Buckingham Nicks - The Coffee Plant Demos (1972-1974)

I've posted a ton of Fleetwood Mac stuff relating to the group's early Peter Green-led blues era. I still have some more to post there, especially BBC material. But I also want to move on to the second phase of the band, its rebirth as a soft rock group.

I've already posted an album by Fritz, the late 1960s and early 1970s group led by future Fleetwood Mac stars Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. That group evolved into the Buckingham Nicks duo. I've got a lot to post from them. In my opinion, Buckingham and Nicks basically took over Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and led them to become one of the most successful groups of all time. From a singing and songwriting perspective, it's true that Christine McVie also plays an important role. But Buckingham and Nicks were essentially two-thirds of the force behind all those big soft rock hits in the 1970s and 1980s.

Some people have noticed that Buckingham and Nicks didn't just pop out of thin air when they joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, but in fact already had a career going with one album as a duo in 1973. But unfortunately, not nearly enough people know about their duo work, since that one album has remained unreleased pretty much since shortly after it was released. I'm going to post that album here shortly. But this album is the compliment to that, a series of demos done by the Buckingham Nicks duo around the same time as they recorded their lone album in 1973.

The bulk of this comes from a popular bootleg known as the "Coffee Plant Demos." There isn't a single song here that is also on the Buckingham Nicks album, so this is like a second album. One can call these demo recordings, but a lot of them are fairly fleshed out, with drums and bass.

In my opinion, there are a lot of good songs here, and no real duds, showing that the Buckingham Nicks duo should have had success whether they joined Fleetwood Mac or not.  In particular, one song here, "Sorcerer," has kind of become a Stevie Nicks standard, getting on her more recent greatest hits collections, even though she didn't officially release a solo version of it until 2001.

In addition to the songs from the "Coffee Plant Demos" bootleg, I've added two songs. The first song on the album, "See the World Go By," is a Stevie Nicks song that dates from 1972, and seems to fall between the cracks of when the band Fritz broke up in 1971 and when the Buckingham Nicks duo did a lot of recording for their lone album in 1973. The song quality on this song is a bit less compared to the rest, but it's still decent.

I've also added a song at the end, the classic "Rhiannon." This comes from a concert bootleg dating to 1974. I'm going to post some live Buckingham Nicks material later. But I'm adding this in here because it's kind of a free floating recording that doesn't come from the two full Buckingham Nicks concerts that were bootlegged, and yet it's in pristine soundboard quality. So I've removed the audience noise to make it fit in with the rest of the songs on the album. This is probably one of the very first time this song was every played in concert, if not the very first time. (Although the exact date and location of the recording is unknown.) It's interesting to see how this song was different in its early days, with some different lyrics and a slightly faster pace.

01 See the World Go By (Stevie Nicks)
02 Without You (Buckingham Nicks)
03 Candlebright [Nomad] (Buckingham Nicks)
04 That's Alright (Buckingham Nicks)
05 Garbo (Buckingham Nicks)
06 Sorcerer (Buckingham Nicks)
07 Cathouse Blues (Buckingham Nicks)
08 Goldfish and the Ladybug (Buckingham Nicks)
09 Going Home (Buckingham Nicks)
10 Yesterday I Saw the World (Buckingham Nicks)
11 Rhiannon (Buckingham Nicks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15291428/FleetwodMc_1972c-1974_BuckinghmNcksCffeePlantDmos_atse.zip.html

There are very few photos of Buckingham and Nicks prior to their Fleetwood Mac days. In November 2019, I changed the photo for the cover art. I thought the one I'd used was from 1973, but it turns out it's from 1975. So I updated it with a photo that is from 1973. It shows Buckingham and Nicks playing in the Troubadour club in Los Angeles that year.