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  #136  
Old 09-03-2016, 10:46 AM
jbrownsjr jbrownsjr is offline
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Originally Posted by bwboy View Post
I Know I'm Not Wrong was a song I never really noticed, somehow it just seemed to fall between the cracks. But when FM played it live for the first time a few years back, it became one of my all-time favorite songs! It's so catchy and upbeat, I really love it. But when people talk about Tusk, this song is rarely mentioned, good or bad.

Maybe it's because it's not divisive like other Tusk songs. I hate Not That Funny, and I hate that Lindsey sang that song live over other, more deserving songs that the audience would have rather heard. A three minute annoying song on record that he stretches to a horrific 7-9 minutes live really irritates me, and I'm so glad it's been off their set since he returned to the band.
They did it on the Dance tour... long version... He was pretty crazy at the Cleeveland Show with this tune..
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  #137  
Old 09-03-2016, 08:27 PM
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Originally Posted by bwboy View Post
I Know I'm Not Wrong was a song I never really noticed, somehow it just seemed to fall between the cracks. But when FM played it live for the first time a few years back, it became one of my all-time favorite songs! It's so catchy and upbeat, I really love it. But when people talk about Tusk, this song is rarely mentioned, good or bad.

Maybe it's because it's not divisive like other Tusk songs. I hate Not That Funny, and I hate that Lindsey sang that song live over other, more deserving songs that the audience would have rather heard. A three minute annoying song on record that he stretches to a horrific 7-9 minutes live really irritates me, and I'm so glad it's been off their set since he returned to the band.

IKINW has always been a favorite of mine. But I have to say, the alternate version on the "Tusk" box set that has Lindsey and Stevie singing together blows the original out of the water. Why they didn't end using that version instead is a head scratcher for me. There's something about it that's just more interesting and fun to listen to. Anytime it comes up on my playlist I have to listen to it at least 2-3 times. I've found my favorite FM songs are usually those where you hear the partnering of voices between Lindsey, Stevie and Christine as opposed to strict solos. They're just more dynamic.
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Old 10-13-2016, 02:41 PM
FuzzyPlum FuzzyPlum is offline
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Default Indulgent showdown: Fleetwood Mac's Tusk vs The Clash's Sandinista

Really interesting article...
'Tusk is a masterpiece, or very goddamn close to it. It has to be one of the best—and most absolutely rewarding and consistent—double studio albums ever made, and it has dated exceedingly well'.

The Observer
http://observer.com/2016/10/indulgen...hs-sandinista/



Deep in the heart of every rock musician, from the most credible to the most commercial, there lies someone whining, “Je suis un artiste! If only the world knew what a deep, tortured soul I am, and how complicated my record collection is!”

The more practical of these musicians merely peppers their catalog with maudlin and heartfelt ballads. Let’s call this the Bon Jovi method: “Perhaps you will forgive that Slippery When Wet stuff if I sing another song that is the musical equivalent of the page in the yearbook dedicated to that 11th grader who died.” Other artists make severe left or right turns, and produce albums dripping with uncharacteristic drama and musical complication; here I direct you to Music From ‘The Elder’ by Kiss, a histrionic, incomprehensible, and orchestra-laden concept album from 1981 that very nearly ended Kiss’ career (it’s actually a pretty good record, by the way, and features two songs co-written by Gene Simmons and Lou Reed).

Pop/rock history is absolutely strewn with such artifacts, from Pet Sounds to Bad Religion’s Into the Unknown (a fascinating pop/prog exercise from 1983 that was so offensive to the group’s fans that the band excised it from their catalog). In between these extremes, there’s Springsteen’s bold and courageous Nebraska, McCartney’s remarkable Firemen albums, Neil Young’s fascinating genre exercises (like Trans, Everybody’s Rockin’ and Arc), the Beastie Boys’ game changing Paul’s Boutique, and, of course, the great daddy of all of these sorts of records, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. There are also entire careers that are built on thwarting expectations, e.g. Scott Walker, Beck, Bowie and Prince.[i]

In the autumn of 1979 Fleetwood Mac, a wildly popular and influential band at the peak of their visibility and commercial prowess, released a much-anticipated double album that was interpreted by fans and media as radical, even experimental. Almost exactly a year later the Clash, a wildly popular and influential band at the peak of their visibility and credibility, released a much-anticipated triple album that was interpreted by fans and media as radical, even experimental.

Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk is lean, effective and almost completely without waste or filler. It showcases a great band at their prime. Alternately precise and luxurious, Tusk is one of the most underrated albums of the era.

It is the anti-Sandinista!.

Sandinista! is a sprawling mess, resembling some kind of well-meaning dish that combines far too many under-cooked and over-thought ingredients (“I’m not sure yet if I’m making a soup, a stew, or a salad, but maybe we should we throw some cardamom and fenugreek in there!”). Sandinista! is like a perfect storm of mistakes, and it’s one of the most confounding and overrated albums of all time.


Respectfully, I “get” what the Clash were going for on Sandinista!—they wanted to present a travelogue of the sound of the disenfranchised classes of Jamaica, London and New York City. But it appears that no one was running the show or making sure takes were satisfactory; seemingly, nobody cared if overdubs made any sense, or if the mixes were coherent; and it certainly sounds like no one was insisting that a song be fully composed before the tape was rolling.

For 36 years, Sandinista! has been defined not by its content, but by the way it has been interpreted by an audience desperately eager to see genius where there was only confusion.

Sandinista! is a prime—perhaps the prime—example of what happens when a well known artist does something so contrarian and obscure that it gets mistaken for greatness; let’s call this “The Radiohead Effect.”

“This is so effed up, it must be good!” says the listener, who may also be the type of person who has spent far too much of his or her life listening to live recordings of “Dark Star”, owns a copy of Elvis Costello’s The Juliet Letters, and thinks liking Primus makes them really, really weird, maaan. Listen, pally, you want weird and good? Sit down with all four CDs of Tony Conrad’s Early Minimalism Volume One, and then talk to me about your uncle who taught you all about Captain Beefheart and the Talking Heads.[ii]

The standard line about Sandinista! is that there’s an album worth of good stuff here. Well, that’s not quite true. There may, indeed, be an album’s worth of good material, but barely an EP’s worth of good recordings.

The Clash
Remember all the thoughtful, meticulous songwriting and pristine production we used 12 months ago on London Calling? Me neither! Here’s Sandinista!. Screen shot/YouTube
Only a year earlier, the Clash had released one of the greatest albums ever made. On London Calling, the Clash also deviated from expectations; they crafted a near-perfect double album that accessed influences from all over the world, from all over their heart, from all over the 20th century. London Calling is an album about the conflicting public and private faces of the West, referencing the music that had touched the Clash and made them the band they had become, from Woody Guthrie to Mott the Hoople to Jacob Miller to Lonnie Donnegan.

The big difference, as far as I can tell, is that on London Calling, someone was in charge (specifically, producer Guy Stevens), and the Clash circa 1979 were a band who were seeking a form of perfection; but the band who made Sandinista! were, I believe, deliberately seeking a scattershot account of the 88 different types of music in their heads. However, I don’t think they anticipated the desultory effect an undisciplined writing, recording and mixing process would have on the finished product.

In order to underline my rather strong assessment of Sandinista!, I’ll point out some specifics.

In no particular order…“Junco Partner” is one of the more coherent recordings on the collection, but why didn’t someone ask violinist Tymon Dogg to tune up before recording? It’s precisely this sort of problem—stop the tape and tune the freaking violin—that consistently plagues Sandinista!

“Rebel Waltz” is painfully close to being a great song, but it’s about four mix passes away from a decent mix. Again, a track like this—which, if it had been more thoughtfully arranged and mixed, would have fit in well on London Calling—underlines why Sandinista! is such a troublesome album.

“The Sound of Sinners” also could have been a helluva song, if it had been produced or mixed by someone who wasn’t really, really high; and there’s almost something to “Ivan Meets G.I. Joe”, except, well, it’s dumb, and they made the standard stoner mistake of not being able to distinguish between the sound effects and the music (the video game sounds are mixed as high as anything else in the track).

One take, one riff, one verse, one melody and...we're done!
One take, one riff, one verse, one melody and…we’re done! Screen shot/YouTube
Let’s keep on going! “Look Here”, like many of the album’s worst tracks, is an idea, not a song—“We’ll try to do a jazzy, swingy, kind of thing, um, I mean, let’s not spend too much time on it, and, uh, I have one melody line I can repeat a lot, and if it doesn’t sound quite right, we can just overdub some more stuff on it, and I think it will be, like, jazzy!”

“Up in Heaven” is a very solid riff and a fairly decent verse and…nothing else. Nada. No one bothered to write anything more. “Something About England” is a goddamn good song, but it sounds like it was mixed by someone who just drank a lot of Benadryl and Baileys and chases shiny objects without any sense whatsoever of an “overall” coherent mix—“Oh, that’s a cool guitar part! Let’s turn that up! Wow, I like the sound of that piano, let’s put that fader up for a while!”

And on and on.

Sandinista! is mortally faulty on every level, except for one: it’s not pretentious, and its fascination with various urban music styles is sincere. In this sense—the way in which it is genuine, and simultaneously under- and over-thought—Sandinista! is reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. But Dylan did something pretty brilliant on Self Portrait: he kept things small, and the performances and arrangements are on the minimalist side, as opposed to Sandinista!’s universal tendency to throw more and more crap into the gumbo.

Now, let’s extract a pretty solid EP from the album’s entire 144 (!) minutes.

“Magnificent 7” is a pioneering song with some style, effectively recorded. “The Call Up” is dynamic and strange, with a compelling lyric. And “Hitsville UK”, although drenched in the weed-friendly reverb haze that surrounds virtually all of Sandinista!’s non-mixes, is a very solid song, even if it smells a bit like a second-rate Jam or Elvis Costello composition. Sandinista!’s three unapologetically great tracks are “Somebody Got Murdered”, “Police on My Back” and “Lose This Skin” (though “The Call Up” comes preciously close); but I suspect it is no accident that two of these three were not written by the Clash.[iii]

There’s more: The thing that makes Sandinista! not just a curious, well-meaning face-plant but also a true catastrophe are the dub tracks. The half-dozen-plus dub tracks on the album are pretty sorry and confused examples of the genre. Generally, dub is the act of taking away elements, and effecting those that remain, to create a psychotronic, mesmerizing, hypnowoofer effect; however, the dub tracks on Sandinista! have more to do with “Revolution No. 9” or a bad sophomore year music concrete project. Whereas I can concede that most of Sandinista! is well intended, the dub tracks are just a disaster, a sign of what a misdirected and ill-conceived mess this whole thing is.

Now…Tusk.


I’ll be honest, you can’t even compare these two albums, these extraordinary adventures. From hushed, flickering ballads to constricted, tightly wound pop built out of the closely arranged Legos of genius, Tusk is a masterpiece, or very goddamn close to it. It has to be one of the best—and most absolutely rewarding and consistent—double studio albums ever made, and it has dated exceedingly well.

To rediscover Tusk (or to investigate it for the first time!) is like stumbling upon a lost masterpiece by the Go Betweens, XTC, Nick Lowe, Kimberly Rew, the dBs, or any of the artists from the early 1980s who were trying to create a highly conceptualized yet non-indulgent uber-pop resonant with emotion and depth.

On Tusk, Fleetwood Mac distill the very best of their past (the uncluttered intensity of the Peter Green era, the gorgeous, sad restraint of the Danny Kirwan years, and the harmony-laden FM glow of Rumours and Fleetwood Mac) into one package, and present it in a detailed, fastidious fashion; every sighing and soaring note and iridescent guitar is placed with nearly mathematical intent. What results is an album that easily equals the best credible pop of the era.

Contrary to the hype that usually accompanies Tusk, this isn’t just Lindsey Buckingham’s album; in fact, if you remove his tracks, you’re still left with a goddamn terrific record.

Christine McVie’s exquisite “Brown Eyes” is a cool, shimmering, dusk-purple spray of hooded-eyed sadness; the bass-chord-driven “Never Make Me Cry” is such a great example of late-night low-volume electric melancholy that it is reminiscent of Mazzy Star or Malcolm Burn-era Chris Whitley (and despite Buckingham’s more deliberate efforts, it might be the most successfully arty track on the album).

Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac. Courtesy of Fleetwood Mac
As for Buckingham’s much noted achievements on Tusk, they are artful and meticulous, and like the work of Mitch Easter-era R.E.M., endlessly fascinating, with new production quirks and onion-skin-like overdubs revealing themselves on every new listen.

When you combine Buckingham’s precisely tweaked pop gifts with McVie and Nicks’ luxurious, poignant sigh-pop, and then paint the whole megalith in the intimate tones that Tusk is bravely produced in, the result is rare magic. I think the album most comparable to Tusk is the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile, which also balanced Brunelleschi-like brilliance with Gropius-like simplicity, creating a pastoral yet ecstatic album.[iv]

Listen, I can’t say enough about Tusk, but it’s really stunning how this emotional yet disciplined album, so richly composed and edited and mixed to masterpiece-like effect, is virtually the opposite of Sandinista!.

Let’s put it this way: Sandinista! absolutely insists you call it brilliant, because if you refuse to, you’ll see what a true piece of crap it is. At some point in high school, some friend of yours—possibly someone you wanted to hook up with—showed you one of their poems. It was pretentious nonsense full of typos, and combined the worst aspects of Kahlil Gibran, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut. But you had invested so much in your friendship with this person that not only did you say you liked it, you actually convinced yourself that it was brilliant.

Generationally, we had so much invested in believing the Clash were The Only Band That Matters (especially after the Everest-like triumph of London Calling) and so much invested in believing that they were our Beatles, our Stones, that we not only tolerated the babbling, incomplete and indecipherable nonsense that was Sandinista!, we actually convinced ourselves that it was as good as the band thought it was when they were really high and recording it.[v]

Joe Strummer.
Joe Strummer. Wikimedia Creative Commons
I shall end this anecdotally.

One day in 1981, in my role as teenage journalist and correspondent for the U.K. music weekly Sounds, I found myself talking to Christine McVie. I told her I had heard that the Clash wanted to make sure that their new triple album, Sandinista!, would sell in stores for a lower price than Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. McVie arched an eyebrow and said, “Ah…the Clash…I believe that’s one of those bands Lindsey likes.”

One day in 1981, in my role as NYU student who lived in Weinstein Dormitory and made virtually daily pilgrimages to a record store on St. Marks Place called Sounds, I ran into Joe Strummer. He was walking on the north side of 8th Street between University and Broadway. He was holding a small brown paper bag full of cherries. Being a strident but generally amiable 18-year-old asshole, I felt compelled to tell him all the things I didn’t like about his latest album, Sandinista! I also told him how very much I liked the just-released album from his pre-Clash band, the 101ers.

Strummer listened politely, never losing eye contact. When he saw that I was done, he smiled and said, “Want a cherry?”

[i] Into the Unknown is actually a pretty good record, and the two Firemen albums (Paul McCartney’s collaboration with producer/former Killing Joke bassist Youth) are probably McCartney’s most interesting work of the last 25 years. Neil Young’s Arc, like Metal Machine Music, is much better described than heard.

[ii] Seriously, though, listen to Early Minimalism Volume One; it is a deeply important and fascinating document, and a fundamental part of understanding the birth of the Velvet Underground, Krautrock and Sonic Youth.

[iii] “Police on My Back” is a first-rate cover of an even better recording by the vastly underrated Equals, a terrific and pioneering mod/blue beat band from the 1960s led by Eddy Grant; and “Lose This Skin” is written and sung by violinist Tymon Dogg.

[iv] Two architects mentioned in one sentence! I knew those NYU classes in urban design would pay off!

[v] Regardless, I’ll still take Sandinista! over the worst multi-LP album ever made, ELP’s triple-disc Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends. If I ever get Doctor Who-like powers to travel through space and time, the very first thing I will do is destroy the master tapes to this unforgivable atrocity; only then will I consider preventing Hitler’s birth or telling a young Robert De Niro that he should never, under any circumstances, make any movies with Ben Stiller.
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  #139  
Old 10-15-2016, 06:21 PM
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What an excellent piece! Thanks for that link! I basicly agree, but he could have gone slightly deeper on WHAT made Tusk so brilliant. still, he makes a very good observation.
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  #140  
Old 12-09-2016, 06:08 PM
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The Verge

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/7/13...-round-up-2016

The pre-2016 entertainment that got us through 2016

A roundup of our favorite older things to watch and hear this year
by Verge Staff Dec 7, 2016, 2:21pm EST

FLEETWOOD MAC’S TUSK

Chris Plante: We The Internet have collectively agreed on 2016's status as a Level 6 Garbage Fire. In my personal life, 2016 was more like a grease fire, a small flame, but one that refuses to go out and promises to burn your life down if you let it. My grandmother passed away, my wife and I continued to mourn the death of a close friend, and as if tormented by metaphor, practically every appliance in our house broke in the span of six months. This week, I got food poisoning, in a cheeky full stop to a year that often felt, emotionally speaking, like barfing and ****ting at the same time. As an act of self-preservation, I turned on most Sunday mornings to Tusk, Fleetwood Mac's experimental 1979 folk album. In a 2015 Letter of Recommendation for New York Times Magazine, Sam Anderson perfectly described Christine McVie's voice as "smooth and sad, a melon-flavored wine cooler on a vacant beach at sunset with the one you know will eventually leave you." Fleetwood Mac is McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks, and when they were authoring this music, the latter two were just entering their 30s. Even rock stars, their lyrics suggest, must grow up and do battle with the dragons of mundanity: death, heartbreak, and finances. In 2016, those beasts appeared over and over, over and over, and Tusk served as a torch, rarely leading the way, but always illuminating the darkness.
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  #141  
Old 02-08-2017, 02:18 PM
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I'm sort of answering another thread that I can't find anymore. As with many double albums, there are people who say it should have been a single album. But, I've tried to make a single-album selection from Tusk, and it just doesn't work. The track listing and order I settled on is:

Over and Over
The Ledge
Sara
Think About Me
Walk A Thin Line
Storms
Angel
That's All For Everyone
Sisters of the Moon
Tusk
Brown Eyes

However, no matter how I fiddle with the track listing, it just doesn't work. The slightly out-there Lindsey songs stand out too much in a shorter track listing. Getting (finally) to the point of this thread, while I don't think Tusk is the perfect double album, Tusk it what it is. It's a double album with a lot of Lindsey, and nothing else can be extracted from it.

I much prefer Tusk to Mirage, which is much more of a safe post-Rumours album.
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  #142  
Old 06-03-2017, 08:47 PM
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Ok.... Tusk is my all time favorite Fleetwood Mac song. For all you Tusk lovers isn't the box set of variety versions of this song amazing? When a version comes on a mix play I get so excited to hear yet another version of a great song. Tusk the song and the album is their masterpiece. If you don't have this box set ....and you love the MAC. Get this set.Its Amazing!
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  #143  
Old 09-10-2017, 07:35 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ench View Post
I'm sort of answering another thread that I can't find anymore. As with many double albums, there are people who say it should have been a single album. But, I've tried to make a single-album selection from Tusk, and it just doesn't work. The track listing and order I settled on is:

Over and Over
The Ledge
Sara
Think About Me
Walk A Thin Line
Storms
Angel
That's All For Everyone
Sisters of the Moon
Tusk
Brown Eyes

However, no matter how I fiddle with the track listing, it just doesn't work. The slightly out-there Lindsey songs stand out too much in a shorter track listing. Getting (finally) to the point of this thread, while I don't think Tusk is the perfect double album, Tusk it what it is. It's a double album with a lot of Lindsey, and nothing else can be extracted from it.

I much prefer Tusk to Mirage, which is much more of a safe post-Rumours album.
I think you were searching for this thread: http://ledge.fleetwoodmac.net/showthread.php?t=56888
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Old 09-10-2017, 07:38 AM
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“The epitome of art for art’s sake”: Fleetwood Mac’s masterful and difficult “Tusk”
The band that helped usher America from AM to FM radio, and their infamous follow-up to "Rumours"


Excerpted from "Fleetwood Mac's Tusk" by Rob Trucks (Bloomsbury, 2010). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.

On March 1, 2009, Mick Fleetwood is 61. John McVie is 63. Stevie Nicks is 60.

Christine McVie, the missing third of Fleetwood Mac’s three vocalists and songwriters during the group’s glory years, is 65 and nowhere near Pittsburgh. She retired from Fleetwood Mac, and touring, a decade before.

At 59, Lindsey Buckingham, the man behind Tusk, is the baby.

For the next four months, at every one of their 51 performances, the band will play 23 songs, beginning with “Monday Morning” and ending with “Silver Springs.” Of the 21 songs in between, the oldest is the Peter Green-penned “Oh Well,” which first appeared on the Then Play On album, approximately five years before Buckingham and Nicks joined. The newest, a significant reworking of Tango in the Night’s “Big Love,” is old enough, if animated, to drink, vote, and be tried as an adult.

Like professional wrestling, this is theater.

Like professional wrestling, this is scripted.

And like a professional wrestling pay-per-view event, Fleetwood Mac’s 2009 tour brandishes an outrageously over-the-top title.

The designated appellation for this quartet of AARP-ready musicians’ 51-show North American sojourn: Fleetwood Mac Unleashed.

* * *

Nearly every night John McVie wears an open vest, Fleetwood wears a buttoned vest and Buckingham wears a bright-red V-neck T-shirt underneath a leather jacket.

Stevie Nicks wears a selection of shawls and, when onstage, is often lost in her own private Idaho, spinning and twirling, twirling and spinning. Like Billy Idol, dancing with herself.

Nicks will definitely be onstage for “Sara,” the tenth selection of the evening and one of but three songs from Tusk that makes the set list. Certain internet bloggers will have you believe that Nicks wrote “Sara” for her aborted child, fathered by the Eagles’ Don Henley. Mick Fleetwood has written that he is the song’s “great, dark wing,” while others will suggest that “Sara” is about Sara Recor, one of Nicks’ closest friends until Recor started sleeping with Fleetwood before Nicks realized that her own relationship with the drummer was over.

Whatever the song’s true topic, “Sara” is one of the few early Nicks songs that is positively not about her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham. And yet every night for 51 nights Nicks will sing herself over to Buckingham’s side of the stage, lay her head on his shoulder and, at the song’s conclusion, initiate an embrace before leaving the stage, once again and not so subtly selling the band’s “complex and convoluted history” that reached its peak with Rumours.

* * *

Within a year of its release, Rumours is the best-selling album in the history of Warner Brothers.

Rumours is the best-selling single album by a single artist of all time (these qualifiers allow ignorance of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).

And though the Grammy Awards are like a middle school graduation exercise in that no one but the participants and their parents gives a ****, Rumours won one of those too.

The Big One: Album of the Year on February 23, 1978, just about 54 weeks after the album’s release.

And don’t think the Eagles’ Hotel California wasn’t some serious competition.

Rumours, along with Hotel California, another mid-1970s, LA-based “soft rock” classic, ushered in America’s transfer from AM to FM radio.

Good timing never hurt anyone.

* * *

Talking about Tusk without Rumours is like talking about aftershocks without an earthquake, like a lava flow without a volcanic eruption.

Tusk is a reaction (insert bad “Chain” pun here).

Tusk is not Tusk without Rumours.

* * *

Stevie Nicks is responsible for the wildly inappropriate tour title.

Stevie Nicks also threatens to quit the band if Tusk is used as the title of their 1979 double album.

Because, yes, among other things, Tusk represents part of the male anatomy.

You need go no further than the album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rumours to know that Mick Fleetwood has a proclivity for dick jokes.

In a lot of ways, rock and roll is like nursery school and, at least in this sense, Fleetwood Mac is very much rock and roll.

* * *

This is how the story goes:

Rumours also wins Album of the Year at the Dick Clark-created American Music Awards.

Before going home, Lindsey Buckingham vomits all over Dick Clark’s backstage office.

As much as Rob would like to see this proportionately heroic regurgitation as symbolic, he’s afraid (Rob is often afraid) that a combination of steadily ingested pre-show drugs, and not any personal animosity towards Dick Clark and everything he stands for, is to blame.

Or credit.

* * *

Now that some 30-year-old dust has settled, Rumours stands as the ninth-best-selling album of all time, comfortably nestled between Shania Twain’s Come on Over, and the Beatles’ so-called White Album.

Coincidentally, the White Album is not only the bestselling Beatles album of all time, but a pretty good road map (were one to exist) for Tusk.

You know, a wildly experimental double album from a wildly successful pop band with a plethora (if three can be considered a plethora) of singing and songwriting talent.

And yes, Ringo wrote “Don’t Pass Me By,” which represents one-thirtieth of the group’s recorded output in 1968, and that really makes four singers and four songwriters for the Beatles so you’re welcome to use that fact as a disqualifier if you’d like because we’re about to move on to Pet Sounds comparisons anyway.

* * *

Besides FM radio and music, Rumours also sold a storyline. No review, interview, or feature about the band was written without assessing the recent break-up of Christine McVie from John McVie, of Stevie Nicks from Lindsey Buckingham.

And how the songs of Rumours sprung from these separations.

* * *

For those just barely old enough to see Pet Sounds in the rearview mirror, Tusk stands as a pioneer, the epitome of art for art’s sake. Not only an influence but also a permission slip, a throwing down of the creative gauntlet.

Which is why Tusk functions as both a primary influence for many independent musicians and an alarm of earsplitting proportions for the major label system that gave it birth.

* * *

When a wrestler’s good-guy character has run its course, he turns heel.

When a wrestler’s bad-guy character has run its course, he turns babyface.

But what do you do when a rock and roll band’s storyline is a plethora (if a plethora can be two) of break-ups and there’s no chance of romantic reconciliation?

* * *

Fleetwood Mac is a machine.

Despite the rough edges, a well-rehearsed, well-scripted machine.

Cue Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

Without a doubt, Tusk is Fleetwood Mac’s most adventuresome moment.

And one that they will never, ever repeat.

* * *

Music is personal.

Tusk is a symbol.

* * *

In terms of being someone who has tried to inject a sense of possibility into the band, there needs to be a certain aggressiveness in order to do that because I think there tends to be a kind of complacency to sort of remain with the status quo, you know. Certainly on the Tusk album. That was an effort to try to, you know, broaden out the palette and, as you know, that process became something which was disallowed by the band on future albums, not because there was any lack of artistic success but because there was a certain lack of commercial success. And so that’s always been something that I’ve had to pit myself against, like it or not.

—Lindsey Buckingham, October 2, 2008 (the last
day of his fifty-eighth year on earth)



http://www.salon.com/2017/09/09/33-13-excerpt/
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  #145  
Old 09-10-2017, 08:04 AM
FuzzyPlum FuzzyPlum is offline
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'You need go no further than the album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rumours to know that Mick Fleetwood has a proclivity for dick jokes'


What does this mean? I've poured over those albums and don't get any sense of 'dick jokes'. What am I missing?
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  #146  
Old 09-10-2017, 08:49 AM
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SisterNightroad SisterNightroad is offline
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Originally Posted by FuzzyPlum View Post
'You need go no further than the album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rumours to know that Mick Fleetwood has a proclivity for dick jokes'


What does this mean? I've poured over those albums and don't get any sense of 'dick jokes'. What am I missing?
I think it's a nod to Mick's "balls".
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  #147  
Old 09-10-2017, 09:24 AM
FuzzyPlum FuzzyPlum is offline
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I think it's a nod to Mick's "balls".
Thanks.
Oh, is that it? Not sure they are even evident on the FM album?
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  #148  
Old 09-10-2017, 09:38 AM
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Thanks.
Oh, is that it? Not sure they are even evident on the FM album?
In fact they aren't on that cover, or at least aren't visible. I think memory tricked the author because Mick's "hanging balls" have always been part of his character.
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  #149  
Old 09-10-2017, 10:11 AM
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HomerMcvie HomerMcvie is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FuzzyPlum View Post
'You need go no further than the album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rumours to know that Mick Fleetwood has a proclivity for dick jokes'


What does this mean? I've poured over those albums and don't get any sense of 'dick jokes'. What am I missing?
"Tusk" was supposedly named because it's a nickname for the penis. Stevie threatened to quit over it?

Speaking of such...what IS fuzzy plum? Because I tell ya, I can only picture ONE thing, every time I see your name. There, I asked!
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  #150  
Old 09-10-2017, 10:21 AM
FuzzyPlum FuzzyPlum is offline
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"Tusk" was supposedly named because it's a nickname for the penis. Stevie threatened to quit over it?

Speaking of such...what IS fuzzy plum? Because I tell ya, I can only picture ONE thing, every time I see your name. There, I asked!




I dont f***ing know

We should all be allowed to change our name at least once!
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