CNN – When Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, they helped propel the band to a commercial and creative pinnacle.
For the couple, though, joining the band was the beginning of the end of their love story.
Nicks and Buckingham’s infamously tumultuous relationship, which began in the early 1970s, ended just two years into their tenure in Fleetwood Mac.
Though they’ve been broken up for nearly 50 years, their mutual antipathy remains as legendary as their musical output.
“I met her when I was about 16,” Buckingham said in a 2009 BBC documentary about the band. “It’s been most of my life. Sadly, for the lion’s share of those years, there has been distance and animosity of some kind, mixed in with everything else, too. It’s never been just one thing.”
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And yet, after decades of performing love songs onstage while ripping into each other backstage, Nicks and Buckingham seem to have paused their ongoing feud to rerelease the only album they made as a duo, 1973’s “Buckingham Nicks.”
Whether the pair will do more to promote the album than share cryptic corresponding Instagram posts remains to be seen. Their acrimony fueled enduring, influential music, but any reunion between the two likely won’t be as effortless as their sound.
1966-1973: Classmates to bandmates to lovers
Nicks and Buckingham met in 1966 as high school students in California’s Bay Area. Though they played guitar a bit together, it wasn’t until they were both attending San Jose State University that they officially teamed up musically, when Buckingham invited Nicks to join his first band, the psychedelic-folk rock group Fritz.
The pair resisted romance until after Fritz broke up in the early ’70s.
“I think there was always something between me and Lindsey, but nobody in that band really wanted me as their girlfriend because I was just too ambitious for them” …
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