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Old 05-28-2021, 06:20 PM
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Villavic Villavic is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2000
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Question Was it Mick's decision?

I was checking Wikipedia's Tusk page references, and found this paragraph extracted from Evans, Mike (2011). "Superstardom". Fleetwood Mac: The Definitive History (a book I have not read), and it says “"It was Mick Fleetwood, however, who made the first decision concerning the new record: that it was going to be a double album”. Was it? I didn’t recall that, and surely Mick would have said so in his (first) book, so I took my Mick's book and found these parts that talk about Tusk being a double album.

Our writers were prolific, and very early on we realized we had a lot more good songs than we could fit on a single album.
….
Many of the tracks, especially most of Lindsey's (but "Tusk" as well), were rather eccentric in a New Wavy style; this was a direct reaction to the middle-of-the-road feelings of Rumours. But we all considered the Tusk songs to be the crowning jewel of Fleetwood Mac's recorded work. In the end, we decided we could get away with releasing all of the music on a left-field double album.
….
But when we finally gave them the tapes of Tusk, they told us flatly we were crazy to release a double album. Mo Ostin explained that the record industry was in the midst of a severe slump in 1979-80 (few if any of the much-vaunted New Wave bands sold many records), and that a big double album might not be a very commercial proposition. The Warner Bros. executives, meanwhile, listened to Tusk and saw their much-anticipated Christmas bonuses fly out the window. No way, they said, was this package going to sell tonnage. But we never wavered once. We were too far into what we were doing, and at that point there was no question of hacking the album down to one record.


If the record company told them a double album wasn’t a smart commercial proposition, I don’t see Mick insisting the band that the album be double. I think they all wanted to make it double, specially Lindsey. Most likely hearing that, maybe Mick considered reducing it to a single record, but probably he didn't say anything after all the band agreed it would be a double.

Or have you read in any other source that it was Mick's decision?
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