Why Mick Fleetwood thought his label ruined Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’: “A milestone of stupidity”
Everything about Fleetwood Mac screamed success in the late 1970s. Although the group had been through some of the worst ups and downs that any rock act could have gone through, the massive singles from Rumours made everything worth it, slowly turning it into one of the greatest-selling albums ever. So, naturally, the sequel was always going to be daunting, but Mick Fleetwood had a good reason for why Tusk failed to reach the same heights as its predecessor.
Then again, any band that releases a double album is already tempting fate a little bit. It’s nice for fans who want a little bit more of their favourite act whenever they get their new project, but the added sales figures in the late 1970s combined with the massive length of the record often results in diminishing returns for everyone involved.
But let it be clear that Fleetwood Mac was almost too big to fail at this point. Songs like ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Dreams’ had etched themselves onto rock fans’ cerebrum, so putting in another batch of songs was just feeding the beast rather than making a sharp left turn for no reason. At the same time, this wasn’t exactly the Fleetwood Mac people knew.
No, Lindsey Buckingham had some different ideas this time around, which normally involved him making some of the whackiest tracks that he ever laid down. Compared to the raw anger and genuine hurt on the last album, a track like ‘Not That Funny’ sounds absolutely surreal next to ‘Sara’, almost like you’re listening to a nightmare fever dream before being laid to rest with a musical lullaby.
Whereas Tusk started off relatively slow out of the gate, Fleetwood blamed a marketing stunt on why it had no shot. Instead of building anticipation for the record, their label thought it would be a good idea to give the record to radio stations for a little teaser of the project. And, of course, by teaser, that meant that they played the entire album from back to front on the air.
Looking back, Fleetwood thought that was the most boneheaded move their higher-ups could have made, telling Discoveries, “There are people with tape machines out there. And they played the whole album! I should have stopped it. But they’d convinced me it was part of a new, cutting-edge marketing thing. Who knows how much damage it did? To me, it was like a milestone of stupidity and rolling the dice unnecessarily. But the album survives.”
Even though the album is still a watershed moment and sold fairly well, cracks in the armour were already starting to show. The group may have seemed indestructible after undergoing the hell of having to make Rumours, but it wasn’t long after this album that Stevie Nicks departed for a solo career, with the group not resurfacing until a few years later to work on Mirage.
Fleetwood started the group and often acted as their wiser older brother, but the radio wasn’t doing him or the band any real favours. While the album posted impressive numbers, its sales could have been even more massive if bootleggers hadn’t released a grainy version of the album days before its official release.
