Quote:
Originally Posted by elle
if there was no Tusk, all their albums would just be trying to be commerciality-attempting replicas of Rumours.
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I think the album was designed to alienate about half the people posting in this thread, with their ideas for more sales, more sameness, more mainstream radio
logic. A
Tusk album that sold 15 million in 1979 is a contradiction in terms. Without that album, the band would have been, by 1979, just an old character actor (pop culture was that evanescent and that brutal). Without the burn and the freakishness, there would have been no reason for the Washington Post or the Philadelphia Enquirer critics (Ken Tucker, John Rockwell, Robert Hilburn, and all) to write articles comparing
Tusk with
The Long Run — giving Fleetwood the clear lead for creativity and fire. I don’t want a one-album
Tusk any more than I want a twenty-minute
Nights of Cabiria.
Quote:
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i've never been at FM or LB show where Tusk was not a huge crowd pleaser. guess everyone knows it from football games.
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My mum and pops were USC football season ticket holders in 1979–80. We went to all the home games at the Coliseum. “Tusk” was unmistakably important to the Trojan halftime shows and the games in general. All the Trojan fans knew it (and even the Bruins knew it) and got pumped up when Traveler the white horse rode out with the song blaring from the band. It was a whole scene for a long time at USC games. I think the Trojan Marching Band angle made “Tusk” the song immortal in Los Angeles. Everyone knew it. As I said, even my parents knew it. One afternoon, they played it for a friend, another doctor, and she bought the album. I doubt she listened or liked the rest of the album much, but “Tusk” was her longtime musical gimmick. She joined us at many a Trojan football game, where Tusk was the immediate signal for celebration in the stands. It was ecstasy for the crowds, and Fleetwood Mac’s mystique was intertwined in it. I also saw the first incarnation of the marching band play at the Forum in December — this is what Los Angeles was like in the late Seventies! You just can’t separate “Tusk” from Fleetwood Mac in 1979: they were both the same thing (for a time). Album sales are another thing. They indicate that some people just didn’t want the album playing in their
car — but they wanted the song at the football games.