Why Tusk is the "Perfect" Album

[michelej1]

VH1 by Mike McPadden, July 2 2015

http://www.vh1.com/news/32806/classi...-baffled-fans/

8 Albums By Classic Rock Artists That Left Fans Baffled

Fleetwood Mac rewrote what was possible in pop-rock with their 1977 watershed Rumours, a multi-multi-platinum hit factory that also made deeply heartfelt and personal impacts on listeners worldwide, thereby setting up the band to be the biggest musical outfit maybe even of all time.

Tusk, the album that followed Rumours, made sure that didn’t happen.

Sprawling, strange, fitfully brilliant, and recorded at a cost of a then-unprecedented $1 million, the double-LP Tusk slammed into fans and critics alike in 1979 like a wrecking ball emblazoned with a giant question mark.

If Rumours sounded nothing like Fleetwood Mac’s original incarnation as a heavy blues ensemble, then Tusk not only sounded nothing like Rumours, it actually sounded like nothing else anyone else had ever attempted since the last biggest rock group on the planet pulled off Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Alas, LSD seems to be a more creatively fertile intoxicant than cocaine and that, among other factors, may well explain why Tusk, triumph that it is in spots, hardly connected with human consciousness as did Sgt. Pepper.

Mac bass player John McVie has correctly stated that Tusk comes off as three separate solo projects jammed together: one by vocalist Stevie Nicks, one by singer and keyboard player Christine McVie, and the biggest one by guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. In fact, Tusk’s three radio hits adhere to that theory: Stevie’s “Sara”, Christine’s “Think About Me,” and Lindsey’s title track.

The song “Tusk,” in fact, encapsulates everything great and insane and frustrating and berserk and enduring about the larger album. Building off a tribal drum beat, “Tusk” features Buckingham, Nicks, and Christine McVie almost mumbling the paranoid opening verses of the song before exploding into the angry, shouted chorus “Don’t say that you love me! Just say that you want me!” after each line of which Lindsey whoops, “Ai-ooh-eee!” The University of Southern California Trojan Marching Band provides booming percussing and blaring horns. At some point somebody who sounds stoned say, “Real savage-like!”

In summation, “Tusk,” the song, is the strangest damn concoction to ever hit #8 on the pop charts. Tusk, the album, took that weirdness all the way to double platinum status.