Tusk is Dull Ivory, Creem 1980

[michelej1]

Fleetwood Mac: Tusk: From Shining Platinum To Dull Ivory
Mitchell Cohen, Creem, January 1980

WHITE ELEPHANT is more like it, heffalumping into the thick four-sided forest, stomping on moby grapes, swatting at the metaphysical graffiti carved into the tree trunks. Tusk isn't exactly a swingin' safari, and who is the walrus?

Not Lindsey Buckingham, that's for sure. This character, who wrote all of two good songs on Rumours (and one on the LP before that), has composed a healthy 45% share of this double-disked set, and not a 'Go Your Own Way' in the portfolio. And the vixenish Stevie Nicks, her voice fairly ravaged into a not-unaffecting Wynette whine, is still spinning her mystic crystal revelations into melodies that sound like fruit suspended in Jell-O. Fleetwood and the male McV are, as befitting a tag-team that has been together since the Profumo scandal, the mainspring that keeps the mammal on time for his appointments, but rhythm sections are like Roscoe Karns and Zasu Pitts: you wouldn't co-star them in History Is Made At Night. But Christine McVie, ah...here is rock's only Bronte heroine.

See, Fleetwood Mac are not dumb. At long last lucky, maybe – if their former guitarists weren't quite so flighty, they might be playing 'Dust My Albatross' for the 4,308th time at Klooks Kleek this very night, instead of having a uranium album on the U.S. pop charts – but not dumb. So they have wisely opened and closed Tusk with C. McV songs, 'Over & Over' and 'Never Forget', bracketing the album in sexual mystery, coastal harmony, true-life adult oozemusic that is infused, like many of Christine's contributions over the years ('Show Me A Smile', 'Spare Me A Little Of Your Love', 'Prove Your Love', 'Say You Love Me', 'Remember Me', and Tusk's 'Think About Me', to name but a half dozen) with a warmth, uncertainty (check those titles) and vulnerability. Without Christine as the fulcrum between the British good-humored pragmatism and California helium-headonism of the group, things might well fall to pieces. How appropriate that she's been consorting with a Beach Boy.

So much for mash notes. Tusk is dominated by interlopers, and it's there that the weight must lie. On the credit side, a pat on the back to Lindsey Buckingham (assuming that his "special thanks" are basically for production duties) for getting so distinctive a sound for the LP: the instruments have true definition, there are edges where there should be edges, curves where there should be curves, and side four, especially, rolls like a scenic stretch of Abbey Road.

Unfortunately, Buckingham doesn't sing all that well (the mix notes this, and camouflages as best it can), and most of his songs are Barthelme-dull sketches buried in thump and clangor. Exceptions: the ethereal 'Walk A Thin Line', the almost-rock 'I Know I'm Not Wrong' (if only that harmonica, or whatever it is, weren't playing "toast and marmalade for tea"...), the staggering 'Tusk', which explodes the mold and comes up a cross between T. Rex and John Philip Sousa. As for Ms. Nicks, she has her moments of sparkle – I'd keep 'Storms' on a one-disk distillation of Tusk, plus the piano pattern on 'Beautiful Child', the way she sings "When you build your house, I'll come by," on 'Sara', and that might be all – but her meandering trance-tunes like 'Sisters Of The Moon' have become a drag.

With its sparse, digitally-balanced ambience, artsy-obscuro graphics and diffused creativity, Tusk takes on the characteristics of a kind of blissed-out image risk (though not a commercial one); a real late-60's move of an act following a freak mass-appeal success with an ambitious foray. In the past, The Mac have made minor, eccentric albums – Penguin, Future Games – that were noticed by perhaps 25,000 people. Tusk isn't particularly impressive as a 20-song compendium, and it has its perverse touches, and it will be noticed by millions. Trouble is, the sprawling format makes even more obvious the fact that Fleetwood Mac is at least three different bands, led by three miniaturists of varying talent: one a fragmentary rock-technician; one a sexily swirling mistress of misty dreams; one a very human, thoughtful singer-composer as scared as most of us are of the impermanence of intimacy. Guess which one has been signed to do a film and a solo album. Hint: get the fog machines ready.

[michelej1]

Fleetwood Mac: Tusk
Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 4 March 1995

If anyone remembers Fleetwood Mac's Tusk at all, it's as the surprise flop sequel to 1977 Rumours. A soft rock masterpiece (gorgeous melodicism charged with the emotional carnage wreaked by the interband tangle of break ups and infidelities), Rumours was also an unprecedented blockbuster, selling a staggering 21 million copies worldwide.

In America (where FM were just made for FM radio), the LP was even huger: 31 weeks at Numero Uno in the Billboard charts (that's two thirds of a YEAR!) and total sales that, at 14 million, still make it America's second best-selling LP, ever. In the USA, Rumours was what happened instead of punk; even in Britain, where FM radio barely existed, it was the album in every suburban hi-fi cabinet, right next to Dark Side Of The Moon.

And so, by the fall of 1979, a tremendous head of anticipation had built up vis-a-vis the long-awaited follow-up. Los Angeles' Mayor Tom Bradley even made October 10th Fleetwood Mac Day to celebrate its release. Two years in the making, Tusk had swallowed up an astronomical – and, back then, virtually unprecedented – $1 million. Instead of Rumours 2, though, fans were confronted with a sprawling double album, dense with detail, alternately over-done and oddly incomplete, and seemingly devoid of hits.

Record biz insiders dubbed it ‘Lindsey's Folly’, a monument to the hubris and Brian-Wilson-complex of de facto producer Lindsey Buckingham (the guy who'd originally turned around the one-time Brit- blues band's ailing fortunes, when he and his folk-rock-maiden lover, Stevie Nicks, had joined in 1974). Sheer post-Rumours momentum resulted in solid sales of four million, although whether anybody who rushed out to buy Tusk on its day of release made it through the four sides more than once is a moot point (the number of mint second-hand copies in circulation suggest otherwise). A virtual radio blackout completed the sense of non-event.

Tusk ranks as one of the great career-sabotage LPs in pop history alongside The Clash's Sandinista, ABC's Beauty Slab and Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique; one of those albums by bands apparently on a creative and commercial roll who nonetheless wilfully confound their audience, motivated by artistic frustration, or f***ed up, f***ed off confusion, or simply because they've succumbed to a kind of collective deathwish. The album that Tusk most reminds me of, though – as anti-populist refusal of the soft option and the easy money, as cocaine-addled exercise in superstar experimentalism – is Sly And The Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On. Musically, there's the same obsessively nuanced production, the same oddly disjointed rhythms; mood-wise, the same consumer-unfriendly aura of uncertainty (off-putting to punters who felt they'd propelled their heroes up into the dizzy heights and that the least they could do is sound like they were having fun). Hell, even the same two-year gap between megahit (Stand in Sly's case) and its down-tempo sequel. Tusk is soft-rock's Riot, a band's trademark sound fractured by the same forces of out-of-control fame and fortune that sent Sly spiralling off into paranoia and addiction; the document of a band half-defeated by, half-struggling against the soul-destroying poisons of luxury, sycophancy and party-powders. It's white So-Cal suburban blues.

You only have to look at the record to get a pungent whiff of non-rightness. Something's askew, from the oblique cover (an expanse of dun and beige textures, with a black and white snap of a dog savaging someone's ankle), to the, even then, terribly dated Seventies prog packaging (inner sleeves within inner sleeves, trompe l'oeil pseudo surreal photos of the band) to the obtuse, inscrutable title (the perennial jester Mick Fleetwood's l'il joke, ‘tusk’ being his personal slang for the male sex organ). The not-right aura was positively trumpeted by the title-track single that trailed the LP, a daft little ditty whose mock tribal rhythms, peculiar ‘found sounds’ in the back of the mix that sound like a restive mob and pompous, punctilious horns (courtesy of the University of Southern California Trojan Marching Band, recorded live at Dodger Stadium) now strangely make me think of Faust at their silliest (‘The Sad Skinhead’, maybe). A ‘novelty’ hit, and doubtless by dint only of the blind-loyalty of the fans, Tusk sounded, to this 16-year-old PiL-head, exactly like the hippie dinosaur drivel I'd read punk had set out to destroy. Mind you, I'd probably have felt the same about Faust, back then.

So I never actually heard Tusk the album at the time; but, a few months later, I astonished myself by tumbling head over heels for ‘Sara’, the Stevie Nicks song that provided Tusk with its one bona fide hit (in the USA, anyway). Gushing out of the radio in, I guess, early 1980, the single's gold-dust rush of sound was the perfect aural analogue of the song's central, arresting image: "Drowning in the sea of love/Where everyone would love to drown." Unaware of the metaphor's ancient history – which goes back through Romanticism's wombadelic dreams of "the sea of seas", through Zen, perhaps all the way to primordial memories of when life emerged from the briny deep – I was hooked by that line, and the oozy, swoony way Stevie sung it. I'd felt that oceanic impulse, the urge to merge, to be subsumed in the plenitude of ‘us’ rather than stranded within the paucity of ‘me’. Drowning in the sea of love – yeah, I could go for that.

Of course, it never occurred to me to buy the single, hard-earned egg stall money was reserved for ‘relevant’ releases, eg Gang Of Four's second LP, Solid Gold (whose desiccated drudgery I now wouldn't submit myself to if you paid me). Only when time enough had elapsed for the punk-indoctrination to fade, and I could actually listen to forbidden fruit (eg Led Zeppelin), did I actually buy Tusk, along with pretty much everything else Stevie had breathed on. I'd gotten this mad notion that Nicks' lachrymal, lump-in-throat (headful of snow?) voice was a precedent for the clotted, inconsolable-ness of Kristin Hersh.

Those who supervise admission to the Canon Of Rock do not take Ms Nicks seriously, to put it mildly: ‘mooncalf’, ‘space cadet’, ‘hippie chick’ are the sort of pejoratives hurled her way. And it's sort of understandable: how seriously can you take someone who named her publishing company Welsh Witch Music? Who – for her last interview with a UK rockmag – had her personal effects transported, at her own expense, to the photographer's studio, where her boudoir was painstakingly recreated? In mitigation, I might propose her as the American Kate Bush (the same fascination for mythopoeic fancy, Celtic lore and old Albion). Actually, I'd rather up the stakes and make the case for Stevie as a pre-punk Liz Fraser, blessed with a voice so language-liquidising, so mild and honeyed, it's almost edible, definitely pre-Oedipal. Not only does Tusk contain two of Nicks' greatest songs – ‘Sara’ and ‘Beautiful Child’ – it also catches the Voice at its most perfect blend of husky and luscious, poised midway on the long dying arc from the nymph of ‘Dreams’ (1977) to the rock survivor of the Eighties/Nineties, when age and abuse had worn her pipes down to a Marianne Faithfull croak.

A word of warning: the CD of Tusk contains a sacrilegiously truncated edit of ‘Sara’. Avoid this travesty and hunt down the vinyl double, for the full six-and-a-half minute glory. Siphoning sheer nectar from her throat, Steve is cradled in Buckingham's shimmerscape production – cascades of scintillating acoustic guitars, susurrating plumes of angel-breath harmonies, drums that seem to billow in out and of the mix (I imagine a totally wired Buckingham, hunched over the mixing desk, Lee Perry with a Cali perm and chest hair poking out of his shirt). At the second verse, there's a key change, the rhythm shifts to an uncanny urgency, it's like we've passed through the looking glass; Stevie's singing becomes modal as she falls into reverie. The lyrics are elliptical, but charged with dream-time vividness: "I think I had met my match/He was singing/And undoing/The faces." The chorus is more affirmative, less otherwordly, then the song plunges back again through veils of gossamer haze into the mystic zone; so liquefacient and iridescent is Stevie's voice, as she sings, "The starling flew for days," it seems to chime and twinkle. Then the chorus – just a little too uplifting – and the song cruises off into a glorious slow fade. I've never been able to figure out what ‘Sara’ is about: is it a love song to a woman, or a strange account of some kind of emotional menage-a-trois, or just a mystical hymn to Love itself, its oceanic powers to dissolve boundaries? Actually, I don't really want to know.

Elsewhere on Tusk, Stevie's in her Billie-Holiday-of-FM-radio mode. The tale of a ships-passing-in-the-night tryst with an old flame, of consummated lust and unrequited love, ‘Beautiful Child’ is exquisitely written, from the tentative, aching, dagger-in-your-hand melody to lines like, "Your eyes say 'yes’/But you don't say 'yes'," and it's framed in another bejewelled Buckingham arrangement. The final stretch never fails to crush the breath out of me; a roundelay of double-tracked Stevie, plus backing harmonies, with all the voices repeating the lyrics from the last verse in counterpoint. The effect is like the heart is literally broken, a clockwork device gone out of synch, or like the lover's inner monologue is in ‘random shuffle mode’: self-confounding thoughts tread on each other's tails, clash and overlap, furrowing out a locked groove of the unresolvable anguish. All this is emphasised by the fatalistic trudge of the rhythm section as the song fades (yet paradoxically mounts in intensity) – like leaden steps that take you further and further into exile from paradise.

‘Storms’, the third and last Nicks gem, is also on the angel-with-a-broken-wing tip. Drizzled in honeyed guitar, Stevie casts herself as an elemental wild child: "Never have I been a calm blue sea/I have always been a storm." ‘Angel’ plays on the persona she established with ‘Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win)’, the Celtic witch who "Rules her life like a bird in flight," the proto-feminist sprite forever eluding male grasp. ‘Sisters Of The Moon’ harps on the Woman-As-Mystery schtick, too, but the stompin' stodge-rock brings to mind unwelcome images of Stevie whirling her scarves around onstage, and, when she belts, there's a glottal wobble that reminds you why so many people regard her as kin to Kim Carnes et al, as opposed to unacknowledged precursor to Hersh, Fraser, Merchant and Archer (Tasmin, that is).

And what of Fleetwood Mac's other two singer/songwriters, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham (it's ironic that the band are named after the rhythm section, although Mick and John's supple, poised grooves – schooled in the British blues boom – are vital to this music's sway, the way it breathes)? I've never cared much for Christine McVie's air-freshener tones, although Greil Marcus hailed her as "the premier white female singer of the [Seventies]", and even "rock's answer to Lorelei." Buckingham's songs – which I don't respond to as emotional statements so much as peculiar sonic objects – range from lurching ballads encased in wedding cake arrangements to an odd strain of hillbilly boogie, like the 1.59 minute canter of ‘That's Enough Of Me’ (imagine Carl Perkins filtered through Boston's ‘More Than A Feeling’).

Back in 1979' Greil Marcus was one of the few critics to defend Tusk, decrying its disappointed reception as sure and sad proof of "the growing conservatism of the rock 'n' roll mainstream", and declaring that "the stand Fleetwood Mac has taken with Tusk is as brave as that Bob Dylan took with John Wesley Harding – braver, maybe, because Fleetwood Mac can't rely on Dylan's kind of charisma, or on the kind of loyalty he commands… With its insistence on perceptions snatched out of a blur, drawing on (but never imitating) Jamaican dub and ancient Appalachian ballads, Fleetwood Mac is subverting the music from the inside out, very much like one of John LeCarre's moles – who, planted in the heart of the establishment, does not begin his secret campaign of sabotage and betrayal until everyone has gotten used to him, and takes him for granted."

Perhaps this is to attribute too much to a record only half of which really withstands close scrutiny. Still, Marcus' inclusion of the Tusk piece in In The Fascist Bathroom, his anthology of punk-related writings, is a striking feat of recontextualisation. Only 30 pages later comes a treatise on Pil's Metal Box. There are unlikely parallels between Tusk and Box: both were long-awaited double albums released late in 1979, with bizarre packaging; both were essays in anti-rockism shaped by the input of dub; both were attempts (probably semi-conscious in Fleetwood Mac's case) to sidestep an audience's expectations and tamper with one's own mythology. But Marcus' juxtaposition appeals to me especially, because Metal Box was the absolute soundtrack of my angst-wracked adolescence, while ‘Sara’, an ‘aberration’ in my punk-conditioned taste, was a brief glimpse of something ("the sea of love") beyond the prison cell of misery-me.

[Somajoseph]

Thank you for posting these reviews! I remember reading this as a teen, and I still love this review today.
Creem was a great magazine & I actually thought their review was spot on. Refering to Lindsey as "this character" always made me laugh.

[michelej1]

I wonder what the reviewer meant about Stevie being signed to do a film.

Michele

[louielouie2000]

I wonder if reviewers like these & Sylvie Simmons have any idea how pompous and self congratulatory they sound spewing out the esoteric references of music they'd rather be listening to?

[WildHearted]

Originally Posted by michelej1

I wonder what the reviewer meant about Stevie being signed to do a film.

Michele

Probably the Rhiannon movie.

[jbrownsjr]

Originally Posted by WildHearted

Probably the Rhiannon movie.

haha yes.. I remember that too..