Rumours of the Tusk Dog
 

Did you ever wonder about the dog on the cover of Tusk? I heard a rumour that it was Lindsey's dog biting the foot of Richard Dashut. Richard and Lindsey were good friends so it seems unlikely to me that Lindsey's dog would be attacking his good friend's foot. How did they even manage to get a picture of this? Was it spliced off the videotape from the making of the album? Why would they have a vicious dog in the studio with two sexy ladies present? Did Stevie really threaten to quit the band if the album was titled Tusk or was it the cover that offended her, or both? Obviously her threat was futile cause she never quit(in 1979).

How old was the dog when this pic was taken and what ripe old age was he when he entered Doggie Heaven? What was the pooch's name? What type of dog was he? Was it even a boy dog?

And my biggest question of all is why hasn't this dog ever been mentioned in rock-n-roll history? I mean this is a dog that graced the cover of a big time rock band yet the poor creature is never even mentioned in the passages of time.

Mick doesn't mention anything about the cover in his book. He explains the title, and it has nothing to do with the dog:

The title refers to a jocular term of affection for the Male Member: old habits die hard in Fleetwood Mac.(When Stevie heard that we had decided to name the album Tusk, she threatened to quit the band in revulsion. But I chose to ignore her and nothing ever came of it.)

For those who don't know much about the Fleetwood Mac blues band, here's the explanation, Mick mentions about the shows back in 1968:

Night after night, Jeremy would convulse us all in drunken laughter as he thought up and carried off some new outrage. The worst of these was Harold, the pink sixteen-inch rubber dildo that eventually became part of our show. Our roadie Hugh Price would bring out Harold on a big platter, as if he were the butler delivering tea. Harold would be attached to my bass drum by way of a suction cup at his base, and would spend the evening quivering and vibrating in an erect position at the ladies in our audience.

Again, this has nothing to do with a dog. And I don't see an explicit relationship between the male member and the Tusk song lyrics. :shrug: (and the story behind that song).

His name was Scooter and he was Ken Caillat's dog.

You don't? Perhaps you need to replace every chant of "Tusk" with "Penis" and remember the song is perhaps about Mick and Stevie? :shocked:

Completely irrelevant to dogs though. Well unless you aren't a Stevie fan... :shrug:

Bob Welch's album 'The Other One' has a spoof of the 'Tusk' cover. Somebody is holding up their hands with fingers entwined in such a way as to make a dog shadow on the wall. It's clever and obviously an answer to the 'Tusk' cover. To whom do those hands belong?

I'm sure Bob would tell you, if you asked. Are you FB friends with him?

Yeah, well, as you may know I'm a Mick's book fan, and I always recall what he said about the song. No dogs, no Stevie, but Normandy. And "his" contribution, though the author credits just mentions Lindsey, not Mick & Lindsey:

I wanted to make a statement too, some special contribution that would reflect my vision of what Fleetwood Mac was all about, a sense of grandeur with intimacy, if you will. That was the vision that came together in the aural collage called "Tusk."

It started as a riff we used to play when we took the stage and the lights went off and we were being announced, right before our first number. It was our way of having a live sound check so Richard Dashut could set his levels. It was just a little riff that Lindsey started playing one night, and I'm tapping my drums. We used to play it in the dark for less than a minute every night. When we began the new album we tried doing something with it, but the idea was scrapped. Months and months went by, but that riff just would not leave my head. One night Richard Dashut assembled a twenty-second tape loop of this four-bar riff. A bunch of us physically held the tape loop aloft in the studio so it wouldn't sag as we dubbed it from one twenty-four-track recorder to another. Then we sped it up, I did some overdubs, and we had a basic track.

The next day I was at home, thinking about "the riff," and my memory returned to my visit to Barfleur in Normandy the previous summer.

One Sunday morning I had been awakened (with a serious hangover) by the raucous music of the village brass band, which was circling through the town blaring away in honor of the festival of the local saint. I tried to get back to sleep after the band had passed, to no avail. Just when I thought they had stopped for half an hour, back they came roaring through the village again. It became clear there was to be no relief, so I got up and opened the shutters onto a wonderful scene by Brueghel: old peasants with bloodshot noses, young women garbed in colorful local costume, kids running around, drunks staggering after the band, the village all garlanded and festooned, everyone having a grand time a la fete.

Now, back in Los Angeles, I had a brainstorm. What was music all about anyway? Here was this brass band that was the catalyst for the village, bringing old and young together, playing and laughing. Why not try to recreate this ambience at Fleetwood Mac shows, with local brass bands, maybe from the high schools, playing "the riff" at every stop on the tour? We could bring the intimacy of the village fete with us as we traveled around the world.

That, in any event, was the basic idea. One day in the studio I volunteered to pay for a marching band to record this riff. In a typical burst of grandiosity, I said I wanted to go for an immense wall of sound, that I wanted to record the band in Dodger Stadium. Silence. They looked at me as if I were mad. Someone murmured that this idea was a little off the wall. Dark mutterings that old Fleetwood had gone round the bend on this one. Then Judy Wong, bless her, said she knew someone at Dodger Stadium.

Ha!
I forget exactly how the University of Southern California's Trojan Marching Band was chosen to play the part of the village band on the album. I went to one of the marching band's meetings, played them a tape of "the rift," and asked if they could manage an arrangement. The kids liked the idea. The band director, Dr. Bartz, came over to our studio a few days later, and gradually my village band came to life. By this time, I was frothing at the mouth. We could do this in Australia, Germany, Rio, anywhere! The fans would love seeing the locals up onstage with us. It would be incredible. A few weeks later Fleetwood Mac, the 112-member USC Trojans, and a film crew met up on a beautiful southern California afternoon in an empty Dodger Stadium.

Sorry if I'm going out of the topic, cause this thread is about the cover and not the song, but i thought this should be interesting... I have read and seen several Lindsey interviews, where he talks about the Tusk song, like in A&E Private Sessions. I don't remember he tells about Mick's inspiration or contribution. Have you?

Actually, I'm not. I did have some correspondence with him on a message board he used to have. I'll go look him up on FB.

He only posts, maybe once a week, but he's very friendly, and usually answers everything.:)

As far as I remember, it's John McVie's foot the dog is biting. :shrug:

I think it was in the BBC doc during the Unleashed tour. Lindsey said the marching band was Mick's idea.

Me too. John's foot on Tusk and his arm on the box set. So, who holds the record of most album covers in Fleetwood Mac?

A "friendlier" pic of Scooter, from Ken Caillat's Facebook:
http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot..._3815168_n.jpg

^^^ great pic!

Thanks for sharing and Ken did confirm in his book that it was indeed his dog "Scooter"

This is not the same dog on the cover of the album.