Buckingham Nicks A/U Series Part 3: Storms

I Haven't Felt This Way Since Many A Year Ago

St. Louis, Missouri
Wednesday, November 6, 1979
(10:00 pm)
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"Sometimes the most beautiful things...the most innocent things...and many of those dreams...pass us by...keep passing me by..."

Stevie Nicks had the entire arena at her feet. Lindsey looked across the stage to his right and watched his wife at the microphone, his eyes fixing for a moment on the brown beret she wore with her flowing cream-colored dress and her tan suede boots, and he was realizing the same way he had on stage every night in their lives they'd ever done this, even back at local San Francisco gigs in 1968.

Stevie was not just his wife. She was a superstar.

"You feel good," Stevie, Lindsey and Christine sang into their microphones. "I said it's funny that you understood...I knew you would...When you were good, ooh, you were very good..."

"Angel" was one of Stevie's big songs of the night, and the audience was already screaming and cheering as she took to the mic to sing her next verse, written so long ago during difficult times that the lyrics seemed from another lifetime ago.

"So I close my eyes softly till I become that part of the wind that we all long for sometimes...yeah." She turned around just a bit to look at her husband and her best friends, and everyone was as in their element as she was when she continued, "And to those that I love like a ghost through a fog, like a charmed hour and a haunted song and the angel of my dreams..."

The way they had rehearsed the number, Lindsey was to come up the second time the chorus came around and he did, guitar in hand, sharing the mic as they sang and he wrapped his arm around her waist, then her shoulders, then playfully cupped his hand around the beret that she wore. They were Stevie and Lindsey of Fleetwood Mac tonight, not tired parents or a quarrelsome married couple but the musicians they had set out to be eleven years earlier in Lindsey's parents' garage, and together, they knew they were creating magic as they sang inches away from each other's lips at the microphone.

"I still look up," she sang as the song neared its conclusion. "I try hard not to look up...yeah...That girl was me...That girl, that girl was me..." She just about growled her lyrics into the mic, her fist thrust into the air, and then gripping the mic stand like a French chanteuse as she sang, "Oh, you try hard but you'll never catch me, yeah..."

She backed away from the mic and began to dance. She'd told everyone she loved her little dance routine at the end of "Angel", saying she felt like a 1930s dance hall girl every time. She looked around as she bounced herself around in a little circle, and it seemed that all of Fleetwood Mac was on fire, living their dreams that night on stage in St. Louis, Missouri. Lindsey was looking down at his fingers on the guitar, Mick banged away at the drums and bopped along to the song, Christine sat behind the keyboard and dutifully hammered out chords as she rocked a bit to the beat, and even John in his white suit cracked a smile at her from over the bass.

Fleetwood Mac was being Fleetwood Mac and it was all being recorded for a documentary which one evening decades later, gathered in John's living room in black attire they would all sit and watch...sadly, all except for one.

"Track a ghost through the fog!" they all sang at the end of the song, and they didn't even need the uproarious cheers from the audience to know what they had just accomplished. In the dark before the next song, Lindsey grabbed his wife and kissed her.

"You are the angel of my dreams, Stevie Nicks," he said, borrowing a line from the song.

Stevie giggled and said, "And you, Lindsey Buckingham...when you're good...you're very, very good."