Tusk at 40: FM's defining record
 

https://www.theringer.com/music/2019...sey-buckingham

‘Tusk’ at 40: On Fleetwood Mac’s Defining Record

Forty years after its release, the group’s improbably cohesive follow-up to ‘Rumours’ remains the blueprint for what comes after astounding commercial success

By Lindsay Zoladz Oct 14, 2019, 10:49am EDT

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One rumor goes that Stevie Nicks threatened to leave Fleetwood Mac if they actually called the album Tusk. “There was nothing beautiful or elegant about the word ‘tusk,’” she later said. She’s right: It’s a grunt, a jab, a thudding monosyllable that has none of the musicality of the title Nicks was already dreaming up for her first solo record, Bella Donna. It was also, at least according to another rumor, a dick joke: “I don’t recall it being Mick’s joke about a …,” she trailed off in that interview, as if she couldn’t even bring herself to say it. “That went right over my little prudish head. I wasn’t even told that until after the record was done, and then I liked the title even less.”

Another way of thinking about the title, though, is as an outgrowth of the decorative, costly excess that birthed it: Before Fleetwood Mac even arrived at Studio D at L.A.’s Village Studios in 1978, all sorts of exotic knickknacks were imported onto the premises, transforming the space into a simulacra of an obscenely rich rock star’s home. In the liner notes to the album’s 2004 reissue, Nicks set the scene: “shrunken heads and leis and Polaroids and velvet pillows and saris and sitars and all kinds of wild and crazy instruments and tusks on the console.” Photographs by the nature artist Peter Beard were scattered around for inspiration. “Rare woods from Brazil and volcanic stones from Hawaii went into the decor,” Nicks’s biographer, Stephen Davis, writes. All this ambiance—and Lindsey Buckingham still insisted upon recording some of the damn album in a bathroom.

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Such is, as Mick Fleetwood aptly puts it in his biography, “the duality of Tusk.” A sprawling double album, it’s rife with contradictions and ironies. It was, at the time of its release 40 years ago this week, the most expensive album ever made (and the first album ever to cost more than $1 million to record), but its rough edges and experimental ethos have since made it a source of inspiration within the indie-rock world. (In 2002, art-rockers Camper Van Beethoven released a great, imaginative full-album cover of Tusk.) An intentional departure from the coiled energy of Rumours, Tusk is a record large, strange, and varied enough to contain its exact opposite: It is at once sprawling and intimate, masculine and feminine, successful and failed.

It is also the rare album that could sell more than 4 million copies, spawn six hit singles, and, relatively speaking, still be considered a flop. “I say this without hesitation; as a band we really didn’t give a ****,” Fleetwood writes of the record’s commercial prospects. “Not at all.” Not many artists have to confront the mixed blessing of following up what was then the best-selling record of all time, and no one in Fleetwood Mac would have felt creatively satisfied had they just made Rumours II. Still, few listeners or record executives could have quite anticipated the strange sprawl of Tusk, a record that over the years has earned numerous comparisons to the Beatles’ White Album. (Fleetwood, in his memoir, refers to the group’s 1975 self-titled release as their “‘White’ Album”—but he means that in a different sense.) But time sands all edges. Forty years after its release, Tusk feels not so much like an anomaly as an archetype, the urtext of the Difficult Follow-Up Album, and—wild as this would have seemed at the time of its release—increasingly the consensus choice for Fleetwood Mac’s finest record.

The year before he entered the studio to begin recording Tusk, Lindsey Buckingham saw the Clash live in London. The experience left him electrified, challenged, and a little bit personally offended. In late-’70s Britain, writes Nicks’s biographer Davis, “Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Elton John, and all the older musicians were mocked for being out of touch with their audience and reviled as ‘dinosaur bands’ and Boring Old Farts.” Buckingham was then not even 30; he wasn’t about to live up to the Boring Old Fart stereotype. So he chopped off his flowing Led Zeppelin locks and traded in his bell-bottoms for skinny jeans and tailored suits. He started hearing beauty in dissonance, like the way recording on a boom box could give music a stark, compressed sound, or the tone you got from playing percussion not on a drum kit but an empty box of Kleenex.

An underappreciated aftershock of punk’s first wave is the kick in the ass it gave to some of the previous generations’ heroes, pushing some of those “dinosaur bands” to make their most adventurous music in years. Punk dared the Stones to make 1978’s Some Girls, their best and most brash record since Exile on Main St. It’s also the inspiration for some of the great Buckingham compositions on Tusk, from the taut, sneering “What Makes You Think You’re the One” to the haunting, oddly dissonant last-call dirge “That’s All for Everyone.” Buckingham was constantly experimenting in Studio D, searching for undiscovered tones and textures: He got the grumbling, blown-out sound of excitable punk ditty “The Ledge” by tuning his guitar down to sound like a bass. (“It sounds to me like it was put in a cement mixer and almost spat out,” he later said, proudly.) “I remember Lindsey used to make such a horrible sound,” the album’s coproducer, Ken Caillat, said in Ryan Reed’s book Fleetwood Mac FAQ. “He would physically make me distort the guitar so that it sounded like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard. I remember when he was recording ‘Not That Funny,’ he insisted he wanted a really weird-sounding vocal, so he made us tape a microphone to a tile floor, and he was doing a push-up over the microphone, singing, ’Not—that—funny—is it?!’ Anything to make it weirder was better on his songs.”

The Beach Boys, too, cast a long shadow over Tusk, and for several different reasons. Ever the studio rat, Buckingham spent the months leading up to the Tusk sessions listening obsessively to Pet Sounds, trying to deconstruct the production techniques behind that innovative masterpiece. It’s also been reported that Buckingham was granted access to the elusive master tapes of the Beach Boys’ then-unreleased Pet Sounds follow-up Smile, and that the Tusk tracks “That’s All for Everyone” and “Beautiful Child” bear the influence of Brian Wilson’s cutting-edge production. During the Tusk sessions, though, Christine McVie went even straighter to the source—she actually started dating a Beach Boy, the dreamy but ultimately troubled drummer Dennis Wilson.

As a counterbalance to Buckingham’s punk outbursts, Tusk showcases some of McVie’s most straight-forwardly lovely compositions: opener “Over & Over” sets a rose-colored tone, while the understated “Never Make Me Cry” is a perennial tear-jerker. Perhaps the most Rumours-reminiscent cut is McVie’s rousing “Think About Me”—one of Tusk’s few full-band jams. Tusk wouldn’t have confounded listeners if even half its songs sounded like this, but restless shape-shifting was also a consistent part of Fleetwood Mac’s ethos, even from the Peter Green days. “They had been a blues band, then a jam band, then a rock band, then a soft rock supernova,” Davis writes. “The Rumours groove had to be part of a progressive continuum, not the endgame.”

One of the most acrimonious fights during Rumours was over the exclusion of Nicks’s masterpiece “Silver Springs.” The band had to make some cuts to keep Rumours confined to a single LP, and when it came time for the final sequencing, the languorous, slow-tempo-ed “Springs” was first on the chopping block. “I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio and completely flipped out,” Nicks said years later, recalling the conversation with Fleetwood when she first learned the song’s fate.

She got her revenge on Tusk. While Buckingham often approaches songwriting like a code to be cracked (“I’ve learned more about the mathematics of songwriting—how to fit pieces together, line length, timing chords and melodies,” he said around the time of Tusk’s release), Stevie’s process was more intuitive, her songs less rigorously structured. She thrived in open space and sprawl, something Tusk generously supplied. Her songs on the record are loose, unhurried, and exploratory, from the poignant ballad “Storm” to the meditative confessional “Beautiful Child.” The bluesy rocker “Angel” showcases a gravely, newly mature tone of Nicks’s voice that she’d explore further on Bella Donna, while the fan-favorite “Sisters of the Moon” furthered her witchy self-mythology: “A black widow spider makes / More sound than she,” Nicks sang, “and black moons in those eyes of hers / Made more sense to me.”

Her most enduring offering, though, is “Sara”—more of an incantation than a pop song, though it was still Tusk’s highest-charting hit. Her first demo of the track was 16 minutes long; a gorgeous nine-minute take was included on Tusk’s 2004 reissue. In his biography Gold Dust Woman, Stephen Davis calls “Sara” “the most asked-about song by Stevie’s interviewers, even more than ‘Rhiannon.’” Their first question, of course, was almost always, “Who’s Sara?” but that was a misleadingly literal thing to ask of a Stevie Nicks song. “It’s not about Sara [Rector], who was one of my best friends—even though everybody thinks it is,” she said many years later. “But it was really about what was going on with all of us at the time … some songs are about a lot of things.” “Sara” is an impressionistic swirl of all that was happening in Stevie Nicks’s mind in the heady days of 1978, from her ill-fated affair with bandmate Mick Fleetwood to her indecision about whether or not to pursue a solo career. It was a blustery brew but, as she’d tell us a few songs later, she had always been a storm.

While she believed Tusk to be “a spectacular record,” soon-to-be solo star Nicks resented the time its recording required of her. “Tusk took us 13 months to make, which is ridiculous,” she said when promoting Bella Donna in 1981. “I was there in the studio every day—or almost every day—but I probably only worked for two months. The other 11 months I did nothing, and you start to lose it after a while if you’re inactive. You see, Lindsey, Chris, John, and Mick all play, and I don’t. So most of the time I’d be looking at them through the window in the control room. After four or five hours, they’d forget I was even there, they’d be so wrapped up in little details. It was very frustrating.”

One of the approximately 3 billion things I adore about Tusk is that it contains maybe the greatest, and definitely the most petty, album credit of all time:

Lindsay Zoladz
✔
@lindsayzoladz
I completely forgot the production credit on Tusk is “Fleetwood Mac (Special Thanks from the Band to Lindsey Buckingham)” !!!! I will love this petty messy band until I die

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Buckingham was, more than anyone, the sonic mastermind behind Tusk. But the very fabric of Tusk is also variety, collaboration, and bricolage—an alchemy he never could have achieved alone. If Rumours was the result of a handful of passionate, often-inebriated people standing elbow-to-elbow in a too-small room, Tusk is the sound of them stomping into their respective corners. To love Fleetwood Mac is to marvel at the beautiful absurdity that these five very different people were ever in a band together, let alone a band whose songs could hang together so well. In this sense, the improbably cohesive Tusk just might be their defining record.

Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Tusk’s double-album breadth might have stunted its commercial prospects in 1979—the 2XLP retailed for $16.98, around $50 adjusted for inflation—but in the more-is-more logic of the streaming era, it seems downright normal. (Drake’s mammoth-selling 2018 album Scorpion, for one example, is 15 minutes longer than Tusk.) Forty years later, it remains the blueprint for what comes after astounding commercial success, if an artist is too itchy and creative to simply rest on their laurels. Its forward-thinking ethos has kept it fresh all this time. “Tusk is not going to sound dated in five or 10 years,” the writer Blair Jackson predicted all the way back in 1981, “and I would be willing to bet that a lot more people will slowly be convinced of the album’s greatness than will forget all about it.” You can say that again.

Tusk had 6 hit singles??

Yeah you don't remember "Angel" lighting up the charts? :laugh::laugh::laugh:

Angel and Sara do sell that album.

Title tune became classic, too, eventually. I suppose I must thank Mick’s USC inspiration, though I would rather forget him.

hmm... official singles I can recall are

Tusk
Sara
Think About Me
Sisters of the Moon

and the last two were not big hits. (Though I never understood why TAM didn't do well)

Exactly! Six singles, my ass...

TAM has always been one of my top ten(or five) FM songs. I NEVER tire of it.

I love Tusk. I love how Christine describes it as so "underproduced." Is that not the perfect word to describe it? Its hard to explain so I thought she nailed it with that one word description.
Lindsey sure went out of his way to try and make it the least commercial project ever.
Double album, album cover, underproduced, track listing, and yes many of his songs.

I sometimes wonder if Lindsey had compromised with the band and made a 1 disc album that limited some of the album's oddities what it would have sounded like.

I agree Homer. I think the lead single should have been Think About Me. Its the most traditional FM song ever and could have easily been on Rumours. Tusk (song) is a FM and Lindsey concert staple but I never ever hear it on the radio. Classic rock radio pretends it does not exist even though it was a top 10 single.

Think About Me was a second-tier hit, reaching #20. It’s the Love in Store of TUSK. Sisters, on the other hand, could hardly be considered a hit, more of a rock radio staple. And even that status was brief. It’s primarily remembered for once being a stupendous stage moment for the singer and band on two tours. Think About Me is still played occasionally in stores and on various 70s stations.

Angel
Sara
Think About Me
Sisters of the Moon
Never Forget
That's All For Everyone
Brown Eyes
Never Make Me Cry
Over and Over
Beautiful Child


Those Are My Highlights

The re-master sparkles on my speakers.

Are the other 2 'hit singles' considered to be Angel and Not That Funny?
Goodness me, they each charted precisely nowhere, in no countries. Not even #87 in The Netherlands or anything.

Wikipedia says Not That Funny was released as a single only in the UK.,.:shrug:

I get your point and don't disagree with that, but just to nitpick the songs a little--- TAM is such a better single than Love in Store, which always sounded somehow unfinished to me, like there were layers missing. Its production sounds very....emtpy.... and as a result rather cold and lifeless to me. Whereas Think About Me has such great energy and is bouncy and happy and has all those yummy layers of production that make it closer as others said to previous Mac singles. And it's another CM/LB vocal blend song.

It says UK, Germany and Netherlands.
Awful choice for a single release. Perhaps as punk was so big at that time in the UK they may have thought NTF to be amongst the must punkiest of the Tusk songs and therefore likely to do well. I'd have chosen almost any other Tusk song ahead of it as a single.

It's the perfect song.


If you want to know what pleases me in a song, TAM is IT.
Perfect rock beat
Catchy chorus
Great guitar solo
Lindsey and Chris duetting!!!!!!!

Have I mentioned that I NEVER tire of it? It's made every greatest hits disc I've ever made.

My Tusk highlights:

1. I Know I'm not Wrong (forever and ever my favorite Tusk Song)
2. The Ledge
3. Tusk
4. Think About Me
5. Angel
6. What Makes you Think you're The One
7. Over and Over
8. Sara

:]:]

I don't believe that Angel was ever a single.. It got airplay on rock radio for the first few months after Tusk's release. It would have made a better 4th single than Sisters though as it is more poppy and catchy even though Sisters is the superior song IMO.

I think Never Forget, Angel and Tusk would have been good choices.

From the point of view of Warner Brothers, the traditional idea of a radio-friendly single that would appeal to a mass audience was very strong.

But from the point of view of the band (or at least some of the band), that idea was tiresome. Why give the radio audience what it expects? Give it something it doesn’t expect, like Tusk, a track that didn’t sound remotely like anything else on the radio in the US in 1979. Tusk was a brilliant idea for a first single, not only because it’s a great track but because it’s a completely new idea for a radio single—it’s an anti-single. Its response on radio was mostly positive on its own terms (everyone was talking about it in 1979—it wasn’t flying under anyone’s radar), and that weirdness combined with its sonic power (a jungle statement) also made it a longstanding artifact of USC Trojan culture in the years after. (I attended many, many Trojan football games at the Coliseum, and Tusk at halftime was always rowdy and popular. Unlike a lot of other halftime nonsense, it energized the stadium.)

After Tusk, it didn’t matter what the singles were. Nothing was going to make the album sell millions more, and the tour itself was pushing the weirdness quotient that the band wanted to push that year (where songs onstage lost all resemblance to their sleek, smooth studio counterparts).

Before June 1982, nobody knew what Mirage was going to sound like. Tusk succeeded in that way.

I completely agree. I love Tusk as the first single. I was commenting on what would have been more radio friendly. I even like Tusk's running order. And I did NOT when I first bought it.

I love the experimentalness of Tusk, Honey Hi and Brown Eyes.

I don't think anyone disagrees that Tusk was experimental and sort of anti-corporate rock. Bravo. It was a huge risk to dare to be so different.
HOWEVER, lets talk about the band post-Tusk. IMHO life after Tusk killed the band's creativity. While I like Mirage, it was an album that swung way too far into the pop/adult contemporary sphere that was so anti-Tusk. It was purposely commercial almost sweet bubble gum high pop greatness. Then Tango came along and the band again was under HUGE pressure for a commercial success after 5 years apart. We get sweet 80s synth pop. So while Tusk was considered a refreshing change, its impact sort of ruined their rock chops to some extent IMHO.

What Makes You Think You're the One ?

Awesomeness for 40 years long! Still just LOVE that song SO much!:thumbsup::nod:

One review (Rolling Stone maybe?) described the whole album as having a music-box quality and to me that's an apt description of the sort of..... tinkly....elements on most of the songs.

Issuing “Tusk” (the song) as the lead single was the right choice. So left field and so bizarre in comparison to anything from the previous two records (or eight records). It’s not only my favorite song from the album but one of my favorites from the entire band catalogue—as iconic and palate cleansing as “Hypnotized” or “Albatross,” but weirder, so much weirder.

The lush, mysterious “Sara” makes for great contrast. “Think About Me” lands somewhere between the elegant folk of “Storms” and the frenzied rockabilly of “”That’s Enough for Me.”

While I do agree that Tusk was the best first single(given how.....DIFFERENT the album was), but I think that Think About Me might have pulled people in more, giving them more of a Rumours vibe. Who knows, maybe it would have sold a bit more? 4M is huge numbers now, but it wasn't then, following their career defining album.

Sara was a good followup. As a former $tevie fan, I was always amazed that Angel didn't make it as a single.

Looking back, there really weren't many "hits" on it(radio listening wise).

Yes. The band (except Lindsey) felt they had made a mistake with Tusk (shortly after Tusk, not today) and were always chasing pop radio. So while Tusk was anti-corporate and anti-commercial, its impact on the band made them more corporate and more commercial with their final 2 albums with this line up. While I appreciate Tusk, the Tusk hangover impacted their greatness IMHO. I don't see Mirage and Tango as having the depth of greatness their first 3 albums had with this line up.

I think the reason that Mirage and Tango didn’t have the “depth of greatness” was largely due to the solo career focus that was in full force from 1981-1987.

I see your point and would agree a tiny bit. The bigger picture is that while the band was creative naturally for their first 2 albums together and very creative for #3. The blowback from Tusk changed the band to be chasing commercial success. It was pivotal for the band for Mirage to chart hit singles and be radio friendly (aka music box). Even more so for Tango. I believe even in Mick's first book Lindsey was under tremendous pressure for the album to get Mick out of bankruptcy. My only point is that something that is not talked about (much). While Tusk is applauded these days for the risk the band took, there is no doubt it changed them forever and seeking commercial success and so anti-Tusk the rest of their album existence.
That is what irks me about Tusk. Not the album itself but the post Tusk era i.e. over compensating future projects. While Tusk is underproduced Mirage and Tango are way overproduced.

Yes..I would agree with your point. Let’s also add the drugs and all the obsessive life styles that was spinning out of control from 1981-1987

Think About Me---what a great tune. But I like the earlier 1978 version (on the deluxe edition) MUCH better. It's catchy, direct, Christine's voice is not double-tracked, Lindsey isn't hogging the mic, the organ and keys are very present. And you can hear these cool, industrial percussion things going on in the background. I think if the track had been built up in a way that captured the spirit of this initial version, it could have been a BIG statement of girl pop...Still, I do like the finished album version. Just not as much as I do the 1978 version.

The list price of the album was crazy for the time. And a radio station played the whole album. If neither of them were a factor, I would have said Think About Me for the lead. I am ok with Tusk then Sara. Of course LB wanted his single released first because he wanted the contrast. LB would never have agreed to Think About Me. Also, I do think Think About Me as the lead would have misled buyers into thinking they got Rumours II. Someone might have considered that as well. That could have turned off fans. Who knows. In the end - 40 years later. The songs that hold up - Tusk, Think About Me, I Know I'm Not Wrong. Over and Over and all of Stevie's.

I always got the impression that Christine was reluctant to do her 'Tusk' songs on stage during that tour.

Whereas Stevie and Lindsey did 3 to 4 of their songs live, Christine only did 'Over and Over' (and 'Think About Me' only here and there).

What gives? :confused:

They did Brown Eyes on the Tusk Tour.

Hmm, I think 'Brown Eyes' wasn't until the 1982, 1987, and 1990 tours.

Can anyone shed some light on Christine's 'Tusk' songs during the 1979/1980 tour? I'm still pretty sure she only did 'Over and Over', and 'Think About Me' (but sporadically).

I was a kid(and was sick as a dog, but begged my mom to let me go), but Tusk was my first FM concert. I'm 99% certain they played Brown Eyes.

For a year or so, I could recite the set list in order.

Those brain cells departed, some considerable time ago.

Brown Eyes made its concert debut on the Mirage tour.

"That's All For Everyone" and "Walk A Thin Line" are my favorites.

That's my understanding. In fact, there were actually entire shows where Chris did none of her 1979 songs (Oh Daddy was pulled in for Over and Over for a time.) But have you heard the rehearsal audio of the band running through Brown Eyes, Honey Hi, Over and Over, and Think About Me? The band sounds really good on all of them. I think there's an old thread or two about this if you want to pursue it.

Edit: Adding the audio for the above-mentioned tour rehearsal.

It would have been great if the MAC would have done Tusk in its entirety. I know it would have been such a risk but a great idea after the 2+ years of touring Rumours. Even if it was just a select group of shows. It was another missed opportunity. If the 5 were together today it could have been a nice 40th celebration. A dude can dream.😎