New Interview with Lindsey about Tusk

[aleuzzi]

Originally Posted by David

Lindsey always wanted an audience and never said otherwise. He didn’t always get an audience, but he always wanted one. He wanted to bring the public along on his little journey. But he got screwed out of that because the pop audience always had a built-in stodge factor, thanks to mass-market radio play.

Oh, definitely. There was a palpable sense of “if I build this, they will come and love it.” He learned otherwise. Just because he was repulsed by the slick yacht rock craze of the late seventies doesn’t mean that the audience they amassed — and the radio stations that promoted their music — wanted otherwise.

FM mark ten, in large part thanks to Lindsey, Mick, and John, always brought a fiery spirit to the music, easy-on-the-ears but undergirded by forceful rhythms and piercing guitar. So they were never going to be The Captain and Tennille or Robert Dupree. And they were never aiming for slick studio polish like the session players for Toto and Steely Dan. Collectively and individually, the band members had personality. Still, Lindsey’s experiments on TUSK probably felt alienating and — possibly worse — pedantic. There are times in various interviews over the years where I got the sense he was lecturing the public on the ethics of aesthetics. But a large percentage of Mac fans didn’t come to FM to do heavy thinking. They wanted to dream (crystal visions, anyone?), relax, party, smoke pot. They wanted sex, romance, intrigue, drama. They wanted to be entertained.