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Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s breakup provided rich fodder for multiple Fleetwood Mac albums. The couple was together when they joined the band and split while recording Rumours, as any casual listener might suspect. Nicks said she was the one who called it quits. Even decades afterward, she could remember the day she ended their romance.
Stevie Nicks revealed what happened on the day she broke up with Lindsey Buckingham
While Nicks and Buckingham were a couple when they joined Fleetwood Mac, she admitted their relationship was not in a good place. Their problems only worsened as time went on, and she realized she wanted to leave the relationship.
“I don’t even remember what the issues were; I just know that it got to the point where I wanted to be by myself,” she told Rolling Stone in 1997. “It just wasn’t good anymore, wasn’t fun anymore, wasn’t good for either of us anymore. I’m just the one who stopped it.”
The band retreated to Sausalito, California, to work on Rumours. Nicks and Buckingham began to put distance between each other. Eventually, though, she reached her breaking point and they called it quits for good.
“In Sausalito, up at the little condominium. Lindsey and I were still enough together that he would come up there and sleep every once in a while,” she said. “And we had a terrible fight – I don’t remember what about, but I remember him walking out and me saying, ‘You take the car with all the stuff, and I’m flying back.’ That was the end of the first two months of the recording of Rumours.”
Stevie Nicks once said she felt married to Lindsey Buckingham
Their relationship wasn’t always the tortured one the public has known. Nicks said they got along well in the early days. They moved to Los Angeles to work on music and got together in the process.
“Our relationship was great,” Nicks said. “We had other problems: didn’t have a lot of money, alone in L.A., didn’t have our families, no friends, didn’t know anybody. But we had each other.”
They were so committed to each other that she felt as though she were in a marriage.
“From ’71 through ’75, I lived with Lindsey all those years,” she said. “We were absolutely married. In every way [but for the ring]. I cooked, I cleaned, I worked. I took care of him.”
He said their split was the right move for the band
The breakup was not easy on Nicks or Buckingham. In retrospect, though, he realized it was the right move for himself.
“It was a little lonely there for a while,” he told Rolling Stone in 1977. “The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is really a cleansing thing … As I began to feel myself becoming more myself again. I’m surprised we lasted as long as we did.”
He noted that if he and Nicks, and John and Christine McVie remained together, the band might have collapsed.
“If Stevie and I, and John and Chris had remained as couples, the stability of the band would not have been very good,” he said, per the book Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac. “It was like that was a necessary thing to go through to eliminate all those weird vibes. And, we respect each other a lot more now.”
According to Nicks, though, there were plenty of “weird vibes” after the two couples split.
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