Tusk at 40: FM's defining record

[David]

Originally Posted by jbrownsjr

I think Never Forget, Angel and Tusk would have been good choices.

From the point of view of Warner Brothers, the traditional idea of a radio-friendly single that would appeal to a mass audience was very strong.

But from the point of view of the band (or at least some of the band), that idea was tiresome. Why give the radio audience what it expects? Give it something it doesn’t expect, like Tusk, a track that didn’t sound remotely like anything else on the radio in the US in 1979. Tusk was a brilliant idea for a first single, not only because it’s a great track but because it’s a completely new idea for a radio single—it’s an anti-single. Its response on radio was mostly positive on its own terms (everyone was talking about it in 1979—it wasn’t flying under anyone’s radar), and that weirdness combined with its sonic power (a jungle statement) also made it a longstanding artifact of USC Trojan culture in the years after. (I attended many, many Trojan football games at the Coliseum, and Tusk at halftime was always rowdy and popular. Unlike a lot of other halftime nonsense, it energized the stadium.)

After Tusk, it didn’t matter what the singles were. Nothing was going to make the album sell millions more, and the tour itself was pushing the weirdness quotient that the band wanted to push that year (where songs onstage lost all resemblance to their sleek, smooth studio counterparts).

Before June 1982, nobody knew what Mirage was going to sound like. Tusk succeeded in that way.