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carriecourogen · 8 months

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and i would ask for you to consider the fact that your icons were not always icons

this essay was written & performed for the words & guitars reading series. you can watch a video of the reading here.

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham thought 1973 was going to be their year. They were 24 years old and their two years in LA had put them through the wringer. Stevie was working as both a maid and a waitress, Lindsey was painting houses, and the couple had so little between them that they sometimes shared a single hamburger for dinner.

But they had their music. Their music was the dream they were chasing, the thing that would make all this misery worth it someday — soon, hopefully. So when they released their first album in 1973, they were sure that they had secured two one-way tickets from their dire straits to stardom. They had worked too hard and had too much desperate faith in their talents to imagine things working out any other way.

They had no reason to believe that the album would get lukewarm reviews or that they would be dropped by their label within months or that they would end 1973 no further ahead than where they started. They didn’t know that success would come in the form of a British blues band two years later, didn’t know that their relationship had an expiration date and would not so much spoil as spectacularly burn. They just knew that they were in love and they had made something good and they were placing all their bets on that being enough.

In the spring of 2013, I was 21 years old and 40 years removed from all of this. I didn’t know what it was like to have been one of the few who originally bought Buckingham Nicks, then hear their familiar harmonies burst forth unexpectedly on Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album two summers later, comparing notes on the backs of both LPs to confirm my suspicion that the voices were the same. I was just a kid home from college for a weekend searching through my dad’s seemingly endless record collection for albums to make mine.

“I think you’ll really like that one,” he said when I showed him my selections.

He wasn’t singling out his copy of Berlin or Some Girls or More Songs About Buildings and Food — all far better known albums laying in my pile of things to cop that day. He pointed instead to the faded and fraying LP with a half-naked young couple on the front. “It’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham before they were in Fleetwood Mac,” he said, but I already knew that.

I had known about Buckingham Nicks for a few years, or at least knew the morsels of information the two had shared warmly about their “long lost” album, having fed into their carefully curated melodramatic narrative for so long it was now bleeding into the Tumblr generation. It was the elusive cult favorite, only officially available on long out of print vinyl that went for anywhere from $40 to $150 on the internet. Somehow, it seemed like I had effortlessly stumbled upon the holy grail of records, one that you were either lucky enough to find and hear or not.

Maybe that’s part of its enduring magic. There’s no instant gratification, no shrink-wrapped reissue at Urban Outfitters or quick download on iTunes or stream on Spotify. It isn’t music that presents itself to you. It has to be found, the same way I found it digging through crates of forgotten old records in a damp basement one day.

I graduated from NYU that year wanting to go into journalism but instead taking a job I hated at a marketing agency. I was full of anger for anybody who told me that I was a good writer or let me believe that this career could be my reality. I couldn’t see that it would be my reality someday, just that it was not my reality right now, and because of that, I felt like a failure.

Countless nights that summer I came home to the Craigslist apartment I shared on the Lower East Side with a woman old enough to be my mother, sat in my closet-sized, closet-less bedroom, and played Buckingham Nicks on repeat. The more I listened to it, the more I felt a kindred spirit with them. They were good. They made sacrifices and struggled and they still failed. I needed that album that summer, and I needed its story.

Buckingham Nicks is not a perfect album, not even a great one. But that’s not why I fell in love with it. I fell in love with it because it was pure and unjaded in the way it captured life at such a specific, tumultuous time of young adulthood — and all of the passion and frustration that comes with it. In it, I hear music free of the darker, thornier themes that would arise in their later work, and instead just the innocence of youth. That raw vulnerability changed the way I looked at the Buckingham and Nicks we know now, the ones I was first introduced to as a teenager, who had, until then, lived in my mind simply as two parental figures of rock and roll who, for the most part, have their shit together:

Lindsey Buckingham plays the role of the aging father: there to tell tales of hedonistic glory days with a newly-mellowed and romantic outlook, if not some regret for who he was in the past.

Stevie Nicks is the self-proclaimed fairy godmother to thousands of women and girls who find safety and comfort in her music, whose voice consistently serves as a lighthouse when you feel like you have lost your way.

But for 37 minutes, I can slip this record on and those people disappear. Whenever I feel like I’m flailing, I can fish this record out of its safe spot, put it on my turntable, and feel comforted by their impossible youth, by the way they seem to hang suspended in time and acetate as my peers. For 37 minutes, we are the same: just kids masquerading as grown-ups, trying to be heard, looking at others doing what we want to be doing with a mixture of envy, admiration, and fear while we stumble towards a finish line that seems to keep moving further and further away.

Records don’t change, at least not technically; people do. In many ways, Buckingham Nicks is a constant, there to make me feel less alone when I need that the most. But that’s not to say I haven’t started to feel its limitations. When I first discovered the album, I was younger than Stevie was when she made it. That version of myself used to inadvertently use her timeline as a barometer of my own success. It’s okay that I’m not exactly where I want to be just yet, I used to say to myself. Stevie didn’t even join Fleetwood Mac until she was 27. At the time, 27 seemed so old. I’ll be 28 next month.

I wonder if, in time, I will become like every other adult with whom I’ve spoken about this album: forever unable to listen and hear anything other than my own distant, naive youth. Maybe I’ll find it more romantic in hindsight than it actually was. Or maybe a little bit funny. This is where I wonder what it’s like to be someone like Stevie or Lindsey right now, wonder how it feels to look back on things with more than 40 years of perspective.

I got a small glimmer of that insight once when I saw Stevie Nicks perform solo for the first time in 2016. Fourteen rows back, separated from the friends I had gone with, I was surrounded by middle aged women dressed in flowing black blouses clutching plastic cups of wine. From where we stood, Stevie looked every bit the ageless, immaculate rock goddess you’d expect, her skin luminous and her long, blonde hair flowing in perfect waves that nearly reached her butt. It was as if a Disney princess had come to life and decided to join a band. God, her hair is great. I overheard one woman marvel. It’s gotta be a wig.

“We are gonna play for you the oldest song that we have ever played on stage,” Stevie boasted. “It’s from the Buckingham Nicks album, and —”

Most of the audience that night weren’t the kinds of obsessive concert goers like me who check past setlists before every show; they didn’t see this deep cut coming. They weren’t angry about it, though; they just looked happily confused. They didn’t really care what she was playing. They were there to play an adult game of dress up, loudly sing along to songs like “Edge of Seventeen” and “Dreams” — or any one of the greatest hits Nicks and Fleetwood Mac have filled their shows with over the past decade — and relive their teenage years with better seats and better booze. But the ones who knew what she was talking about shrieked in hysterical tones so piercing that I could have sworn I saw a surprised smile creep across her face. She paused briefly, then continued, “We went and joined Fleetwood Mac and we never played this song again, ever. So, anyway. Here it is. It’s called ‘Crying in the Night.’”

As the opening chords began to ring out, I felt my eyes start to flood and I blinked furiously, embarrassed and surprised by my own tears. Give me “Landslide,” and the heaving sobs will come without fail, as they’ve done several times in the bathroom at work, on the subway late at night, in the bulk aisle of Whole Foods — honestly, there should be a map of New York marked with all the places I’ve cried to that song. But “Crying in the Night” isn’t really an emotional song. There I was, though, choked up and smiling at the same time. It was strange seeing it be performed as a half, and not a whole, but still. This song — this story — that I thought would be asphyxiated by anonymity w getting a moment in the light, after all these years.

When you have a career as long as Stevie Nicks’s, your work travels with you over time, constantly evolving until it can’t anymore, until it eventually stagnates and becomes rote. The Buckingham Nicks songs never really got that chance. Unlike the “Landslides” and “Rhiannons” of her catalogue, there haven’t been different iterations as they were performed night after night, seeing her through rock ingenue to hedonistic superstar, from washed-up has-been to reformed elderstateswoman beginning to strain under the endless routine of it all.

“Crying in the Night” just stayed trapped in 1973, laying inert in forgotten dusty grooves of vinyl, until it suddenly leapt forward to Madison Square Garden in front of an audience of 18,000. And for a small moment, I felt like she knew how strange and special that was, too, because something about her demeanor ever so slightly, but visibly, shifted.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Stevie Nicks’s inevitable but still difficult to fathom mortality. When we deify our idols to the legendary status we’ve granted Stevie, we run the risk of forgetting that it could ever be possible for our world to one day exist without them. But as her generation of rock gods is beginning to die off, each day yielding a new sad and unexpected headline, I am reminded of the unignorable fact that Stevie Nicks is now in her seventh decade, and her remaining time here is not promised.

I hope whenever that day comes, in the midst of my sadness, I will remember a small moment of magic in which she appeared to radiate pure exuberance, a little lost in her own personal time machine back to 1973. I hope I remember how, for a small moment, Stevie Nicks seemed like what I can only imagine she was like when she was just a girl — broke and bone-tired, but still finding joy in creating things with her partner for the first time — and not the 68-year old woman both burdened and blessed with the title of icon, playing by herself to a sold out arena in New York.

I hope I remember that, for a small moment, I thought that maybe youth isn’t a part of us that slips from our grasps to plant itself firmly in our pasts as time relentlessly moves forward, but instead is a feeling, at once ever present and ever fleeting.

#wrote this so long ago but hbd buckingham nicks :')

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