Tusk is the twelfth studio album by the British and 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 by Warner Bros. Records. 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. The production costs were initially estimated to be about $1 million but many years later were revealed to be about $1.4 million (equivalent to $ in ), making it the most expensive rock album recorded to that date.

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.

Compared to 1977's Rumours, which sold ten million copies by February 1978, Tusk was regarded as a commercial failure by the label, selling four million copies. In 2013, NME ranked Tusk at number 445 in their list of "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2000, it was voted number 853 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.

Background

Going into Tusk, Lindsey Buckingham was adamant about creating an album that sounded nothing like Rumours. Buckingham commented that he intended for Tusk to subvert the expectations of creating a "Rumours 2 and Rumours 3, which is kind of the business model Warner Bros. would have liked us to follow." Mick Fleetwood decided early on that Tusk was to be a double album. 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. Hormel 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.

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." 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." 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.

Recording

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 during the recording sessions. For certain songs, Buckingham played a Kleenex box as a snare drum and had Fleetwood overdub his own drums over Buckingham's demos. Several of Buckingham's songs were 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".

Caillat recalled that Buckingham's 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." 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. Buckingham was interested in starting a solo career during the making of Tusk and according to Caillat had threatened to leave Fleetwood Mac; the rest of the band acquiesced to Buckingham's desire to create a more experimental album in an effort to appease him. 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.

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. 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.

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. According to Dashut, Beard bled onto some of the collage by cutting his hand with a razor blade.

The liner notes contained group shots of the band taken by Norman Seeff, with one of those images featuring a moonlit gazebo in the background.

<blockquote>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. Similar issues occurred when the initial batch of singles for the title track were recalled by Warner Bros in September due a scratch on the vinyl's B-side. Caillat commented that "after Tusk came out, we had a meeting, of literally all the vinyl manufacturers. We had [them] all come in and actually tell us why there were so many problems". According to Caillat, they generally attributed these issues to industry changes on how the vinyl formula was made.

An advertisement campaign was arranged by Warner Bros Records that utilised aspects of the album package, including the polaroid photo of the dog and italicised font found on the cover, and Seef's photo found in the inner sleeve. The company also developed what Rolling Stone described as "a motorized floor display that features a silk-screened image of the dog". The company originally outsourced the promotion responsibility to New York advertising agency Lord, Geller, Federico and Einstein to develop the album's marketing strategy, although Fleetwood Mac balked at the idea over the belief that "they were being sold like a product - like chewing gum." |source=—Lindsey Buckingham |width=20% |align=right |style=padding:10px;

The album was scheduled for release on 12 October 1979 in the United States and 19 October in the United Kingdom. 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. The RKO radio chain obtained access to Tusk and prematurely played the album in its entirety on several of its radio stations across the United States. Warner Bros secured an injunction against RKO, which prevented the company from playing the album on its stations. They also barred RKO from claiming exclusive access to the album and requested that the radio chain refrain from disposing any of their copies with the intended goal of tracking down the source of the leak.

Fleetwood called Tusk his second favourite Fleetwood Mac studio album behind Then Play On. 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. Bassist John McVie thought that the album "sounds like the work of three solo artists";

The album was remade in its entirety by American alternative rock band Camper Van Beethoven and released in 2003. Buckingham expressed his approval of the cover album, saying that the band "took some of the songs to such different places."

Commercial performance

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. It peaked at number one in the UK and achieved a platinum award for shipments in excess of 300,000 copies.

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 4 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.

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). 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. In addition, Tusk was a double album, with a high list price of US$16.00, or $71 in 2025 terms. 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.

Critical reception

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." 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. Music Week thought that the album "did not have the same impact" as Rumours.

Cashbox characterised Tusk as the band's "most adventuresome LP to date" and posited that it would take "six months before people really realize what a creative masterpiece the two-LP set is." Record World called Tusk "a highly progressive disc that takes more than one listen to digest." Reviewing the album for Billboard, Ed Harrison thought there was sufficient material on Tusk to classify it as "an artistically successful venture". He also believed that Tusk would have been "an incredible follow-up to Rumours" if it was condensed from a double album to a single disc. In a different review from Billboard written one week prior to Harrison's writeup, the publication said that some tracks on Tusk "sound as if they were culled right off the 'Rumours' LP."

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.

Track listing

Record one

Record two

Notes:

  • On earlier CD pressings, "Sara" is edited to 4:39.
  • The CD mixes of "Not That Funny" and "I Know I'm Not Wrong" differ from their LP mixes.

Personnel

Fleetwood Mac

  • Lindsey Buckingham – vocals, guitars, bass guitar, percussion, charango, kalimba
  • Stevie Nicks – vocals, tack piano (on "Sara" doubled with Christine McVie's piano)
  • USC Trojan Marching Band – horns and percussion (on "Tusk")

Production

  • Fleetwood Mac – producers
  • Richard Dashut; Ken Caillat – producers, engineers
  • Lindsey Buckingham – engineer
  • Hernán Rojas – assistant engineer, additional engineering
  • Rich Feldman – assistant engineer (with digital mix-down equipment)
  • Ken Perry – mastering (at Capitol Records)
  • Greg Thomason; Raymond Lindsey; Patrick Byrne – studio crew
  • Larry Vigon – art direction, design
  • Peter Beard; Jayme Odgers; Norman Seeff – photography

Charts

Weekly charts

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

|+ 1979–1980 weekly chart performance for Tusk

! scope="col"| Chart (1979–1980)

! scope="col"| Peak<br>position

|-

! scope="row"| Australia Albums (Kent Music Report)

| 2

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

! scope="row"| Japanese Albums (Oricon)

| 27

|-

|-

|-

! scope="row"| Spanish Albums (AFYVE)

| 18

|-

|-

|-

|-

!scope="row"|US Cash Box Top 200 Albums

| 2

|}

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"

|+ 2004 weekly chart performance for Tusk

! scope="col"| Chart (2004)

! scope="col"| Peak<br>position

|-

|}

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

|+ 2015–2016 weekly chart performance for Tusk (2015 reissue)

! scope="col"| Chart (2015–2016)

! scope="col"| Peak<br>position

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

|}

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"

|+ 2021 weekly chart performance for Tusk

! scope="col"| Chart (2021)

! scope="col"| Peak<br>position

|-

|}

Year-end charts

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

|+ 1979 year-end chart performance for Tusk

! scope="col"| Chart (1979)

! scope="col"| Position

|-

! scope="row"| Australian Albums (Kent Music Report)

| 42

|-

! scope="row"| Canada Top Albums/CDs (RPM)

| 69

|-

! scope="row"| New Zealand Albums (RMNZ)

| 42

|-

! scope="row"| UK Albums (BMRB)

| 25

|-

!scope="row"|US Cash Box Top 200 Albums

| 33

|}

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

|+ 1980 year-end chart performance for Tusk

! scope="col"| Chart (1980)

! scope="col"| Position

|-

! scope="row"| Australian Albums (Kent Music Report)

| 17

|-

! scope="row"| Canada Top Albums/CDs (RPM)

| 70

|-

! scope="row"| Dutch Albums (Album Top 100)

| 65

|-

! scope="row"| German Albums (Offizielle Top 100)

| 14

|-

! scope="row"| New Zealand Albums (RMNZ)

| 19

|-

! scope="row"| US Billboard 200

| 20

|-

!scope="row"| US Cash Box Top 200 Albums

| 37

|}

Certifications

See also

  • Album era

References

Bibliography

<!-- This is a licensed stream for the album, which is allowed under Wikipedia polices -->

  • Tusk (Adobe Flash) at Radio3Net (streamed copy where licensed)