Inside Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham's Rocky Relationship

The Grammy-winning musicians and Fleetwood Mac band members, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, met in a cinematic way. Per their statements, they attended the same high school party in the 90s. Nicks spotted Buckingham in the living room, singing "California Dreaming," and she joined in.

"I didn't really see him again until two years later," Nicks told Courtney Love in a 1997 interview for Spin, "when he called me and asked me if I wanted to be in his rock 'n' roll band." The band in question was named Fritz, and the members had a rule where no one could date Nicks.

"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," Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1977. "But they didn't want anybody else to have me either. If anybody in the band started spending any time with me, the other three would literally pick that person apart. To the death."

As the duo grew rather close, they eventually decided to break up the band and pursue a music career together. After Fritz disbanded, the pair formed their band called Buckingham Nicks in the 1970s.

Following the failure of their single album, Nicks and Buckingham began to have relationship problems.

The album didn't do well, and they were immediately dropped by their labels. Davis said the album "promptly bombed."

As the tension between Nicks and Buckingham grew, the couple continued writing songs even after they were dropped. However, they couldn't decide which songs worked and which ones didn't. This would lead to 'bruising fights' that resulted in Buckingham sleeping on the floor and Nicks sleeping in their bedroom with her dog beside her.

Nicks eventually confessed that she and Buckingham weren't getting along. She admitted that much of their conflict stemmed from her disapproval of the way Buckingham handled her songs.

She reportedly felt he changed her songs too much, and the meaning was lost. For her, this became a "huge problem" between the two of them.

Sadly, this was not only the only problem they had. "We had other problems," Nicks mentioned in the 2007 interview with Rolling Stone. "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."

Before forming the band that made them a household name, Nicks And Buckingham were just a boxspring-less twenty-something couple who struggled to make ends meet.

Nicks told Rolling Stone that she lived with Buckingham from '71 to '75, and during that time, they were "absolutely married. In every way but for the ring. I cooked, I cleaned, I worked. I took care of him."

It was this period that inspired one of the band's greatest hits, "Gypsy."

"Lindsey and I had no money, so we had a king-size mattress, but we just had it on the floor," Nicks told Entertainment Weekly in 2009. "I had old vintage coverlets on it, and even though we had no money it was still really pretty. Just that and a lamp on the floor, and that was it — there was a certain calmness about it. To this day, when I'm feeling cluttered, I will take my mattress off of my beautiful bed, wherever that may be, and put it outside my bedroom, with a table and a little lamp," the musician concluded.

The split happened while they recorded "Rumors." During an interview with Rolling Stone, Nicks admitted that she was the one who instigated the separation.

"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," Nicks told Rolling Stone of the split. "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."

She continued, "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. 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."

Lately, Buckingham discussed his relationship with Nicks and reflected on not getting closure after their much-publicized breakup.

"...And really, again, that was part of the deal with Stevie and me was that we had to spend an awful lot of time together without ever having gotten closure from each other," he told Nile Rodgers on his Apple Music 1 show "Deep Hidden Meaning Radio With Nile Rodgers."

Buckingham continued, "Most people when they break up, they don't see each other for a long time or maybe ever again. But you're not constantly having to not only see someone but, in my case, make the choice to do right for someone when I didn't always feel that I wanted to, you know?"