweatshirt in a boutique on Cape Cod and thought: This is just straight white women’s culture now. Heteropessimism swathed in a witchy caftan, or a $90 sweatshirt. 

That few feet of stage between Stevie and Lindsey during “Silver Springs,” watch it shrink. In The Dance, Stevie turns towards Lindsey and sings the charged parts directly at him; she stares, but he stares back. In fact, he locks in like a shortstop waiting for a line drive. The intensity of their eye contact in this performance is so understood that “Silver Springs” is now shorthand for the exhaustion of dating men. In one TikTok, a man and a woman stare at each other on a train in Greece, looks of regret, betrayal, and annoyance splashed across their faces; a stranger captures the moment, inserts the song, and writes “wondering if ‘silver springs’ is playing in their heads.” It gets three million likes.

The way Nicks sings “never get away, never get away” is a diva taunt in itself, a spell she casts on Buckingham (really, they’re both locked into the curse of being better together than solo). “Silver Springs” was her response to his scathing account of their relationship’s end, “Go Your Own Way,” one of Rumours’ biggest hits. Nicks took particular umbrage with the line “packing up, shacking up is all you wanna do,” and she no longer plays “Go Your Own Way” live. You can imagine 20 years of singing harmonies on a song that calls you a slut would make a person mad. 

One reason that Fleetwood Mac “won” the classic rock wars, in the pop cultural sense, is because their songs operate from both the man’s and the woman’s point of view. (Multiple women’s points of view, actually: In Nicks and in Christine McVie [RIP], listeners get complementary archetypes: the poised but modest McVie hiding out behind the keys, the defiant and diaristic Nicks blessedly traipsing through the spotlight.) I don’t see viral videos set to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Stones, or any of the other English rock groups beloved by Boomers. This is a shift from even 20 years ago, when anyone who picked up a rock magazine was told, among other myths, that Jimmy Page was the greatest guitarist of all time. Now rock magazines don’t exist, it’s common knowledge that Page “dated” a 14-year-old girl, and the harder-edged Boomer rock canon has lost its grip on teenage boys with guitars. Yet Fleetwood Mac, long regarded as the platonic ideal of soft rock, have stayed enormously popular. One of the best-selling albums of all time, Rumours is a permanent staple on the Billboard 200 chart; it currently sits at no. 19. 

A small tangent: Fleetwood Mac is one of the very few rock bands that my 67-year-old mother actually likes, instead of merely tolerating. I have this indelible image of her in my mind from the ’90s: driving towards Youngstown in her Dodge minivan, past the prison and the shuttered factories, singing “The Chain.” She’d never been cheated on in her life, but she belted it with the sass and spite of a woman scorned—If you don’t love me now. This is the autonomous mess of people’s lives, not the tokenized, sexualized female muses invoked by other guitar gods, and women relate to that. I’d call it mom rock but I think, more accurately, it is family rock. The music transcends generations for many reasons, but it comes down to the strength of the songwriting: hooks, harmonies, and one of rock’s best rhythm sections; the big emotions running through the songs, and the added bonus of knowing it was real. I imagine Tusk’s “Save Me a Place” playing when my parents are reunited in heaven, that’s how deep this shit runs. 

“I had to see it, this is my band,” said a 73-year-old lifelong Californian seated next to me at a Broadway matinee of Stereophonic last October. The play is staged as if the audience is watching a documentary of the control room and recording booths, with an omniscient point of view achieved by taking the perspective of the engineer/co-producer. It won five Tonys last year and earned heaps of praise in the press, but it wasn’t until Rumours co-producer and engineer Ken Caillat sued the Stereophonic creators that it really hit home: here’s another nod to the real-time heartache and substance abuse that fueled Rumours. As reported in the New Yorker, Caillat caught wind of the play via his daughter, the singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat, and suspected a heavy-handed pull from his memoir, Making Rumours. 

For my new theater friend at least, the allegations made him want to see Stereophonic even more. I sat through the production a bit stunned: a lot of details match up. The dynamics of the breakups and the general personalities are very similar, down to the British drummer/band peacemaker who’s also going through a divorce back home. They keep grueling hours, which at some point in the night devolves into drinking and doing cocaine. Arguments are frequent, and you see one erupt while they record gorgeous three-part harmonies. The Lindsey character is a short-fused perfectionist prick; the Stevie character is a fragile mess who hides out in empty rooms writing by herself (which Nicks was known to do). Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-divorced bassist and keyboardist handle it the British way, by barely speaking. 

This is all happening against wood-paneled interiors resembling the Record Plant, where Rumours was primarily made, with mention of the women taking refuge in their own condo. I honestly chortled when I saw a recent Guardian story in which Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi attributes his inspiration to hearing Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” on a plane. At least Will Butler’s original music for the band in Stereophonic is solid—I like “Masquerade” best. 

Both Stereophonic and Daisy Jones and The Six employ storytelling techniques that nod to their real-life roots. (They also employed real-life rockers to make the music, with Blake Mills working on Daisy Jones.) For Stereophonic, it’s the rock-doc staging and all-seeing point of view; for Daisy Jones, it’s the oral history format. Every band member and associate tells their side of “the story,” the story being: why did this band implode at the height of fame? Short answer: because the relationship between Daisy and The Six’s primary songwriter Billy was too intense, and he was married. 

In Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book, the oral history format tricks you into forgetting you’re reading a romance novel with a side of music industry lore. (The audiobook is particularly great at this, with a smoky-voiced Jennifer Beals voicing Daisy and the always delightful Judy Greer voicing keyboardist Karen.) Though Reid said she was inspired by the 1997 “Silver Springs” performance, the details are a bit different, or at least well scrambled: the band is from Pittsburgh, Daisy is foisted upon them by the label, and the plotline is much more about her twin struggles of hiding her drug habit and being taken seriously as a songwriter by the group. Maybe that’s why Nicks said she saw her own story in Daisy and in Keough’s portrayal: She was never asked to join Fleetwood Mac, but instead came as part of a package deal with Lindsey, and felt like she was constantly fighting for her songs to make the cut.

Imagine the band without her, without the destructive lovers. Imagine a world where “Silver Springs” never got redemption. Our endless fascination with the tumultuous relationship at the heart of Fleetwood Mac will probably never die. Nah, we’ll never break the chain.