The polarising Fleetwood Mac album Stevie Nicks called “ahead of its time”
Fleetwood Mac might have undergone more changes than the seasons themselves, but nothing felt more like whiplash than the follow-up to Rumours. While any band would have felt the pressure after such a monumental smash, or be lost in the haze of tasting the high knowing it would soon be over, the other issue was another beast: keeping up at the tail-end of a decade that suddenly favoured post-punk.
After all, the same year Rumours was released, Talking Heads ripped out the rulebook with Talking Heads ’77, setting ablaze the amateur hues of the Mac’s lovelorn romances with songs that exploded from the turntable like brute bulldogs crashing upon everything in their wake—an embarrassingly iconic arrival for those playing the field for a solid many years prior, even if what they had was good but in a completely different way.
The point is, ’77 proved the dominance of a flavour of new wave and post-punk that knew exactly what it was trying to be, with a fervour that stood tall and confident against the more subdued mist of nostalgic rock and folk. Even though, in reality, clearing the mist would only reveal a tall, lanky, broad-shouldered, timid frontman who’d clearly only found his way there by accident but had the knack for excellence in spades. David Byrne, everybody, the world’s greatest eccentric.
Just around the bend from this, fearing irrelevance in the shadows of his own corner and growing uneasy at being nothing like Byrne’s quirky band of brothers, Lindsey Buckingham was paying close attention. A self-proclaimed leader intent on finding the next worthy route, one that would follow Rumours by being absolutely nothing like it at all, he viewed the new wave heroes through a yearning lens, “desperate to make Mac relevant to a post-punk world”.
How Fleetwood Mac reinvented themselves with the post-punk inspired Tusk
While the jump from Rumours to Tusk isn’t a unique one in and of itself, like The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, or AM and Tranquility Base shifts, the fight to keep the soaring momentum of the ship that was Fleetwood Mac started the moment Buckingham realised it wasn’t about half-heartedly making an audience-approved “Rumours 2”, but a Tusk that dug new ground with its long teeth pointedly sported on its face. Like a bright, unmissable warning against others who wanted to match their newfound tenacity.
Of course, the record itself became one of their most divisive, mostly because people thought they’d lost all charm and direction enough to be labelled with the pesky term “flop”, but certain members, aside from Buckingham, remained adamant that it was the right thing to do like Stevie Nicks, who described it as “ahead of its time” and a natural step away from a record like Rumours, recreating which would have surely been the end of the Mac.
Recalling Studio D, Nicks told Rolling Stone how they set the scene, making it all feel like a better, more established cover of artistic grandeur waiting to explode out into the public. “Studio D was covered with Polaroids and shrunken heads and angel wings, and all of our stuff was in there. You walked into that room, and there were big, massive tusks on each side of the board, and the board was called Tusk,” she said.
She further added about the nervousness she felt about it as well, saying, “It became something so beautiful and so ahead of its time. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall, too, when they played it, because they had to be horrified. I was a little horrified myself over that 13-month period, but it was an experience. We were going to the top of the mountain, and it was very spiritual. And again, we were having serious relationship problems during Tusk, but when we went into that studio and saw those tusks, and all the amazing stuff we collected and brought in every day, we became part of a world that was fantastic.”
Describing the whole thing as an “undermining” of everything they’d done before, it’s clear Buckingham shared the same sentiment. By going against everything that others expected, Buckingham established a new path for the band based wholly on artistic dignity and patience, even if it felt like any wrong move, big or small, would have sped up the clock hands toward their seemingly inevitable demise.
