When Lindsey turned 13, he had developed a keen interest in folk music, and spent much time practicing the fingerpicking styles of the Kingston Trio. At 15, he sang and played guitar with a small folk group (as shown in one of the photos of 'Cradle' liner notes). He attended Menlo-Atherton High School, a year behind Stevie Nicks, and was 'a stand-out performer' with the Varsity Water Poloists and the on the swim team. In his Junior year, he sang a few songs with Stevie at a Young Life gathering, and in his Senior year Buckingham, Nicks (who was by then a student at San Jose State College), and three other friends formed a group called The Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band. Since his abilities on guitar leaned towards the fingerpicking styles of folk and bluegrass, Buckingham was soon transferred to bass, "since he found it extremely difficult to master the then fashionable heavy rock style." Fritz was quite popular at the high school, and played at various school functions, (including their 1967 graduation party) before moving on to become "one of the major local acts in the San Francisco Bay music scene" in 1968. The band opened for such acts as Santana, Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. When he was 21, Lindsey remembers, "Some aunt that our family didn't even know left my brothers and I each $10,000 when she died, so I went out and got an Ampex four-track with a half inch tape-- y'know, a professional machine-- and a console, and took it up to my father's warehouse, and learned how to work machines, basically, from that."

In 1971, when Fritz disbanded, Lindsey and Stevie became romantically involved. They both dropped out of San Jose State College (where he had majored in Art; she in Speech Communications) and moved to L.A. together to pursue their dream of making music. Before moving, however, Lindsey was struck with a year-long bout of mononucleosis, and he spent much of this time developing his technique on the electric guitar. Once in L.A., they eventually secured a deal with Polydor records and released an album, Buckingham Nicks, in November of 1973. The record didn't cause much of a stir, and the label declined the duo's desire to make a second one. To make ends meet, Stevie waitressed and cleaned houses while Lindsey "hustled ads over the phone for a non-existent business products directory," and also toured with Don Everly's back-up band, singing Phil's parts. Money was so tight that Lindsey and Richard Dashut used to take turns bouncing checks at sympathetic local coffee shops. As Richard recalls: "I had moved out to one-bedroom apartment near Fairfax. After Buckingham Nicks bombed, Stevie and Lindsey ran out of money, so they moved in with me...and we worked on demos for the next BN album-- 'So Afraid,' 'Monday Morning', and 'Rhiannon.'"

Buckingham and Nicks were asked to join Fleetwood Mac on New Year's Eve, 1974, after Mick Fleetwood heard 'Frozen Love' at a studio called Sound City. As Lindsey remembers: "It wasn't an easy decision; we believed in what we had going as a twosome, but we thought it over and we realized that we probably had a great deal to learn from these people, and that they could help us and we could help them...and we did it. " Their first album with the band, released in 1975, broke all sales records for Warner Brothers at that time, and the group toured extensively through 1975 and 1976. By the time Rumours was released in 1977, Lindsey and Stevie had ended their long-term relationship, the McVie's were split, and Fleetwood had separated from his wife. "On the one hand, you had all these traumatic, personal problems that were going on for four out of five members of the group, and on the other hand you had this very special, magical chemistry between five people which was something that you didn't come by every day.  They had to put all the personal problems off in one corner of the room and get on with what we knew was important, because it was just too good a situation to let go by."

It took the band over a year to make their next album, Tusk, in 1979, and Lindsey was determined not to just make a "Rumours Two." He did much of the work for the album at home, and indeed, much of his material "appeared to go out of its way to shun commercial considerations." Richard Dashut, co-producer of the album and close friend of Lindsey's, agrees that, "I think the other members really just went along with it for the sake of the band, as opposed to really agreeing with where his head was at." Tusk never reached the mega-sales status of Rumours, but it has since become the favorite album of several members of the group. Buckingham received special thanks for his production work on the record, and Tusk was dedicated to Mick's father, Wing Commander Fleetwood, who had passed away that year, and Lindsey's father, Morris, who passed away in February, 1974. After touring for nearly a year, the band released a live album in 1980, although Lindsey was initially a bit hesitant about the idea: "A lot of groups have been putting out live records recently, and I would hate for someone to think that this is just another in the pack."

Aside from working on Tusk, Buckingham also produced albums for Walter Egan and John Stewart in the late 70's. In 1981, Lindsey released his first solo record, Law And Order, on which he played nearly every instrument, and had guest appearances by bandmates Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie. In 1982, Fleetwood Mac released Mirage, an album that many critics felt was lacking the vitality of previous releases. The album went to Number One for 5 weeks, while the group went on a relatively short tour to promote it.

It was becoming increasingly clear that Buckingham much preferred the studio to the road, and enjoyed it even more when he was there on his own. In 1984, after ending a 7 year relationship with Carol Ann Harris, he released his second solo project, Go Insane. He admits that much of the subject matter "just deals with having broken up with somebody and having someone who exhibits behavior that is hard to deal with daily." Rolling Stone hailed the album as a 'tuneful triumph': "If Lindsey Buckingham really is following in the footsteps of his idol , Brian Wilson, then Go Insane is his Pet Sounds: possibly his least commercial work, but also his most daring and savory."

By the time Fleetwood Mac reunited in 1987 to make Tango In The Night, Lindsey had been halfway into his third solo album, and he begrudgingly handed over much of the material to the band. He and partner Richard Dashut turned their attention to producing the album, and much of the work was done at Lindsey's house in Bel Air. At the time, all band members thought that making the album was a healthy, healing experience, and that the result was a much stronger effort than Mirage had been. (It was to become their biggest-selling album since Rumours.) Soon there was pressure to go on the road; at this point, however, Buckingham wanted to devote himself to his solo work, and refused to tour. After Buckingham and Nicks had a "physically ugly" encounter during a band meeting, John McVie sheepishly recalls the incident on August 7, 1987 which led to Lindsey's decision to leave the group:" [I said] 'Lindsey, why don' t you just leave'...he left...but what I meant was, 'Why don't you just leave the room!' That's true." Lindsey was replaced by Rick Vito and Billy Burnette.

After leaving the group, he "took an entire year off, just to let the emotional dust settle. But once I got started on Out Of The Cradle, I got back some of the instincts that I'd put on the back burner." His third album was released in 1992, with Buckingham again singing all the vocals and playing all the instruments. He had spent the better part of 4 years holed up in his windowless studio (although he admits to leaving occasionally to spend time with girlfriend Cheri Caspari, whom he'd met while making Go Insane in '84.) Many reviews of the album raved that it was LB's best work since Tusk. Many of the songs seemed to deal with the loss of both his father, Morris, and his brother, Greg, who died suddenly in 1990. In early 1993, after reuniting with Fleetwood Mac to sing 'Don't Stop' at Clinton's Inaugural Gala, Lindsey got a band together (which included Janet Robin and Neale Heywood) and took his music on the road, performing his own solo work as well as some Fleetwood Mac favorites. According to Rolling Stone, "United by Buckingham's undying melodic ingenuity, the material all flowed together rather seamlessly. Having put FM behind him once and for all at the inaugural celebration, Buckingham looked and played like a man creatively emancipated."

Lindsey Buckingham has reunited with the group and accompanied them on their 1997 tour. A new solo album was postponed due to the reunion. However, that album was the reason that the band reunited. After working with Mick Fleetwood on a song for the solo album, Lindsey and Mick found that they had much to discuss, and that they were conducting their lives in a different and more positive manner than they had been doing back in 1987, when Lindsey had left the band. "It was great seeing him again. He wasn't doing drugs, he was in a totally different space. We had a lot to talk about and all the care and love that had always been there came to the surface," shared Buckingham. Fleetwood described their renewed relationship: "We started from ground zero as people, and I now know Lindsey in a way I never got close to before . . . . It wasn't just music; we talked and hugged and it was a whole major deal." What was supposed to be a three month project turned into a year, and the two eventually decided to invite John McVie and Christine McVie to assist them. The chemistry within the band was absolutely still there, and this began the wheels turning towards a full-fledged reunion.

Lindsey was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Fleetwood Mac on January 12, 1998 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

Following the Fleetwood Mac reunion, Lindsey returned to work on his postponed solo album, which is said to be very much a solo effort with Lindsey writing and producing it, and includes at least some instrumentals pieces. "Everything sounds great to me, classic Mr. Buckingham, I think," says friend and continuing cohort Neale Heywood in his Penguin Q&A Session, who also adds that Lindsey has settled very happily into his new role as father. On July 8, 1998, Lindsey, along with girlfriend Kristen Messner, welcomed a son, William Gregory Buckingham, weighing 7 pounds 6 ounces. The year 2000 saw Lindsey and Kristen, now married, welcome a second child into the Buckingham family fold as well.

After attending Walpole Grammar School until he was nearly seventeen, John started a nine month civil service training as a tax inspector. Also at this time, blues musician John Mayall was interested in forming a band and was looking for a bassist, and was given McVie's number from a friend. Mayall, who would later be heralded as "The Father of British Blues," turned out to be "a mentor" to McVie, and taught him the rudiments of the blues. After nine months of working full-time during the day as a tax inspector and playing all-nighters with the Bluesbreakers (in photo, John is at the far left with hair!!), John decided to become a professional musician.

John McVie spent nearly five years in the Bluesbreakers, and aside from being fired (but always rehired) several times for 'excessive drinking,' he was by far Mayall's longest serving sideman. In 1967, after Eric Clapton left the Bluesbreakers for a brief while, Mayall hired a persistent and talented young guitarist named Peter Green, as well as a new drummer by the name of Mick Fleetwood. The three hit it off both musically and socially; thus, the seedlings of Fleetwood Mac were born. Once Clapton returned to the Bluesbreakers, the newly-acclaimed Green was encouraged to form his own band, so he recruited Mick Fleetwood (already fired from the Bluesbreakers for drunkenness) and tried to convince John to join as well. (A temporary bassist, Bob Brunning, had been hired during this time.) Hesitant to leave the financial security of a steady gig, McVie stubbornly refused for several months, even though Peter had already named the band after his favorite rhythm section. Finally, after coming to the conclusion that Mayall had gotten "too jazzy," McVie phoned up Green and Fleetwood in September of 1967 and said he was in.

Right away, Fleetwood Mac began to establish themselves as 'crusaders of the English Blues movement'. While playing clubs on the blues circuit, the band frequently encountered Chicken Shack, and McVie took a liking to the group's beautiful singer and pianist, Christine Perfect. John recalls: "One night we were at the Thames Hotel, Windsor, and I was sitting with Chris, and I asked if she would care to go out to dinner some evening. She said she would, and it was quite romantic." Soon after, he proposed at a club called 'The Bag O' Nails', and the two were married two weeks later in August of 1968. Peter Green served as best man. Since the two spent so much time touring with their respective bands, they rarely saw each other, and in 1969 Christine decided to leave Chicken Shack to be a housewife and "spend more time with hubby." Her 'retirement' from the music business was brief, as she officially joined Fleetwood Mac in 1970. In 1971, it was John who started the band's penguin iconography, after getting a tattoo of his favorite animal on his right forearm.

In the years to follow, the band would muddle through many personnel changes, legal battles, and long, stressful tours. As the years passed, the strain of trying to keep the band going caused McVie's alcohol problem to worsen. Ironically, once Fleetwood Mac found the success they had strived for with the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in 1975, the McVies' marriage began to break apart. Mick Fleetwood recalls that the constant togetherness of the couple "certainly was not a problem to start with. It became a problem when the road dog element in John came out. Hey, you're sharing a bedroom, you're sharing a van, you're sharing! It's a tall order to put on to anyone, and I think many years later it was intangible situation, where they became very unhappy." Christine maintains that, "John and I had spent the equivalent of fifty years of marriage together. We had no individuality, no separation." McVie learned of Christine's affair with the band's lighting director, Curry Grant, while on the road, and at the end of the tour she moved out of the house that they had bought together in Topanga. After trying unsuccessfully to live there with another woman, John sold the house and bought a boat with his share of the proceeds. He lived on Adelie for two years at Marina Del Rey.

It is no secret that the making of the album Rumours was a traumatic experience for all five members of the group, and it has been noted that McVie in particular "had to pull himself back from the edge of suicide. All made a conscious decision to subdue emotions for the sake of the band. In return, McVie thinks, hard work helped soothe the agony and affront of seeing his wife with another man." Hearing 'Don't Stop' in the studio was especially awkward: "I listened to the words, which were mostly about me, and I got a little lump in my throat... especially when you turn around and the writer's sitting right there."

John was remarried in 1978 to Julie Anne Rubens, his former secretary, and eventually purchased another boat called The Challenge, along with property in St. Thomas, Hawaii, and Los Angeles. In 1981, the McVie's were arrested at their Maui home after a package containing cocaine was found addressed to the couple. A newspaper account of the incident stated "police officers reported finding 4.5 grams of cocaine along with a small amount of marijuana in the McVie home.  John, a British subject, could face deportation proceedings if convicted." All charges were eventually dropped after the couple underwent a lie detector test.

After struggling with an alcohol problem since the age of 18, John McVie experienced an alcohol induced seizure in 1987 which scared the daylights out of him, and with a therapist's help he quit drinking completely. As he recalls, "It was time to stop-- plus it was destroying everything. There's nothing constructive comes out of being an alcoholic. " After sobering up, McVie became a father on February 28,1989, when daughter Molly Elizabeth was born.

The last member of Fleetwood Mac to embark on a solo project, he released John McVie's 'Gotta Band' with Lola Thomas in 1992; besides acting as executive producer, he played bass and sung background vocals as well. John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1998 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. His contributions to Say You Will were, as always, solid and creative. He continues to tour with the band in support of the album, always maintaining that this is simply 'what he does'-- "I have a 14-year-old in school and a Beverly Hills Jewish American Princess wife. But, no, it's not for the money. You know, this is what I do. I don't do anything else, except for a few hobbies like fishing. I've been on the road since I was 16." His friendship with Mick Fleetwood is still strong, 36 years later. As Mick says, “John is truly my best friend. I adore him. It’s mutual. We’ve been through so much. He is the most truthful person I know. We share a sense of humor. Loyalty; Musically, we’ve done it for so long together that...anything else is shallow compared to John."

The last time Stevie and her younger brother, Christopher, moved with the family was from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Stevie began writing songs at age sixteen after receiving a guitar for her birthday, and occasionally provided entertainment at school functions at Menlo-Atherton High. The first band Nicks was in, called The Changing Times, was heavily influenced by the harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas. She met Lindsey Buckingham during her Senior year of High School-- he was a Junior-- and the two, along with friends Javier Pacheco and Calvin Roper, formed Fritz Raybyne Memorial Band. Upon graduating, Stevie attended San Jose State University, where she studied Speech Communication. Since the other members of Fritz were still in High School, Stevie had to commute back and forth almost nightly in order to make the rehearsals and gigs.

In 1968, Fritz began their professional career in the Bay area, opening for acts such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and CCR. Watching Janis perform made quite an impression on the young songwriter: "You couldn't have pried me away with a million dollar check...I was absolutely glued to her. It was there that I learned a lot of what I do onstage...I said, 'If ever I am a performer of any value, I want to be able to create the same kind of feeling that is going on between her and her audience.'" While Fritz's manager kept trying unsuccessfully to get a them a record deal, the male members of the group were beginning to feel a little uneasy with all the attention their attractive female singer was receiving. Stevie recalls, "Those guys didn't take me seriously at all. I was just a girl singer and they hated the fact that I got a lot of the credit. They would kill themselves practicing for ten hours and people would call up and say, 'We want to book that band with the little brownish-blondish haired girl.' There was always just really weird things gong on between us. I could never figure out why I stayed in that band. Now I know it was in preparation for Fleetwood Mac."

When Fritz finally broke up in 1971, Lindsey and Stevie remained musically involved, and soon became romantically involved as well. Both 1998 Copyright Dave and Torri Liden; eventually dropped out of San Jose State (much to Stevie's parents' dismay) and moved to L.A. to pursue their musical dreams. Eventually ,in 1973, the duo landed a deal with Polydor Records and made the Buckingham Nicks album. Stevie remembers spending her last $111 on a beautiful white blouse to wear for the cover shoot, but the end result was that she and Lindsey both appeared on the album quite bare-chested: "I was crying when we took that picture. And Lindsey was mad at me. He said, 'You know, you're just being a child. This is art.' And I'm going, 'This is not *art*. This is me taking a nude photograph with you, and I don't dig it.'" Despite its intriguing cover, the album was a flop, and Nicks and Buckingham fell on some very hard times financially. They moved in with friend Richard Dashut, whom they'd met while making the album, and Stevie managed to pay the bills by getting a waitressing job at Clementine's, working for $1.50 an hour. Her worried parents began to encourage her to set some limits on this musical career that seemed to be going nowhere fast. Stevie admits that times were very tough: "It's very easy for me to remember having no money...while I was waiting tables, I'd get some money from them here and there. But if I wanted to go back to school, if I wanted to move back home, then they would support me. If I was going to be here in L.A. doing my own trip, I was going to have to do it on my own."

When the offer to join Fleetwood Mac came from Mick, the two didn't have to think about it very long.  Upon joining the group, Stevie went out and bought all of their previous albums.   "I sat in my room and listened to all of them to try and figure out if I could capture any theme or anything. And what I came up was the word mystical- that there is something mystical that went all the way from Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac straight through Jeremy, through all of them." Nicks added her own touch of mysticism in her song "Rhiannon" which climbed the charts in 1975.

By the time Rumours was completed in February, 1977, Stevie and Lindsey's relationship had come to an end. However, like John and Christine McVie, neither one wanted to bow out of Fleetwood Mac. Stevie recalls, "Really, each one of us was way too proud and way too stubborn to walk away from it...what would we have done? Sat around LA and tried to start new bands? Nobody wanted to do that. We liked touring. We liked making money, and we liked being a band. It was just, 'grit your teeth and bear it.'" Photo © Chris WalterStevie's hypnotic 'Dreams' was to become the band's only number one hit song in the States. Her magnificent 'Silver Springs,' on the other hand, was left off the album in favor of 'I Don't Want to Know,' and never quite received the attention and the airplay it deserved. According to Bob Brunning's biography of the band, Stevie "tore out into the parking lot and screamed with anger, frustration, and shock that the song she wrote about Lindsey was going to be relegated to the B-side of his song about her, 'Go Your Own Way.'" Years later, it was yet another controversy over 'Silver Springs' that eventually drove Nicks to leave the band-- Mick would not give her the song for her 1991 release Timespace and Stevie decided that this was the last straw. Over the years Nicks had embarked on an extremely successful solo career (produced in great part by Jimmy Iovine), and thought she'd simply continue on her own.

Ironically, Silver Springs was the very song which the band chose to release as their first single when they 'reunited' with the Rumours line-up in May, 1997. After years of devoting herself to solo pursuits, Nicks decided to put the bitterness of the past behind her and join the group and tour once more. Stevie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1998 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

As a young teen attending King's School in Sherbourn-- "the equivalent for underachievers like myself"-- Fleetwood grew more "obsessed" with drumming; other interests included fencing and the theatre group (Fleetwood played Ophelia in the school's production of Hamlet). Academically, though he continued to have serious problems, and by the time he was fifteen, it was decided that he would go and live with his sister, Sally, in London, to pursue his dream of being a drummer.

While living in Notting Hill Gate with his sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, Mick worked briefly at Liberty's department store before being fired. One day while playing his drums in the garage, he caught the attention of a young neighborhood musician named Peter Bardens; he later got Fleetwood his first gig with a band called the Senders before inviting him to join his own band, The Cheynes, in 1963. While playing the club circuit with the Cheynes, Mick met and became friends with eighteen year old, John McVie, the bass player in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. At age sixteen, he also met the girl he would later marry, Jenny Boyd. After the collapse of the Cheynes in 1965, Fleetwood drummed for a short while with a band called the Bo Street Runners. Next, Mick was recruited once again by Peter Bardens to play in his new band, Peter B's Looners where Mick got to know a talented young guitarist named Peter Green. By May, 1966, the band added two singers, Rod Stewart and Beryl Marsden, and changed their name to Shotgun Express. Green left the band in 1966 to join John Mayall, and Shotgun Express disbanded in early 1967.

Mick was out of work when Aynsley Dunbar, the Bluesbreakers' drummer, quit in the spring of 1967, and Fleetwood was surprised when Mayall asked him to join: "It was never a serious long-term venture in my mind, which was just as well, because I was asked to leave after a month." Although his stay in the band was brief, it was long enough for Fleetwood, Peter Green, and John McVie to realize they had a good working and social relationship. When Green decided to form his own band several months later, he immediately knew who should make up his rhythm section.

A founding member of Fleetwood Mac, Mick has seen the group through its many incarnations, through struggles and successes. His devotion to the band put stresses through his own personal relationships.  Mick often seemed to be "married to the band." He did eventually marry Jenny Boyd in 1970 and had two daughters; Amy Rose was born in January, 1971 and Lucy was born in April, 1973. [Here is an anti-drug clip by Mick and Amy Fleetwood (Age 3) from Get Off II ] In October 1973, Mick found out that Jenny was having an affair with bandmate Bob Weston-- the tour was cut short and Weston had to be fired. After the legal battle that ensued with manager Clifford Davis, Mick took over the role of band manager and continued to do so until 1979. When Bob Welch decided to leave the group in 1974, Mick was the one who happened to notice the talents of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks while out looking for a studio; Keith Olsen played him 'Frozen Love' off the Buckingham Nicks album to demonstrate the acoustics of the room. The drummer admits that his initial inquiry was "Who's that guitarist?" but he very quickly learned that Buckingham would not join without his partner: " I was aware of them coming as a package pretty early on, but there was a point where I was truly after Lindsey Buckingham, and the fact that Stevie was an afterthought is why she never forgave me. " In the end, the two ended up hitting it off so well with the others in the group that they were hired without an audition.

In 1977, he managed Bob Welch's solo career, and tried unsuccessfully to do the same for Peter Green, hoping to get him to sign a record deal: "The day he was supposed to sign it, he freaked out. I looked a bit stupid. After all, who would believe that he didn't want to sign a contract because he thought it was with the Devil?" During the Rumours period, Fleetwood's life was as wrought with problems as the other four members of the band. After divorcing, remarrying, and again divorcing his wife Jenny by 1977, Fleetwood had an affair with Stevie Nicks. Stevie recalls: "we did in fact keep it completely to ourselves...we didn't even let the band know." In 1979, Fleetwood took up with Sara Recor, who "was there to hold my hand and look after me" during a rough period in which his father passed away and Fleetwood was diagnosed with a mild case of diabetes: "I thought it was a brain tumor. I was afraid I was going to die. It was eighteen months of hell." He and Sara were wed at his home in Malibu in 1988; the two have now split. Fleetwood married Lynn Frankel on July 26, 1995 in New York, while Fleetwood Mac was still on tour. Fleetwood credits Lynn with helping him to sober up-- only two years ago, he says, "I was overweight and miserable, and wasn't playing...I was also abusing myself with cocaine, although not to the extent that I used to. Am I and was I an addict? Yes." Although recently becoming a grandfather, Mick and Lynn are still planning a family of their own.

Over the years, Mick Fleetwood has made several solo albums-The Visitor, I'm Not Me, and Shakin' the Cage (which included keyboardist Brett Tuggle). In fact, both current Mac guitarist Billy Burnette and vocalist Bekka Bramlett were in Fleetwood's band, the Zoo, before being asked to join Fleetwood Mac. In 1990, Mick wrote his autobiography, and also helped to put together My Twenty-Five Years in Fleetwood Mac in 1992. In 1994, he opened a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia called 'Fleetwood's'.

Mick completed a U.S. tour with the reunited Fleetwood Mac in 1997, and has said he hopes that there will be more music from the group in the future. He has also expressed a desire to work with former band mate Peter Green once again. Mick was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1998 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

Thank you to FleetwoodMac.net for the biographies above.  Visit their site for further information about the group..