Fleetwood Mac – ‘Tusk’
Lindsay Buckingham is losing his mind. He’s taken his royalties and constructed a new studio where he’s overdubbing Kleenex boxes as percussion instruments. Mick Fleetwood is hearing a full marching band playing a riff. Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks are still intent on writing gentle ballads and pristine pop tracks, but their cocaine intake is bringing them along for Buckingham’s wild experiments. John McVie is nowhere to be found. Fleetwood Mac is heading for a brick wall at 100 miles per hour with no brakes. However, instead of making a change, they opt to keep going straight ahead and embrace complete self-destruction.
So goes the story of Tusk, one of the strangest albums to ever exist. Somehow, the biggest band in the world got away with an LP full of strange noises, languid odes, jumpy new wave, and no direction whatsoever. The acrimony and drug abuse that surrounded Rumours was still present, only now that band had to respond to sky-high expectations. With how much the band spent on recording, anything less than a couple of million albums sold would have been considered a failure.
It’s tempting to break the album into three parts: the songs written by Buckingham, Nicks, and McVie, respectively. But even that doesn’t completely bring Tusk into focus. McVie’s country rock shuffles rub elbows with her ornate pop tracks, Nicks’ songs range from beautiful ballads to elaborate hits, and Buckingham is all over the map as he succumbs to some kind of musical mania.
Instead, the only way to experience Tusk is to follow the wild path laid out for you by the album’s sequencing. McVie leads the charge with the touching country rock love song ‘Over & Over’. McVie is immaculate as ever, and her balladry reaches new heights on Tusk. Surely fans who put the needle to the groove the first time would have been happy that they were getting a Rumours 2.
And then Buckingham comes in to shit all over that notion with ‘The Ledge’. A thorny new wave track that clocks in at just over two minutes, the song is a demented nursery rhyme that takes all the seriousness of tracks like ‘Second Hand News’ and ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ and blows a raspberry at them. Although it has minimalist production and some bizarre backing vocals, ‘The Ledge’ still has a melody and a bit of pop forethought in it, but Buckingham is clearly looking to leave the listener stupefied as to what they just heard.
McVie brings the pop side of the band back into focus with ‘Think About Me’. As joyous and exuberant as Tusk ever got, McVie channels the same funky drive of ‘You Make Loving Fun’ into ‘Think About Me’, giving the record an essential that could help boost sales for an unwieldy double LP. But ‘Think About Me’ is more than just a canny business strategy. It’s classic pop-rock Fleetwood Mac, laying out an irresistibly catchy track that plays to everyone’s strengths, most notably Buckingham carrying the melody in the chorus.
Another stripped-back Buckingham solo song, ‘Save Me a Place’, comes next. Buckingham working outside the purview of his bandmates gave him the necessary space to allow his creativity to flow, but most of his tracks on Tusk feel like they could have used some reigning in. Besides, Stevie Nicks is itching to get to her first song on the album all throughout the languid ‘Save Me a Place’.
Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Nicks makes her first appearance on record with one of the best songs that she ever wrote, ‘Sara’. Layering McVie’s piano lines together, Nicks unfurls one of her most hypnotic tales of love and loss. To anyone else, lines like “In the city of love / where everyone would love to drown” would be overly dramatic. For Nicks, it’s absolutely pitch-perfect. The song acts as one long crescendo, never once rushing its way to the explosive finale. ‘Sara’ acts as one of the many anchors that keep Tusk from flying off into some other dimension.
Then, of course, Buckingham comes in with some clanging noises to wake you back up. Buckingham’s material on Tusk ranges from bizarre to genius to annoying, often within the same song, ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’ is Buckingham’s ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’, complete with percussive piano and simplistic observations on love. Buckingham leads the march to the outer realms of what the average Fleetwood Mac listener would put on. Buckingham’s one-man mission to diversify the scope of what Fleetwood Mac can do isn’t always successful, but it’s always fascinating.
Nicks reins things back in with ‘Storms’, and Buckingham initially looks like he’s willing to play along with the dynamic studio creation ‘That’s All For Everyone’. But just as he seems like he’s gotten the silliness out of his system, Buckingham comes roaring back with ‘Not That Funny’, an angular Devo-like track that proves how out of his mind Buckingham was during the album’s recording. His voice is frantic and arranged, as though he’s about to explode at any minute. ‘Not That Funny’ is the kind of song you either love or revile with no room in between. Perhaps it enlightened a few fans to check out what the post-punk and new-wave kids were into.
Nicks takes up the invitation to get weird on the dark funk jam ‘Sisters of the Moon’. As eerie as it is enticing, ‘Sisters of the Moon’ plays right into Nicks’ witchy persona while Buckingham finally gets the opportunity to unleash his guitar theatrics. Even though her lyrics are mostly word soup, Nicks sells the hell out of the track as the band behind her clearly has a ball throwing different shapes at each other.
One of Nicks’ most turgid tracks opens up side two, ‘Angel’. Why McVie opted to play a malfunctioning keyboard is anyone’s guess, but the tones of McVie’s keys, Buckingham’s prickly guitar lines, and Nicks’ voice all rub up against each other in just the wrong way. John McVie’s bubbly bass is the song’s only saving grace, sliding up and down the neck with a funky groove.
Another experimental track from Buckingham, ‘That’s Enough For Me’, follows. Toeing the line between country and punk, Buckingham barks out the song’s lyrics before making his guitar sound like a banjo. After that, a surprisingly familiar guitar pops out of the ether at the end of ‘Brown Eyes’, Christine McVie’s bluesy ballad. It belongs to original guitarist Peter Green, who provided overdubs during the song’s fade-out. The fact that Green makes a brief cameo solidifies Tusk‘s reputation as absolutely unhinged.
McVie stays in the zone for ‘Never Make Me Cry’. The backing track is almost ambient, leaving McVie in complete control of the song from start to finish. Once again unwilling to make things too beautiful, Buckingham jumps in to end side three with ‘I Know I’m Not Wrong’. Between the cacophony of keyboards and guitars, Buckingham is still interrogating his raw emotions. Even though he had moved away from talking about relationships and love in straightforward terms, Buckingham wasn’t completely alienated from his skills as an expert songsmith.
McVie brings out the bongos and acoustic guitars for ‘Honey Hi’, one of her many (but not one of her best) love songs. ‘Beautiful Child’ is Nicks’ parting song, laying out a gentle ballad that almost qualifies as a lullaby. There’s bitterness, longing, and regret strewn throughout the track, juxtaposing its lighter qualities. For someone who was suddenly expected to carry nearly a full album’s worth of quality material, Nicks comes out of Tusk as the most impressive of the three songwriters.
‘Walk a Thin Line’ mixes dream pop elements with a military march in a semi-successful fashion. But Buckingham’s true tour-de-force comes next: the album’s title track. For perhaps the first time on the LP, all of Buckingham’s twisted experiments and weirdest instincts actually elevate ‘Tusk’ into something more than just its central riff. Fleetwood’s idea of getting the USC Marching Band to play along was also a stroke of genius. With ‘Tusk’, Buckingham could explore the outer space of his musical mind while still crafting a classic Fleetwood Mac track. In a sense, he could have his cake and eat it too. From there, it’s just up to McVie to send the album out on a high note with another country rocker, ‘Never Forget’.
So, is Tusk a great album? No. It’s too long, too disjointed, and too directionless to qualify as a masterpiece. But is it a disaster? Not nearly. Buckingham’s experimental tracks aren’t that insane in hindsight, even if they are jarring against the rest of the album’s material. McVie brings the pop goods, but even she sometimes succumbs to her worse instincts with the occasional sleepy ballad. Nicks seemed to be especially hitting her stride, setting the stage for her first solo album, 1981’s Bella Donna.
Tusk has various reputations ranging from boundary-pushing brilliance to band-splitting catastrophe, but none of them actually fit the record all that well. The reality is that Tusk is disjointed and hard to put in a neat box. Sometimes it’s brilliant, sometimes it’s off-putting, and sometimes it’s just OK. The story behind it and what it did to Fleetwood Mac is occasionally more interesting than the album itself. But Tusk still remains a fascinating listen after it nearly sank Fleetwood Mac as a commercial entity.
