[QUOTE=David;1287351] When the members of a band all wish they were elsewhere, that’s what you get.[/QUOTE]

Yea, when you don't like the direction of your own project, add the drama of ex's, mix it will drugs and alcohol, a long tour, and fatigue... You got a mess!

I absolutely LOVE Mirage. White thru Mirage are all GOLD to me.

Opinions are like something. Maybe you should go check yourself. :wavey:

Probably the members were frustrated with Lindsey because they felt he went too far, making Tusk too different from Rumours, but I'd blame on all 5 members about accepting Mick as manager of the Tusk tour. Who chooses someone with no experience as a manager? And to top it off an addict.

Less man a month after the end of the Tusk tour, I realized I was in trouble with the rest of the band. By this time, other managers began to enter the picture. John, Chris, and I were still with Mickey Shapiro, but Stevie had signed with the tough industry mogul Irving Azoff, who managed the Eagles at the time, to represent her with regard to her looming solo career. Lindsey was with somebody else.

The sh** hit the fan at a business meeting held to overview the Tusk tour with reference to the European leg. This turned into a vitriolic review of my behavior and management skills. The basic complaint, of course, was that we'd been on the road for eight months and hadn't made much money.

I explained that we'd undertaken this tour in order to sell a difficult record, which by that time was up to five million in sales. Yes, we'd grossed some big numbers, but our overhead was murderous. We spent a fortune on the road, running a fat ship. We decided to be comfortable, and we lost control. If Stevie wanted a hotel suite painted pink with a white piano in it, what are you gonna do? Say no? You can't do that in a Holiday Inn! Pink rooms and pianos cost real money. These were my decisions, because they had to be. There was no management company as a buffer between me and the band. To complain about anything, as musicians love to do, they had to address a band member me. People were honest with their feelings under this system, but they didn't like complaining about money. Even so, early in the tour I tried to change to cheaper hotels. All the others complained and I said the hell with it.
From then on we went first-notch. We had everything.

Irving Azoff: "You should've made more money. Why isn't there more money after a year on the road?"

The accountant, meanwhile, was looking over the books and frowning. Impressive amounts of cash were missing, having been spent on various extravagances. The accountants and lawyers were not used to this. They didn't understand how to run a rock band. They said to me, "How can you consider yourself a manager when you let this kind of thing happen?" But had they ever tried to say no to friends who also happened to be members of the world's biggest band? But that didn't matter.

John Courage was fired by the band's lawyers right after this meeting.

My turn came a bit later. It was a very shifty scenario. The lawyers didn't say we had done anything wrong, but it was bordering on that. There was an unspoken implication that money was missing. We felt unjustly accused by ignorant laymen. It was most unpleasant. John Courage had been working for Fleetwood Mac for almost ten years, and is one of the most honest people I've ever known. And my end had consisted of taking 10 percent of the band's net, not the gross like most managers. I got paid after expenses and had no publishing, and got to work my brains out.

Granted, some kind of split was inevitable, but it was real ugly the way it was done. It was a big meeting. Everybody was there, and all the recriminations of the past eighteen months were played out. We had been pilloried for making the most expensive record in history. Tusk had only gone to number three, where Rumours had been number one. We made no money on tour. Some money was unaccounted for. It was like an Indian Council, everyone seated in a circle, five musicians and the lawyers with their wretched files in their laps.

I didn't say anything.

Irving Azoff made it plain that he was there to clean up the mess and take care of business. "I represent Stevie, and she ain't doing nothing unless . . ."

His basic message was this: "Hey, Mick, it's over. From this point forward, we ain't paying no management commission, no office overhead, legal fees, accounting fees, nothing. We're out for now, goodbye."

....

The end result was that I was off the throne. It was the democratisation of Fleetwood Mac. Ever since, we've had review by committee managers, lawyers, business managers. The Gang of Four.

I was very hurt by all this. I walked outside into my garden and just sat for a long time. Chris, John, Stevie, and Lindsey tried to make it clear that they weren't mad at me, that they considered me to have acted like an over-indulgent father. But I felt humiliated and flogged in front of my community. It was horrible. If that's what they want to do, I thought, Duck it. At that point there wasn't going to be much to manage anyway, since we were all about to devolve into solo projects for a few years.

If I have to choose who pilots the plane I will fly on, I choose the best professional, not the most frequen flyer. This failur was responsiblity of the whole band.

I remember reading all that. Definitely not all his fault. But, he should have never been the guy in charge of $$.

Thanks for the quotes from Mick’s book. I’ve personally thought there was more to the story. I mean, several times in that passage Mick alluded to money missing. I know he says it was because of the extravagant traveling they were doing, but reading between the lines, it just seems like maybe Mick was caught with his hand in the cookie jar a couple of times, and he blamed it on the tour luxuries but couldn’t prove it with the accountants. I love it when he said accountants can’t understand that sort of thing LOL. No Mick, but they can understands receipts… or lack of receipts, for that matter.

Sounds like Mick had been managing FM since before Lindsey and Stevie joined, and it wasn’t until after the Tusk tour that a problem was noticed, so I can see why, after the White Album and Rumours tours went so well, they would have had no problem with Mick continuing in that role.

The book by Ken Caillat about the making of Tusk pretty much says right in the first chapter the rest of FM was held hostage to Lindsey’s demands for Tusk, for fear that if they said no to anything that he would quit. Like Lindsey performing some of his songs without the rest of the band, for instance.

And nowadays, Mick says Tusk is his favorite album as well as Then Play On.

Christine recently as well, if I’m remembering correctly.

I wonder which album will be his favorite in another 40 years?

Seriously, I hated Tusk when it first came out, but I appreciate it a lot more now. One reason I’ve come to like it more is because there were so many years in between FM albums, eventually I went back to Tusk just because I wanted to listen to ‘new’ FM music. I went from liking only 3 songs in 1980 (Tusk, What Makes You Think You’re the One, and That’s All For Everyone) to, maybe in 1995, coming to appreciate Storms, Beautiful Child, and Think About Me) to I think the 2009 tour where they sang I Know I’m Not Wrong, where I finally came to appreciate that song, as well as Christine’s. But it took a really long time… and I was a fan! So I certainly understand why most of America rejected Tusk.

I remember when Tusk was released. It definitely separated the true fans of the music and the “band wagon fans” who liked the popular bands at the time. I thought releasing Tusk was genius at the time following up from Rumours and with Tusk as the lead single…I Loved it!

When Mick is 115, I say it'll be Behind The Mask:laugh:

Maybe then we could get a Deluxe Edition AND a tour with the BTM gang, too! :laugh::laugh:

I looked online for reviews of Tusk from 1979-1980, but could only find one by Rolling Stone, which was extremely positive. Other sites had snippets of reviews, but it appears pretty divided then. Adjectives included random, abrasive, lo-fi, and new-wave.

According to Wikipedia, Mick said Then Play On is his favorite FM album, Tusk is his second favorite.

Christine: “Lindsey had already decided that he wanted to make a solo record. In order to keep him in the fold we all said ‘Well look, let him do his experimenting and incorporate it in the album somehow.’”

There is some confusion about sales for Tusk; most articles say it eventually sold 4 million copies, but online sources say it sold 2 million in America and 4 worldwide, which is shocking, really.

It was nominated for only one Grammy, for ‘best packaging’ or something to that effect.

The record company refused to build a new studio for FM, apparently feeling there were several to choose from, so the rest of the band agreed to let Lindsey have a new studio built out of their own pockets. Ironically, Lindsey still recorded 3 of his songs alone in his home, rather than the studio they had just paid 1.4 million to have built (not just one million).

Interesting stuff!

Tusk wasn’t even close to a “flop” in the broader commercial sense, topping the U.K. charts and landing at Number Four in the U.S. — not a bad return on investment when you consider the amount of bathroom recording involved. But Warner Brothers certainly didn’t do the band any favors on the promo side, playing the double LP in full one day before its release date via the Westwood One radio network.

“That was ridiculous, and that was Warner Brothers’ fault,” Fleetwood told Discoveries in 2004. “I said, ‘I don’t think you should be doing this,’ and they said, ‘Oh no, it’s all part of a new thing, friendly to radio.’ But there are people with tape machines out there. And they played the whole album! I should have stopped it. But they’d convinced me it was part of a new, cutting-edge marketing thing. Who knows how much damage it did? To me it was like a milestone of stupidity, and rolling the dice unnecessarily. But the album survives.”
It also didn’t help that the album’s list price was just under $16, a lofty price for the late Seventies. (Calculated for inflation, that’s around $57 in 2020 terms.)

Tusk changed the band forever. It was creative. It was experimental. Even though it was not a flop, Warner believed it was a flop because it sold so much less than Rumours. It changed the band forever. Tusk sort of killed the band on rock stations. They were not playing Tusk or Sara. Think About Me got airplay though. The over correction from Tusk led to the music box Mirage and then the even more synth pop Tango. While Tusk was not about chasing commercial success. Tusk made the band start chasing commercial success. Classic rock stations are still a staple in every city and they only Fleetwood Mac they play are from the White album and Rumours. There was talk on a local rock radio show a few months ago and the DJ was saying that Fleetwood Mac became a pop band in the 80s.

Does Rick play concerts any more?

I've gone and watched him in a blues club in Nashville fairly recently.