It’s another song that's been wafted up into the charts on the wings of Stranger Things. Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide is over fifty years old now – it first appeared on the band’s eponymous 1975 album – but after being featured in the final episode of the hit Netflix show, it’s finally reached the charts for the first time this month, after half a century in this world.
This gentle Stevie Nicks acoustic ballad isn’t one of the group’s signature songs, but it’s always been highly rated by fans. It was written before its author and Lindsay Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac in December 1974, when they were still Buckingham Nicks, an up-and-coming West Coast duo.
The previous year, the pair had released their self-titled debut (and what turned out to be their only) album. It had, much to their disappointment, been roundly ignored. Polydor dropped them and by September 1974, the couple were running out of options. On the VH1 Storytellers show in 1998,
Nicks recalls that period: “I was home at my Dad and Mom’s house in Phoenix, and my father said, ‘You know, I think that maybe… You really put a lot of time into this (her singing career), maybe you should give this six more months, and if you want to go back to school, we’ll pay for it and uh, basically you can do whatever you want, and we’ll pay for it’. I have wonderful parents, and I went, ‘Cool, I can do that.'”
Soon afterwards, one half of the couple was thrown a (temporary) lifeline. Don Everly had asked Buckingham to join his touring band so he and Nicks drove to Aspen, Colorado for rehearsals.
Whilst Buckingham went on tour, Nicks stayed in Aspen to contemplate their future, and in particular, whether they had one. Interviewed by Performing Songwriter magazine in 2003, she remembered this liminal period in her life.
“This is right after the Buckingham Nicks record had been dropped. And it was horrifying to Lindsey and I because we had a taste of the big time, we recorded in a big studio, we met famous people, we made what we consider to be a brilliant record and nobody liked it.
"I had been a waitress and a cleaning lady, and I didn't mind any of this. I was perfectly delighted to work and support us so that Lindsey could produce and work and fix our songs and make our music.”
“But I had gotten to a point where it was like, "I'm not happy. I am tired. But I don't know if we can do any better than this. If nobody likes this, then what are we going to do?"
Being on her own in a cold, snowy environment concentrated her mind and soon an image came to her - an avalanche, a landslide that could wipe away all her hopes and dreams in a minute.
“I realised then that everything could tumble, and when you're in Colorado, and you're surrounded by these incredible mountains, you think avalanche,” she told In The Studio with Red Beard in 1992. “It meant the whole world could tumble around us and the landslide would bring you down. And a landslide in the snow is like, deadly.”
She reached for her guitar. “I wrote it in about five minutes. But see, when I'm really thinking about something - I mean when something's really bothering me - again, the best thing that I can do is go to the music room, or to the office, where I can write. Because once I put it down and I can read it back, and I can think about what I'm saying, then it makes sense to me.”
In the event, the Everly tour was another dead end for the couple. “We thought he was going to make, like, lots of money. He didn't,” Nicks told The Source in 1991.
“He came back to Aspen and he was very angry with me ~ and he left me ~ took Ginnie the poodle and the car and left me in Aspen the day that the Greyhound buses went on strike.”
“I had a strep throat also. He drove away, I walk in on the radio it says 'Greyhound Buses on strike all over the Unites States.' I'm going, oh no, I'm stuck. So in order to get out of Colorado I had to call my parents and they unwillingly sent me a plane ticket because they didn't understand what I was doing up there in the first place. So I follow him back to Los Angeles, that was like October, it was all around Hallowe’en.”
Meanwhile, at some point in autumn 1974 Mick Fleetwood was in Los Angeles checking out Sound City Studios with a view to recording there. His band had relocated to the US earlier that year, to be nearer to their record company, but were in a state of some disarray.
Guitarist Bob Welch was on the verge of quitting, but having come all this way and with their most recent album Heroes Are Hard To Find their highest charting to date on Billboard, the others were determined to carry on.
The house engineer at Sound City, Keith Olsen, played Fleetwood a track from an album he’d recently recorded there, just to give the drummer a sense of what the room sounded like. Fate would have it that the track he chose was Frozen Love from the Buckingham Nicks album.
And even more incredibly, one half of the duo was close by that day. “I walked out of Studio B, and I heard our song Frozen Love coming from one studio over,” Lindsay Buckingham remembered in the 2013 documentary Sound City. “And I see this gigantic man sitting in the chair with his eyes closed, just grooving, and I thought: ‘Who is that?’”
That gigantic man was Fleetwood. Olsen introduced them and as we know, the drummer would soon float the idea that Buckingham replace the departing Welch. Buckingham said yes – on the condition that Nicks came too - and so on New Year’s Eve 1974, the exact midpoint of the decade, the couple officially joined Fleetwood Mac.
Nicks came with her songs and during the sessions for the band’s next, self-titled, album, three of hers made the cut: Crystal, Rhiannon - which would become biggest US hit to date when released as a single in 1976 - and Landslide.
Landslide was recorded simply, with just Buckingham’s acoustic guitar, a Martin D18, backing his partner’s vocal. On release in July 1975 on the Fleetwood Mac album, it wasn’t a track that drew attention to itself. Overall, the album was reviewed positively – Rolling Stone called it “an impressively smooth transitional album”, though the same publication described Nicks’ vocals on Landslide as sounding “lost and out of place”.
But something in Landslide spoke at a deeper level. Though Nicks wrote the words when she was just 26, lines like: ‘But time makes you bolder/ Even children get older/ And I’m getting older too’ hit home amongst the band’s audience; boomers who, like Nicks, were reaching a crossroads in their lives by the mid-'70s.
![Fleetwood Mac - Landslide (Live) (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/WM7-PYtXtJM/maxresdefault.jpg)
And so Landslide became something of a sleeper track, a staple of both the band’s live sets and those of Nicks’ when she went solo in the 1980s. It was only given a single release belatedly, in 1998, when a live version came out to promote The Dance, the ‘classic’ line-up’s first album together for ten years. Even then, it did respectfully, reaching 51 on the Billboard chart.
Over the years, covers are gradually added to its lustre. In 1994, the Smashing Pumpkins recorded a surprisingly faithful version of it as the B-side to their single Disarm.
At the time, the Pumpkins were among the biggest names in alt rock, Fleetwood Mac were widely regarded as relics from a bygone era, and at the time, Nicks said that she’d been touched by the cover, saying in an online fan chat in 1998: “I was very honoured to have Billy Corgan pick out that song on his own. There's nothing more pleasing to a songwriter than [someone] doing one of their songs.
Eight years later, the song was given another makeover by the Chicks (then still known as the Dixie Chicks), fitting perfectly with their glossy brand of folk/ country. Released as the second single from their multi-platinum 2002 album Home, it reached Number 7 in the Billboard charts, (re)introducing Nicks’ songwriting to a new, younger audience.
Further covers have popped up in the years since, by artists as varied as Miley Cyrus, Anohni and Harry Styles.
Since then, Landslide's status has grown in proportion to Fleetwood Mac’s as a whole. The digital era has been kind to the group. No longer seen as slightly naff soft rockers, they are probably bigger now than even during their mid-'70s heyday.
The fact that their story has so many twists, turns and human drama at its centre has undoubtedly helped, but in the final analysis people love Fleetwood Mac for their songs and their back catalogue is rich with quality nuggets that reside just off the beaten track, away from the big hits; tracks like Landslide that are just waiting to be rediscovered, again and again and again...
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