Quote:
Originally Posted by michelej1
That's a good point. I'm surprised they didn't put their foot down.
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Imagine the studio's having put its foot down about
anything in 1979 to Fleetwood Mac. Warner Brothers was in Mac's back pocket. The band could have done anything it wanted to.
Quote:
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Even with Tusk as the single, I think most people still approached Tusk thinking it would sound more like the first two.
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People loved
Tusk, so I think you're right. It was the perfect first single by a long shot. It was playful, inventive, energetic, wild, creepy, cinematic, inspired on every level. The Rolling Stone critics voted it the best single of 1979. Other critics loved it; the public loved it; and the USC audience at the Coliseum loved it. It was a newsmaking single: jungle chants and a renowned college marching band. There wasn't a single misfire with
Tusk. It was a fabled moment for Fleetwood Mac and for USC, and its triumph has lived to this very day: Go to a Trojan football game at the Coliseum and hear the marching band get the SC fans pumped up at halftime with it. There's nothing else like it in rock history since the Beatles.
But you're right because the really
weird weirdness with the album—not the peppy, cool weirdness of
Tusk that everyone loved—hit people when they played the rest of the tracks. All those scratching and screeching sounds in the production—of guitars tuned down and played like bass guitars, of sound fields awash in oversaturated gain and distortion, etc.—confused and turned off DJs and a lot of the public that bought
Tusk (the single
and the album). The martial horns riffing out the title song had the world tapping its feet and clapping along, but the dry-humping & pig-grunting of
Not That Funny made people truly sorry not only that they had bought the album but also that a band that previously wrote such great hooks had lost it.