Fritz - Fritz (Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham) (1968-1971)

Here's a very special share, of something so rare that I don't believe it's even ever been bootlegged. It's an album of the best of Fritz, the band Fleetwood Mac stars Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were in back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I've started posting various stray tracks albums of Fleetwood Mac, moving forward chronologically through the band's long career. I plan to keep doing that. But I also need to begin posting about the early career of Nicks and Buckingham, until they join Fleetwood Mac in 1975. Some people know about the official "Buckingham Nicks" album from 1973, but there's more than that, including this.

I'm not going to go through a long explanation about the story of Fritz. If you're interested in that, Google it. Here's one article that gives a good summary:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/30-fascinating-early-bands-of-future-music-legends-200891/stevie-nicks-and-lindsey-buckinghams-psychedelic-rock-band-fritz-203670/

The short version is that the band began in the Bay Area of California in 1966. In 1967, Nicks and Buckingham joined. The band got popular enough for them to open for many big name artists, including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Nicks and Buckingham stayed in the band until it broke up in 1971, when those two moved to Los Angeles to try to make it big in the music business. But even though Nicks and/or Buckingham were the lead singers on all of Fritz's songs, there were three other band members, including Brian Kane on lead guitar and Bob Aguirre on drums. But the creative heart of the band was keyboardist Javier Pacheco, because he wrote nearly all the songs. (One exception here is the first song, "Where Was I," written by Nicks.)

As far as I can tell, absolutely none of Fritz's music has ever been officially released. And that's not likely to change any time soon, since neither Nicks nor Buckingham seem interested in uncovering the early part of their career. For instance, the 1973 "Buckingham Nicks" album is beloved by many Fleetwood Mac fans, but it has remained out of print ever since its first release. Only a couple of songs from it have come out on career spanning box sets, and nothing from any time before it.

Luckily, Pacheco has kept many recordings of Fritz, and in recent years he's released a lot of them through YouTube videos. I went through all the videos I could find and put together the best ones for this album. Unfortunately, that didn't mean including all the best songs, because I had to take into account two factors: song quality and recording quality. There were many more songs I didn't include, some of them quite good, because I deemed the recording quality too poor. For instance, there was at least an album's worth of songs performed live, but all of those recordings just weren't good enough for repeat listenings. (If you're interested though, just search for "Fritz" and "Pacheco" on YouTube.)

Thankfully, Fritz did go into professional recording studios several times to record some of their songs, even though they never got a record company to sign them. So pretty much all the songs here are good songs that are well recorded. If you like the "Buckingham Nicks" album, this is much like discovering a very similar album, of comparable musical talent. Despite the fact that nearly all the songs are written by Pacheco, they're probably as good as if they'd been written by Nicks or Buckingham in their pre-Fleetwood Mac days. (Pacheco has gone on to have a long musical career, but in other musical areas, mostly in the Spanish language.)

The last three songs on this album aren't quite Fritz recordings, but I figure they belong here because they fit in the general Fritz time frame. "Anybody Out There" is a demo by Nicks, apparently of a song she wrote. The last two songs, "Next Time Around" and "Time Ago" are more Pacheco songs. Fritz had broken up by then, but he still was able to get Nicks to sing one of them and Buckingham to sing the other.

By the way, I did make a significant edit for one song, "Reconsider." I don't know why, but for that song Pacheco has only made available a snippet of the song that's about a minute and twenty seconds long. That snippet ends with the exact same riff that starts it. So I repeated the entire song, and then added another copy of the intro riff at the end to allow a good fade out. Hopefully, the rest of the original recording will be made public one day. But until then, this can give you some idea of how the song goes.

This makes up a nice 44 minute album that I think any big fan of the "Rumours" era Fleetwood Mac would be interested in. Basically, if you hear a female voice on any of these songs, assume it belongs to Nicks, and if you hear a lead male voice, assume it's Buckingham.

01 Where Was I (Fritz)
02 Up to Fate (Fritz)
03 You Don't Get Young Anymore (Fritz)
04 Reconsider (Fritz)
05 Take Advantage of Me (Fritz)
06 Whirlpool (Fritz)
07 A Million Ways (Fritz)
08 Wondering Why (Fritz)
09 Good Old Fritz (Fritz)
10 In the Dawn (Fritz)
11 Pollyanna Louise (Fritz)
12 Anybody Out There [Demo] (Stevie Nicks)
13 Next Time Around (Lindsey Buckingham & Stevie Nicks)
14 Time Ago (Lindsey Buckingham & Stevie Nicks)

UPDATE: After a request from Pacheco to stop sharing this music, I've taken down the link. Some of this has now been officially released, with more coming soon. Here's a link if you want to buy the official album:

https://fritzrmb.com/music/

I'm still unable to do much photo editing, but I figured it was important to show a picture of Fritz, since so few people are familiar with anything about the early careers of Nicks and Buckingham, including how they look. In this photo used for the cover, taken around 1968, the sole female is Nicks. The male in the middle is Buckingham, and the male on the right is Pacheco. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good color photo of all five band members, so I cropped this one to highlight the three key people.