FEATURE:
The Ledge
Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk at Forty-Five
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A very important album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Seeff
is coming up to its forty-fifth anniversary. Though it had to follow the mighty Rumours of 1977, Tusk is still a superb album in its own right. It is interesting considering albums that follow classics. The pressure and expectation and how artists respond to that. The twelfth from Fleetwood Mac, the double album came out on 12th October, 1979. Ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to celebrate a very interesting and incredible album from the U.S./U.K. band. Rumours arrived at a time when the group were going through turbulent times. Relationships and marriages ending. Tension in the studio. What did result from that time is an undoubted masterpiece. Many consider Tusk to be a lesser follow-up. It is a more experimental album. Lindsey Buckingham exerting more control in terms of the sonic direction and production. There are many gems and standout tracks from the album. Sara, Think About Me and its mesmeric title track. The production on Tusk is especially notable and fine. I guess there was a certain degree of a blank cheque after the success of Rumours. Tusk’s costs were initially estimated to be about $1 million. It was later revealed that the true figure was about $1.4 million - making it the most expensive Rock album recorded to that date. Critics inevitably compared Tusk to Rumours. Rumours sold over ten millions copes and was lauded by critics, whereas Tusk was not as well received by critics and sold four million copies. However, Tusk is another classic from Fleetwood Mac. I want to share some reviews and features about Tusk. Its forty-fifth anniversary is very soon, so it is a perfect time to celebrate it.
Starting out with a feature from The Ringer. They marked forty years of the mighty Tusk. It is a fascinating feature that I would compel people to read in full. It tells a lot of the story behind Tusk and the impact of the album. Forty-five years later and the layers and contours of Tusk are still revealing themselves. Such an important period in Fleetwood Mac’s history:
“An underappreciated aftershock of punk’s first wave is the kick in the ass it gave to some of the previous generations’ heroes, pushing some of those “dinosaur bands” to make their most adventurous music in years. Punk dared the Stones to make 1978’s Some Girls, their best and most brash record since Exile on Main St. It’s also the inspiration for some of the great Buckingham compositions on Tusk, from the taut, sneering “What Makes You Think You’re the One” to the haunting, oddly dissonant last-call dirge “That’s All for Everyone.” Buckingham was constantly experimenting in Studio D, searching for undiscovered tones and textures: He got the grumbling, blown-out sound of excitable punk ditty “The Ledge” by tuning his guitar down to sound like a bass. (“It sounds to me like it was put in a cement mixer and almost spat out,” he later said, proudly.) “I remember Lindsey used to make such a horrible sound,” the album’s coproducer, Ken Caillat, said in Ryan Reed’s book Fleetwood Mac FAQ. “He would physically make me distort the guitar so that it sounded like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard. I remember when he was recording ‘Not That Funny,’ he insisted he wanted a really weird-sounding vocal, so he made us tape a microphone to a tile floor, and he was doing a push-up over the microphone, singing, ’Not—that—funny—is it?!’ Anything to make it weirder was better on his songs.”
As a counterbalance to Buckingham’s punk outbursts, Tusk showcases some of McVie’s most straight-forwardly lovely compositions: opener “Over & Over” sets a rose-colored tone, while the understated “Never Make Me Cry” is a perennial tear-jerker. Perhaps the most Rumours-reminiscent cut is McVie’s rousing “Think About Me”—one of Tusk’s few full-band jams. Tusk wouldn’t have confounded listeners if even half its songs sounded like this, but restless shape-shifting was also a consistent part of Fleetwood Mac’s ethos, even from the Peter Green days. “They had been a blues band, then a jam band, then a rock band, then a soft rock supernova,” Davis writes. “The Rumours groove had to be part of a progressive continuum, not the endgame.”
One of the most acrimonious fights during Rumours was over the exclusion of Nicks’s masterpiece “Silver Springs.” The band had to make some cuts to keep Rumours confined to a single LP, and when it came time for the final sequencing, the languorous, slow-tempo-ed “Springs” was first on the chopping block. “I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio and completely flipped out,” Nicks said years later, recalling the conversation with Fleetwood when she first learned the song’s fate.
She got her revenge on Tusk. While Buckingham often approaches songwriting like a code to be cracked (“I’ve learned more about the mathematics of songwriting—how to fit pieces together, line length, timing chords and melodies,” he said around the time of Tusk’s release), Stevie’s process was more intuitive, her songs less rigorously structured. She thrived in open space and sprawl, something Tusk generously supplied. Her songs on the record are loose, unhurried, and exploratory, from the poignant ballad “Storm” to the meditative confessional “Beautiful Child.” The bluesy rocker “Angel” showcases a gravely, newly mature tone of Nicks’s voice that she’d explore further on Bella Donna, while the fan-favorite “Sisters of the Moon” furthered her witchy self-mythology: “A black widow spider makes / More sound than she,” Nicks sang, “and black moons in those eyes of hers / Made more sense to me.”
Buckingham was, more than anyone, the sonic mastermind behind Tusk. But the very fabric of Tusk is also variety, collaboration, and bricolage—an alchemy he never could have achieved alone. If Rumours was the result of a handful of passionate, often-inebriated people standing elbow-to-elbow in a too-small room, Tusk is the sound of them stomping into their respective corners. To love Fleetwood Mac is to marvel at the beautiful absurdity that these five very different people were ever in a band together, let alone a band whose songs could hang together so well. In this sense, the improbably cohesive Tusk just might be their defining record.
Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Tusk’s double-album breadth might have stunted its commercial prospects in 1979—the 2XLP retailed for $16.98, around $50 adjusted for inflation—but in the more-is-more logic of the streaming era, it seems downright normal. (Drake’s mammoth-selling 2018 album Scorpion, for one example, is 15 minutes longer than Tusk.) Forty years later, it remains the blueprint for what comes after astounding commercial success, if an artist is too itchy and creative to simply rest on their laurels. Its forward-thinking ethos has kept it fresh all this time. “Tusk is not going to sound dated in five or 10 years,” the writer Blair Jackson predicted all the way back in 1981, “and I would be willing to bet that a lot more people will slowly be convinced of the album’s greatness than will forget all about it.” You can say that again”.
I will move on to another fortieth anniversary feature. This one is from Albumism. Whereas excess and dislocation seemed to define Rumours, it is Lindsey Buckingham’s obsessiveness and drive that maybe defines Tusk. Alongside Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Christine and John McVie, the band created an album that I don’t think should ever be compared negatively to Rumours. It is a compelling double album with very few weak moments:
“Rumours’ massive success has been extensively documented and most of us are well aware of how it spawned countless critical and commercial plaudits, chart peaks, millions upon millions of units shifted, sold-out tours, and the coveted Album of the Year prize at the 1978 GRAMMY Awards. Indeed, Rumours ensured that Mick Fleetwood, Nicks, Buckingham, and the McVies were firmly entrenched in the rock & roll high life.
With the band’s newfound global superstardom came substantial freedom, influence and power. Which was invariably followed by exorbitance in its various forms. Much has been made of the drugs, financial recklessness, and romantic shenanigans that plagued the band during and after the recording of Rumours. But this penchant for excess would also manifest creatively, as the band embarked upon the harrowing task of recording the follow-up to their landmark LP.
More accurately, this penchant for creative excess was fueled by Buckingham’s obsessive ambition in conceiving of and executing the vision for Tusk. Stubbornly determined to differentiate Tusk’s musical identity and resist the temptation of a Rumours rehash, Buckingham’s adventurousness was not well-received by his bandmates initially. As a result, he became more protective and territorial about the album’s gestation. “When it came time to go into the studio, I just had to stick my neck out,” he recalled to Rolling Stone in 1980. “I told Mick that I wanted to put a machine in my house, to work on my things there. I had to pursue things that were in my head, and not be intimidated into thinking they were the wrong things to do.”
While McVie and Nicks stuck closer to their signature songwriting approach, Buckingham boldly branched out in various ways, experimenting with leftfield sounds, non-sequitur lyrics, and varied vocal approaches. Unveiled in September 1979 as the lead single and title track from the then-forthcoming album, and featuring unconventional instrumental contributions courtesy of Buckingham banging on a Kleenex box and Fleetwood slapping lamb chops (yes, you read that right), “Tusk” represents “the embodiment of the spirit of the album,” according to Buckingham, as quoted in Tusk’s deluxe edition liner notes. Sounding far removed from any song that the group had recorded up to that point, “Tusk” is driven by Fleetwood’s pounding percussion juxtaposed with Buckingham’s monotone, séance-like refrains which ultimately segue into a manic frenzy of a war-like chant punctuated by the big, boisterous brass of the USC marching band recorded at Dodger Stadium. It’s a hefty hodge-podge of a song, but it’s also instantly memorable.
Perhaps not surprisingly, amongst the four official A-sides that Warner Bros. released from the album in the US, “Tusk” was the lone Buckingham-led entry. Granted, his endearing ode to romantic innocence “Save a Place for Me, his self-proclaimed “rockabilly on acid” trip “That’s Enough For Me,” and the Charlie Watts influenced “Walk A Thin Line” were all designated as B-sides stateside, while his Fred Schneider inspired new wave funk foray “Not That Funny” surfaced abroad in the UK.
Buckingham’s songs unabashedly defied the convention of radio-friendly construction. Securing airplay was never the goal for him here, which freed him up to focus his energy toward stretching his sound in newfound ways. His liberated approach was evidenced early in the album’s sequencing with the idiosyncratic instrumentation of the second track, the two-minute stomper “The Ledge,” which he confessed was driven by his interest in “trying to find things that were off the radar” and intentionally playing notes that were “a little incorrect.”
“We didn't really like [Tusk],” McVie confided to The Guardian in 2013. “We just kind of went ‘okaaay.’ [Eyeroll] Because it was so different from Rumours. Deliberately so. In hindsight, I do like that record, but at the time me and Stevie would be like, ‘What the hell is he doing in the toilet playing an empty Kleenex box for a drum?’”
Suffice to say that while her bandmate was fixated on pushing the sonic envelope with Tusk, McVie was just fine with sticking to her tried and true script of crafting emotive, unembellished songs of love and longing. A somewhat stark contrast to the noticeably more uptempo opening tracks of its two precursors (Buckingham’s “Monday Morning” from 1975’s Fleetwood Mac and “Second Hand News” from Rumours), Tusk opens with McVie’s laid-back, countrified torch song “Over & Over,” as she summons her lover—presumably her then-boyfriend Dennis Wilson—to do right by her fragile heart. A sleeper highlight for me, the multi-layered “Brown Eyes” features an airy groove with intricate vocal dubbing, not to mention uncredited guitarwork from Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green. Amidst her other subdued offerings (“Never Forget,” “Never Make Me Cry,” “Honey Hi”), McVie recaptures the pep in her sonic step, harking back to her Rumours gem “You Make Loving Fun” with the groove-laden love song and third single “Think About Me.”
Released on October 12, 1979, two days after the band were awarded a coveted star on Hollywood’s hallowed Walk of Fame, Tusk’s subsequent story reinforced the extent to which Rumours proved to be both a blessing for the band (not to mention a financial windfall for Warner Bros.) and a curse due to the sky-high expectations that it set for repeated success. In discussing the marketing campaign that Warner Bros. set in motion to support the album, Shelly Cooper, then the label’s director of advertising, once remarked, “I wouldn't hesitate to say that we'll be spending considerable amounts for a long time to come.”
Tusk went on to sell four million copies, an impressive amount by today’s standards (or any standards for that matter), but fell well short of Rumours’ eight-figure haul, leading Warner Bros. executives and industry pundits to deem it a disappointment. A few valid theories might help to explain why Tusk undersold relative to expectations, including its higher price point as a double-album, its dearth of radio-ready fare, and the mixed critical reception that greeted it due to its perceived lack of cohesion. Fleetwood has even posited that sales were undermined from the get-go when radio stations affiliated with the long-since-defunct broadcasting conglomerate RKO “leaked” Tusk by playing it in its entirety prior to its official release, offering listeners the opportunity to record the album for free.
Despite the initial (and largely misguided) scrutiny by various parties, Tusk has thankfully weathered the criticism rather well in the 40 years since its arrival. “I think everyone was looking for Rumours 2 … So yes, it did have an alienating quality to it in the moment,” Buckingham admitted during a 2011 Gothamist interview. “But then, you cut to a few years later when you could be more objective about it, and as tastes change and evolve and as a younger generation gets a hold of things, they see them not only for what they are musically but possibly for why they were made in context. They can even appreciate the fact that there was someone out there who was trying to undermine the idea of repeating the formula of the brand. There’s a certain kind of idealism attached to Tusk as a subtext to the music, and I think people now can respond not only to how colorful and experimental it is, but also why it was made.”
Critical over-analysis be damned, Tusk remains an immersive and fascinating listen, imperative for an expanded understanding and appreciation of the band’s musical history. “We'll never forget tonight / It will be alright,” McVie sings in the album’s concluding lines, and the unforgettable Tusk certainly sounds quite alright four decades on”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews. Apologies for any repetition in terms of story and detail. It is important to frame the time in which Tusk was recorded and released. How it was affected by the culture around it and how it contributed. Pitchfork reviewed Tusk in 2019. Whereas love broke and dissipated during Rumours, what is the inspiration and focus for the follow-up? It seems work and channelling that focus and energy into something creative guided a lot of Tusk’s process:
“The autumn of 1979 was, by any reasonable accounting, a challenging time to be alive. The world felt tenuous, transitional: panicked families were fleeing East Germany via hot air balloon, China was restricting couples to one child each, fifty-two Americans were barred inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, pending release of the Shah. It was also the year of Tusk, the album in which Fleetwood Mac, a soft-rock band second only to the Eagles in their embodiment of easy 1970s gloss, completely lost their minds. It was the band’s twelfth album, though only its third with the now-iconic lineup of guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, drummer Mick Fleetwood, bassist John McVie, keyboardist Christine McVie, and singer Stevie Nicks, and it reflected a personal tumult so claustrophobic and intense it felt global in scale—an after-the-fall re-telling of catastrophic heartache and its endless reverberations.
By this time, Fleetwood Mac was widely beloved for its melodic, harmonized jams, which evoked Laurel Canyon, curtains of strung beads, turquoise jewelry, pricey incense, scarves flung over floor lamps, and brandy poured into a nice glass. Despite their smooth, murmuring sound, few of the band’s records pull punches emotionally, but even compared to a cry of pain like “The Chain,” Tusk is singular. It is pocked with heartbreak, resignation, lust, hope, and deep hurt. It poses unanswerable questions. It reckons with the past, and what that past means for a future. It invariably makes some people want to lock their door, excavate half a joint from the recesses of their couch cushions, and spend the next fourteen hours contemplating the Buckingham-Nicks union as one of the great failed loves of the twentieth century.
Just two years earlier, the band had released Rumours, a collection of pert and amiable love songs that sold over ten million copies and spent thirty-one weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart. Rumours is presently among the top ten best-selling albums in American history, and, as of 2009, has shipped more than forty million units worldwide. It was—it remains—an album owned by people who have only ever owned eleven albums.
Commercial success on that scale is, of course, a complicated thing to navigate; for Fleetwood Mac, it was presaged and then aggravated by outrageous amounts of cocaine and an awful lot of intra-band copulation. I don’t mean to be reductive about the group’s emotional dynamic, but I can’t think of another assemblage of five able-minded adults who created and survived such a preposterous tangle of romantic investments and divestments (to wit: Nicks and Buckingham, McVie and McVie, Nicks and Fleetwood, Fleetwood’s wife and former member Bob Weston, McVie and the lighting designer, and Fleetwood and Nicks’ then-married best friend—to cite just the handful of permutations known to the public).
By the time Tusk was released, the two primary relationships sustaining the band (Christine and John’s marriage, and Lindsey and Stevie’s long-standing romance) had fully dissolved, which seemed to qualify Fleetwood Mac, in some perverse way, to go on to become one of our best and bravest chroniclers of love’s horrifying tumult. Being tasked with singing backing vocals for a song written by your ex-lover, about you, months (and eventually years) after the relationship ruptured? Hold that in mind—just how excruciating that must’ve been. Then find a video of Buckingham and Nicks performing “Silver Springs” (a song written by Nicks about Buckingham, withheld from Rumours, and later released, either cruelly or keenly, as the B-side to the single “Go Your Own Way,” a song written by Buckingham about Nicks) and try not to lose your mind completely when, as if to narrate the precise mechanics of their break-up, Nicks announces: “I’ll begin not to love you… Tell myself you never loved me.”
It’s “Silver Springs,” more than any other track in the band’s pre-Tusk discography, that tells the story of how Buckingham and Nicks lost each other, and, ergo, the story of Tusk; performing the song live, they frequently end up locked in a kind of tense combat stance. When Nicks’ cool, steady voice begins to dissolve into something feral and nearly deranged (“Was I just a fool?” she finally hollers) she’ll often take steps toward him. He always meets her gaze, calmly, and with determination. Maybe they’re putting us all on, but there’s something in those moments that makes True Love—the preposterous, fairy-tale kind, the sort that never resolves itself, that can’t be outrun or eschewed, not ever, not after decades, not after a lifetime—seem entirely possible, even to the most hard-boiled cynics. I bring this up because it’s the only explanation I can think of as to how the band kept going, despite what must’ve seemed, to anyone watching, like a cataclysmic implosion. True Love doesn’t care if your relationship ends; it remains, it buoys you.
If Rumours was the band’s break-up record, Tusk covers arguably even more complicated ground: how to transform a romantic partnership into a purely creative one, while remaining mindful of all the perilous ways in which love nurtures art, and vice-versa. That the band did this at all, much less successfully, much less good-naturedly—in promotional photos for Tusk, Nicks is pictured resting her left hand disconcertingly close to a bulge in Buckingham’s blue jeans—is dumbfounding.
The result is a beautiful and terrifically strange album. From the outset, Buckingham was insistent that the band not churn out a sequel to Rumours. His was a defensive, contrarian pose: Let’s deliberately not recreate that colossal commercial and critical success; let's instead do something different, artier, less bulletproof, more experimental, more explicitly influenced by punk and new-wave, and less indebted to pop. Tusk contains twenty songs and is seventy-two minutes long. It retailed for $15.98 (or $52.88, in 2016 dollars). Its terrifically unattractive cover features a grainy, off-center photograph of a disembodied foot getting chomped on by a dog. The title is a euphemism for cock. Its sequencing is plainly insane, seesawing between two equally manic moods: “Everything is totally going to be fine!!!” and “This plane is going down and we’re all going to die!!!”
Tusk took thirteen months to make, and was the first record to amass production costs of over a million dollars. It was called self-indulgent, and it is. Legends abound regarding the details of its composition and recording. Nicks described their space in Studio D as having been adorned with “shrunken heads and leis and Polaroids and velvet pillows and saris and sitars and all kinds of wild and crazy instruments, and the tusks on the console, like living in an African burial ground.” Everyone agrees Buckingham was losing it a little—that he was chasing something (artistic greatness? avant-garde credibility?) and pursuing it wildly, haphazardly, like a crazed housecat stalking a black fly about the living room. Did he really have a drum set installed in his bathroom so he could play while on his toilet? (More reasonable minds have suggested he merely liked the acoustics in there.)
One solid argument against Tusk—though it could also be levied against Rumours—is that it lacks narrative coherence, in part because it features three songwriters (Nicks, Buckingham, and McVie), each working in their own distinct style. Still, while Nicks and McVie contributed some truly lovely tracks—“Sara,” “Beautiful Child,” “Think About Me”—the record clearly belongs to Buckingham, who wrote nearly half its songs, insisted upon its scope, and is its unquestionable spiritual center, the hamster on its wheel. The engineer Ken Caillat described Buckingham as “a maniac” during the sessions. He said it without equivocation. “The first day, I set the studio up as usual. Then he said, ‘Turn every knob 180 degrees from where it is now and see what happens.’ He’d tape microphones to the studio floor and get into a sort of push-up position to sing. Early on, he came in and he’d freaked out in the shower and cut off all his hair with nail scissors. He was stressed.”
At one point, Buckingham insisted that the band rent out Dodgers Stadium, and arranged to have the 112-piece U.S.C. Marching Band back them on the title track (his bandmates went along with this; none of the group’s foundational romantic relationships were intact, but Tusk still couldn’t have been made by people who didn’t trust one another implicitly). “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me who’s on the phone?” Buckingham and Nicks chant, their voices paranoid. Buried somewhere in there is a riff that could have sold a zillion cassingles, had this been 1977. But it wasn’t.
Though Tusk’s most memorable tracks are also its strangest (like “The Ledge,” a manic, pitter-pattering kiss-off in which the band’s signature harmonies are overridden by a guitar that’s been tuned down and turned up), there are a handful of songs that harken back to Rumours’ rich palatability. “Save Me A Place” plays like an extension, at least lyrically, of “Go Your Own Way,” in which Buckingham begrudges his lover’s unwillingness to grab what he’s half-offering her. A lot of Buckingham’s lyrics from the late ‘70s seem to simultaneously admit trepidation and cast him as the aggrieved party; he seems, in an endearing way, oblivious to his own caveats, or how they might dissuade another person. “Guess I want to be alone, and I guess I need to be amazed/Save me a place, I'll come running if you love me today,” he sings on “Save Me A Place.” He later described the song as vulnerable. “None of us had the luxury of distance to get closure… It’s about a feeling that’s been laid off to one side and maybe not been fully dealt with, sadness and a sense of loss.” It captures the wildness of recovery: what happens when love dissipates, and you have to find a new thing to believe in? What if that thing is work?
Buckingham funneled all of his disorientation into these songs. Tusk is, more than anything else, a document of that feeling and that process—of bewilderment turning into ambition writ large. What happens when a complicated, wounded person grows exhausted and unimpressed by the commercial medium he took to naturally, maybe even instinctively, but no longer believes is important or curative? It’s not hard to imagine the voice of Buckingham’s internal foil during these sessions, whispering seedily, naysaying each new melody, pushing for more: “This is fine, but it’s not Art.” I don’t know anyone who cares about making things who hasn’t at some point lobbed the exact same challenge at themselves: Can’t you do better? Hasn’t someone done this before? Haven’t you done this before? You get the sense of a broken-down person trying to rebuild himself. He is diligent about getting the architecture right.
All of which makes “I Know I’m Not Wrong”—the first song the band started recording for Tusk, and the last one to be finished – even more poignant. When Tusk was reissued, in 2015, the expanded release included six (!) different “I Know I’m Not Wrong” demos, all recorded by Buckingham in his home studio. The chorus is a declaration of intention, of confidence: “Don't blame me/Please be strong/I know I'm not wrong.” It’s not a thing a person gets to say very often. But Tusk isn’t a record that gets made more than once”.
I will wrap up in a bit. Rolling Stone reviewed Tusk in 1979. In a year when albums from The Clash, Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, and Talking Heads were perhaps getting bigger acclaim and making a larger impact, Tusk was definitely one of the most anticipated albums of the year. I think that it stands up and still sounds amazing. For anyone who has not heard Tusk then make sure that you check it out:
“Like “The White Album,” Tusk is less a collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual performers. Tusk‘s twenty tunes — nine by Lindsey Buckingham, six by Christine McVie, five by Stevie Nicks — constitute a two-record “trip” that covers a lot of ground, from rock & roll basics to a shivery psychedelia reminiscent of the band’s earlier Bare Trees and Future Games to the opulent extremes of folk-rock arcana given the full Hollywood treatment. “The White Album” was also a trip, but one that reflected the furious social banging around at the end of the Sixties. Tusk is much vaguer. Semiprogrammatic and nonliterary, it ushers out the Seventies with a long, melancholy sigh.
On a song-by-song basis, Tusk‘s material lacks the structural concision of the finest cuts on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. Though there are no compositions with the streamlined homogeneity of “Dreams,” “You Make Loving Fun” or “Go Your Own Way,” there are many fragments as striking as the best moments in any of these numbers.
If Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks were the most memorable voices on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, Lindsey Buckingham is Tusk‘s artistic linchpin. The special thanks to him on the back of the LP indicates that he was more involved with Tusk‘s production than any other group member. Buckingham’s audacious addition of a gleeful and allusive slapstick rock & roll style — practically the antithesis of Fleetwood Mac’s Top Forty image — holds this mosaic together, because it provides the crucial changes of pace without which Tusk would sound bland.
“Not That Funny,” “What Makes You Think You’re the One,” “That’s Enough for Me” and “The Ledge” affect a rock & roll simplicity and directness that are strongly indebted to Buddy Holly, an obvious idol of Buckingham’s. These songs have the sound and spontaneity of beautifully engineered basement tapes. A bit more sophisticated yet still relatively spare, “Save Me a Place” boasts closely harmonized, un-gimmicky ensemble voices and acoustic textures that underline the tune’s British folk flavor. But Buckingham’s most intriguing contribution is Tusk‘s title track, an aural collage that pits African tribal drums, the USC Trojan Marching Band and some incantatory group vocals against a backdrop of what sounds like thousands of wild dogs barking. “Tusk” is Fleetwood Mac’s “Revolution 9.”
The calculated crudeness of Buckingham’s rock & roll forays both undercuts and improves Tusk‘s elaborately produced segments. And several of these segments demonstrate that the limits of the California studio sound, developed in the Sixties by Lou Adler and Brian Wilson for the Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys, have at last been reached. Fleetwood Mac has arrived at the point where technologically inspired filigree begins to break down rather than enhance music, where expensive playback equipment is not only desirable for appreciation but necessary for comprehension. In McVie’s “Over & Over” and Nicks’ “Storms,” the production goes too far, and the tracks quiver with an eerie electronic vibrato.
The basic style of Tusk‘s “produced” cuts is a luxuriant choral folk-rock — as spacious as it is subtle — whose misty swirls are organized around incredibly precise yet delicate rhythm tracks. Instead of using the standard pop embellishments (strings, synthesizers, horns, etc.), the bulk of the sweetening consists of hovering instrumentation and background vocals massively layered to approximate strings. This gorgeous, hushed, ethereal sound was introduced to pop with 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” and Fleetwood Mac first used it in Rumours’ “You Make Loving Fun.” On Tusk, it’s the band’s signature. Buckingham’s most commercial efforts — the chiming folk ballads, “That’s All for Everyone” and “Walk a Thin Line” — deploy a choir in great dreamy waves. In McVie’s “Brown Eyes,” the blending of voices, guitars and keyboards into a plaintive “sha-la-la” bridge builds a mere scrap of a song into a magnificent castle in the air. “Brown Eyes” sounds as it if were invented for the production, rather than nice versa.
About the only quality that Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie share is a die-hard romanticism. On Tusk, Nicks sounds more than ever like a West Coast Patti Smith. Her singing is noticeably hoarser than on Rumours, though she makes up some of what she’s lost in control with a newfound histrionic urgency: “Angel” is an especially risky flirtation with hard rock. Nicks’ finest compositions here are two lovely ballads, “Beautiful Child” and “Storms.” Her other contributions, “Sara” and “Sisters of the Moon,” weave personal symbolism and offbeat mythology into a near-impenetrable murk. There’s a fine line between the exotic and the bizarre, and this would-be hippie sorceress skirts it perilously.
McVie is as dour and terse as Nicks is excitable and verbose. Her two best songs — “Never Forget,” a folk-style march, and “Never Make Me Cry,” a mournful lullaby — are lovely little gems of romantic ambiance. With a pure, dusky alto that’s reminiscent of Sandy Denny, this woeful woman-child who’s in perpetual pursuit of “daddy” evokes a timeless sadness.
The wonder of Fleetwood Mac’s chemistry is that the casting of these two less-than-major talents in pop music’s answer to Gone with the Wind elevates them to the stature of stormy rock & roll heroines — one compelled to reach for the stars, the other condemned to wander the earth. Within the context of the group, we not only accept these women’s excesses and limitations, we cherish them as indispensable ingredients of their characters.
The aura of romance is finally the real substance of Fleetwood Mac’s music. If the band has an image, it’s one of wealthy, talented, bohemian cosmopolites futilely toying with shopworn romantic notions in the face of the void. Such an elegant gossamer lilt is also synonymous with the champagne buzz of late-Seventies amour. But perhaps, as Tusk‘s ominous title cut and other songs suggest, in today’s climate of material depletion and lurking disorder, the center of things — including Fleetwood Mac themselves — cannot hold. Plagued by internal conflicts and challenged by New Wave rock, this psychedelically tinted folk-rock tribe might well be the last and most refined of a breed of giddy celebrants who, from the early Sixties on, prospered on the far shore of the promised land as they toasted the pure splendor of a beautiful and possibly frivolous pop dream”.
On 12th October, we mark forty-five years of Tusk. The next studio album Fleetwood Mac released is 1982’s Mirage. Once more, the band headed in a different direction. Perhaps moved more back to the sound of Rumours. A less experimental and all-encompassing album. I think that Tusk is among the band’s very best work. Even if Tusk is considered a little bit of a commercial let-down, there is no doubt that it is…
A creative triumph.