Rumours of the Tusk Dog

[Villavic]

Originally Posted by chriskisn

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

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?