Tusk is the twelfth studio album by British-American rock band Fleetwood Mac, released as a double album on 12 October 1979 in the United States and on 19 October 1979 in the United Kingdom[4] by Warner Bros. Records.[5][6] It is considered more experimental than their previous albums, partly as a consequence of Lindsey Buckingham's sparser songwriting arrangements and the influence of post-punk.[7] The production costs were initially estimated to be about $1million but many years later were revealed to be about $1.4million (equivalent to $6.07million in 2024), making it the most expensive rock album recorded to that date.[8][9]
The band embarked on a nine-month tour to promote Tusk. They travelled extensively across the world, including the US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. In Germany, they shared the bill with Bob Marley. On this world tour, the band recorded music for the Fleetwood Mac Live album, released in 1980.[10]
Going into Tusk, Lindsey Buckingham was adamant about creating an album that sounded nothing like Rumours: "For me, being sort of the culprit behind that particular album, it was done in a way to undermine just sort of following the formula of doing Rumours 2 and Rumours 3, which is kind of the business model Warner Bros. would have liked us to follow."[14]Mick Fleetwood decided early on that Tusk was to be a double album.[15]Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, who was dating Christine McVie at the time, offered to host the band at the Beach Boys' studio, which they were planning to renovate. While the band initially agreed to this idea, an attorney for the Beach Boys later told Fleetwood Mac that they would still have to pay for the facility even if they decided not to use it. Fleetwood Mac subsequently backed out of the deal and approached Geordie Hormel, who offered to construct a custom studio for the band at The Village Recorder and presented them with an option to either purchase the studio or rent it. Fleetwood Mac producer Ken Caillat suggested that the band purchase the studio, reckoning that this would be the cheaper option. However, Fleetwood's attorney opted to rent the custom studio, which was named Studio D.[16]
Production costs rose beyond a million dollars, far more than Rumours. Regarding the album's production costs, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham stated: "During the making of Tusk, we were in the studio for about 10 months and we got 20 songs out of it. Rumours took the same amount of time. It [Rumours] didn't cost so much because we were in a cheaper studio. There's no denying what it cost, but I think it's been taken out of context."[17]
After the studio was built, Buckingham queried Fleetwood about recording some songs at his home studio. Fleetwood acquiesced, but told Buckingham that the other members of Fleetwood Mac would need to be integrated at some point. For certain songs, Buckingham played a Kleenex box as a snare drum and had Fleetwood overdub his own drums over Buckingham's demo.[18] Several of Buckingham's songs began as demos recorded at his home studio on a 24-track machine with him playing all of the instruments, including "The Ledge", "Save Me a Place", and "That's Enough for Me".[19][20]
Caillat recalled that Buckingham's obsessive nature in the recording studio was the source of some tension: "He was a maniac. 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."[21] Compared to the sonics of the Rumours album, which featured tighter dynamics, the engineers aimed to achieve a darker sounding album by aiming for fuller low frequencies and a higher treble. To accomplish this, they recorded the album at a magnetic tape speed of 30 inch per second with the use of a Dolby noise-reduction system to reduce tape hiss.[22] Buckingham was interested in starting a solo career during the making of Tusk and according to Caillat had threatened to quit the band; in an effort to appease him, the rest of the band acquiesced to Buckingham's desire to create a more experimental album.[16][23] Caillat later expressed his disapproval of Buckingham's proclivity for harsher textures and said that he attempted to bury some of these sounds in the mix.[16]
I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Bros. put that on in their boardroom and listened to it for the first time.[24]
Buckingham – infatuated with bands such as Talking Heads – was "desperate to make Mac relevant to a post-punk world", according to music journalist Bob Stanley, who commented that, compared to Rumours, Tusk was "unleavened weirdness, as close to its predecessor as the Beach Boys' lo-fi Smiley Smile had been to Pet Sounds. Much of it sounded clattery, half-formed, with strange rhythmic leaps and offbeat tics."[25] Journalist Adam Webb described the Tusk recording sessions as a "cocaine blizzard" from which Christine McVie's then-boyfriend, Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson, "never really came out."[26] Music historian Domenic Priore claimed that, for research purposes during the album's recording, Buckingham accessed the master tapes for the Beach Boys' unreleased album Smile, and that the tracks "That's All for Everyone" and "Beautiful Child" most strongly exemplify its influence.[27]
Fleetwood called Tusk his second favourite Fleetwood Mac studio album behind Then Play On.[28] Christine McVie reflected that the band was apprehensive about clashing with Buckingham over the creative direction of Tusk and expressed mixed feelings about the final product, saying "sometimes I love it, sometimes I simply hate it.[29] Bassist John McVie thought that the album "sounds like the work of three solo artists";[23] Buckingham told Classic Rock magazine that "you got that sweetness [from Nicks and McVie] and me as the complete nutcase. That's what makes us Fleetwood Mac."[30]
Artwork
Rather than solicit the services of Herbert W. Worthington, who created the cover art for Rumours and the 1975 self-titled album, the band opted to select three photographers from different disciplines to design the album sleeve for Tusk.[31] Larry Vigon, who served as the album's designer, reached out to Peter Beard after seeing some of his artwork in one of his journals, which included sundry items such as feathers, dried leaves, and newspaper headlines.[32] Beard, who specialised as a documentary photographer, was enlisted by Vigon to supply images for the album sleeve and spent two weeks in the recording studio taking Polaroids of the band and its inner circle. He also augmented this footage with images of elephant tusks.[23] During one of those sessions, Beard took a photo of Caillat's dog biting his leg, which ultimately became the cover art for Tusk. Fleetwood had originally promised Nicks that the cover art would feature an image of her twirling and dancing; Nicks later told Caillat that she placed a curse on his dog for "stealing her cover".[33] Beard also incorporated several images of Scooter throughout the album's collages that he created, including one with a cropped photo of Scooter's head imposed onto the body of a naked woman.[34] According to Dashut, Beard bled onto some of the collage by cutting his hand with a razor blade.[35]
Norman Seeff recalled that he encountered some difficulties in assembling all five members into one location and likened the experience to "herding cats".
It was like being a sort of a school teacher in the kindergarten because everyone was having their own wonderful time...Each of them was individually fascinating, but together you could feel an electricity between everyone. And I’m working with all the stories of what was going on with them. It was magic, because rather than being five separate people they became one.[36]
Jayme Odgers was responsible for creating the upside-down photograph found in the booklet, which featured Fleetwood clinging to a chair on the ceiling, Buckingham and Nicks suspended in the air, and both McVies firmly planted on the ground. When Odgers proposed the idea, the band was uncooperative and refused to be in the same room together, so Odgers instead took photographs of the band individually in different poses. Odgers pieced together the separate shots into a more cohesive photograph and credited the band's obstinance for achieving the final product. "Unbeknownst to them, my photographic forte was putting separate images together seamlessly, so I pushed on. Had they all been willing to be photographed together, the image never would have looked like it does." The photo also served as a point of contention for Warner Bros, who opposed its inclusion in the booklet. According to Odgers, Fleetwood informed him that the band spent two hours discussing the fate of the image; Fleetwood ultimately convinced Warner Bros to keep the image on the grounds that it would potentially elicit further discussion among the public. In 2016, a black-and-white version of Odger's photo was used as the front cover of the Alternate Tusk album, a collection issued by Rhino Records consisting of alternate takes and live recordings.[31]
Title
Varying accounts have been provided by Fleetwood Mac and their production team of naming the album Tusk. In Fleetwood's first memoir, he said that the title was in reference to male genitalia and claimed that Nicks threatened to quit the band after learning about the origin of the name.[37] Nicks commented that "there was nothing beautiful or elegant about the word 'tusk'. All it really brought to mind was people stealing ivory. Even then, in 1979, you just thought about rhinos being poached, tusks being stolen, elephants being slaughtered and ivory being sold on the black market." She said that she "liked the title even less" when she was told about the meaning of the title and mentioned that the studio's mixing console was nicknamed "Tusk" due to the fake tusks that were mounted on the device.[34][32]
Caillat said the band "thought that the tusk was a sign of male prowess" and remembered hearing the male members of the band making tusk jokes during the recording sessions. Richard Dashut, who co-produced the album, recalled that the band occasionally made phallic jokes, although he said that the title was instead attributed to the album's artwork.[35]
I'm not sure if any of us knew what it meant. It became more of a cause of the elephants. Mick also brought in his tusks from his cast. They weren't real, but they were full-size elephant tusks that were mounted. What I'm fairly certain of is that it didn't come from the dick meaning. Maybe Mick would dispute me.
Larry Vigon, who designed the album, credited the title to Peter Beard's affinity for wildlife and African art. He said that the band settled on the name Tusk after Beard incorporated elephant references into the album artwork. Beard commented that "the album was named Tusk because of all my photographs with tusks in them."[35] Buckingham said that tusk was a "nice sounding word" and that "there's no specific hidden meaning behind it."[20]
Release
The album was scheduled for release on 12 October 1979. The RKO radio chain obtained access to Tusk the week prior and prematurely played the album in its entirety on several of its radio stations across the United States. To counter the circulation of comparatively poor quality tape recordings of Tusk, Warner Bros distributed the album to retail record stores one week earlier than planned, with the first shipments beginning on the weekend of 5 October. Warner Bros secured an injunction against RKO, which prevented the company from playing the album on its stations and also barred them from claiming exclusive access to the album.[38] As part of a Fleetwood Mac Day proclamation from the Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, the album was played for 600 guests. Members of the USC Trojan Marching Band opened the event with a rendition of the title track, which at that point had been released as the album's lead single.[39]
Tusk peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 in the United States and spent almost nine months on the chart. It was certified double platinum for shipping two million copies.[40] It peaked at number one in the UK and achieved a platinum award for shipments in excess of 300,000 copies.[41] The album gave the group two US top-10 hit singles, with the Buckingham-penned title track (US number eight/UK number six), and the Stevie Nicks composition "Sara" (US number seven/UK number 37).[42]
Though the album sold four million copies worldwide, and earned a Grammy nomination in 1981 for its art design in the category "Best Album Package", the band's record label deemed the project a failure, laying the blame squarely with Buckingham (considering the comparatively huge sales of Rumours and the album's unprecedented recording expense).[43] Fleetwood, however, blames the album's relative failure on the RKO radio chain playing the album in its entirety prior to release, thus allowing mass home recording.[37] In addition, Tusk was a double album, with a high list price of US$16.00, or $71 in 2025 terms.[44] The band originally considered the idea of releasing Tusk as two single albums each with the price of $7.98, but the record label decided against this.[45]
Further releases from the album "Not That Funny" (UK-only single release), "Think About Me", and "Sisters of the Moon" were slightly remixed for radio, and were less successful. The latter two appear in their 'single versions' on the 2002 compilation The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac, while "Sara", which was cut to 41⁄2 minutes for both the single and the first CD release of the album, appears in its unedited form on the 1988 Greatest Hits compilation, the 2002 release The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac, and the 2004 reissue of Tusk.[46]
In his review for Rolling Stone, Stephen Holden emphasised the experimental nature of the album, comparing it to the Beatles' "White Album" in that "Tusk is less a collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual performers."[1]Robert Christgau of The Village Voice was more ambivalent, lauding Buckingham's production and experimentation, while dismissing Christine McVie's and Stevie Nicks's contributions.[59] Retrospectively, AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine found the album to be timeless, calling it "a peerless piece of pop art" that rivals the more accessible Rumours album in terms of quality.[49]Amanda Petrusich of Pitchfork found the album "self-indulgent" and "terrifically strange".[54] Contemporary and retrospective reviewers alike have noted the stark contrast between the album's lush opening track, "Over & Over", and the production of the following track, "The Ledge".[60][61]
1 2 3 4 Reed, Ryan (2018). Fleetwood Mac FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Iconic Rock Survivors. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Backbeat Books. pp.127–128. ISBN978-1-61713-667-2.
↑ Irvin, Jim (2016). Tusk (2015 Remastered) (Liner Notes). Fleetwood Mac. Los Angeles: Warner Bros. Records Inc. p.14. Publisher Warner Bros #2HS-3350.
Caillat, Ken; Rojas, Hernan (2019). Get Tusked: The Inside Story of Fleetwood Mac's Most Anticipated Album. Guilford, Connecticut: Backbeat Books. ISBN978-1-4930-5983-6.
Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrateded.). St Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. ISBN0-646-11917-6.
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