“It was just a stupid little paperback that I found somewhere at somebody’s house, lying on the couch,” Stevie Nicks said of the Mary Leader novel that inspired her song “Rhiannon.” “It was called Triad, and it was all about this girl who becomes possessed by a spirit named Rhiannon.
“I read the book, but I was so taken with that name that I thought, I’ve got to write something about this. So I sat down at the piano and started this song about a woman that was all involved with these birds and magic.”
Recorded by Fleetwood Mac for their 1975 self-titled album, “Rhiannon” would become one of the group’s biggest hits and Nicks’ signature song. Its success was a personal victory for Nicks. After she and Lindsey Buckingham struck out with their 1973 debut album, Buckingham Nicks, things looked bleak. Their fortunes changed after Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood heard songs from the record while he was checking the studio where they recorded it.
When Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist Bob Welch quit the band a short while later, Fleetwood remembered the Buckingham Nicks tracks and reached out Buckingham as a potential replacement for Welch. Buckingham said he and Nicks were a package deal, and the two joined the British-born rock act on New Year’s Eve 1974.
Nicks quickly made her songwriting talents known to the band. In addition to her moving acoustic guitar–picked balled “Landslide,” she brought along “Rhiannon,” though at the time it was little more than a rough demo recorded at home on piano.
“I still have the cassette tape of when I was first writing it,” she says. “Lindsey came in and I said: ‘We have to go to a park and record the sound of birds rising.’ And he looked at me like I was crazy. And I said: ‘Don’t you think Rhiannon is a beautiful name?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it is a beautiful name.’”
Turning that piano demo into a hit song took more work than any other track on Fleetwood Mac. As producer Keith Olsen recalled, the group recorded two rough-around-the-edges takes of the song before the sessions began to fall apart. The next day he spliced together the best parts of those two recordings into the musical bed that’s on the final track.
“What the band does, and have always done,” Nicks says, “is take the skeleton of a song and flesh it out. They arrange right underneath my little skeleton.”
From the beginning, she had confidence that Buckingham’s talents — not only as a guitarist (as she relayed in a letter to her family) but also as an interpreter of her ideas — would show her creation in its perfect light.
And indeed, his opening guitar riff is the song’s hook. What makes it such a memorable riff is the combination of melody, articulation and tone. At the time Buckingham had switched to a white 20th anniversary model Gibson Les Paul Custom after playing a Fender Stratocaster for years. He recalled that much of his guitar tone is down to the work of Olsen.
“That was Keith Olsen that was engineering that,” he recalled to AntiMusic. “I think it is a combination of that and what I would guess is a kind of scooping out of certain [midrange] frequencies that were usually identified with a Les Paul.
“And then of course, you've got to look at the part itself, you know, because whatever you play it on, or however someone records it, you have to look at what is being recorded as having a lot to do with what it sounds like.”
As Buckingham explained, his riff was a modification of a part Nicks came up with on piano.
“That was a case where Stevie had this little two-finger thing she'd done on the piano,” he explained. “This is one of the odd things about how Stevie and I can interface; she can come up with really real basic things, which are inherently full of substance but are not necessarily articulated.
“I think the way she wrote that was on the piano and she was just, with two fingers, going dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee, you know? And so to take it from that to something where you're applying an eighth-note thumb pattern, you know — like a first and third interval up and down the neck, from her great idea. It was just the application of that idea into my style, and I think that has a lot to do with it too.”
“Rhiannon” may have been just one of the songs that made Fleetwood Mac stars, but it became Nicks’ signature tune. Which is why Buckingham was angered when the song was played as the group’s walk-on music when they received the MusiCares Person of the Year award in 2018, the first group to do so. He felt the song undermined their entrance, putting the focus on Nicks instead of Fleetwood Mac. And in fact it was an odd choice, considering the group has a big hit — “The Chain,” from 1977’s Rumours — that celebrates their endurance amid internal strife.
In the aftermath, Buckingham was fired — he alleges the band bowed to pressure from Nicks — leading the band to hire Mike Campbell and Neil Finn as his replacements.
“Rhiannon” may forever be associated with the singer, but there’s no doubt it wouldn’t have been as successful without Fleetwood Mac and, specifically, Buckingham’s re-interpretation of Nick’s “two-finger thing.”
![Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/jQAK6sVovUk/maxresdefault.jpg)
