Lindsey reacts to Tusk

[Villavic]

Originally Posted by Macfan4life

He does not even remember the origins of the jam. Is it not how the band would warm up and eventually morphed into Tusk?

I know Mick's book is not 100% reliable, but it's more fun than "I don't know!"

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 rift," 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 fe^te.

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.