super groovy delicious bite: tusk

Fleetwood Mac went their own way with the stormy spacious smoulder of this fractured frantic free for all. The unprecedented success of 'Rumours' had left them with a tough act to follow. Lindsey Buckingham recalls: “Coming off an album as successful as that, we were being asked to get on this treadmill of clichéd thought and hash out the same thing again. Punk and new wave had kicked in during the meantime and, although I wasn’t directly influenced by that music, it gave me a kick in the pants in terms of having the courage to try to shake things up a little bit. I wanted something that had a little more depth...[Working at home] got me to more esoteric places than I could go in a group situation. Then I’d take the songs back to the studio, and having the band build on it was the basic premise for much of Tusk'."

'Tusk' was recorded at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles, California with Lindsey Buckingham on guitar, piano, bass guitar, drums, percussion, harmonica, and vocals; Stevie Nicks on vocals and keyboards; Christine McVie on keyboards, piano, accordion, and vocals; John McVie on bass guitar; and Mick Fleetwood on drums and percussion; with the USC Trojan Marching Band on percussion and horns for "Tusk"; and Peter Green adding guitar to "Brown Eyes". The sessions were produced and engineered by Richard Dashut, Ken Caillat, and Lindsey Buckingham (with a production credit to the entire band). When it was all said and done, it cost over a million dollars, the most ever for an album at that time.

Caillat says of Buckingham: “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.”

Christine McVie: “Recording Tusk was quite absurd. The studio contract rider for refreshments was like a telephone directory. Exotic food delivered to the studio, crates of champagne. And it had to be the best, with no thought of what it cost. Stupid. Really stupid. Somebody once said that with the money we spent on champagne on one night, they could have made an entire album. And it’s probably true...I used to go onstage and drink a bottle of Dom Perignon, and drink one offstage afterwards. It’s not the kind of party I’d like to go to now. There was a lot of booze being drunk and there was blood floating around in the alcohol, which doesn’t make for a stable environment.”

Nicks: "We started writing Rumours through 1976 and it was an involved process during which we were happy and conﬁdent. But even during the recording of Rumours the cocaine hadn’t taken us over. It was great until it wasn’t, you know? We were extremely messed-up romantically, but we were young and creative and we still really cared about the band and we were damn well gonna make another great record. The drugs only got really bad during Tusk."

Buckingham: “I was losing a great deal of myself...My thought was, let’s subvert the norm. Let’s slow the tape machine down, or speed it up, or put the mike on the bathroom floor and sing and beat on, uh, a Kleenex box! My mind was racing...In the context of the whole, ‘Rumours’ took longer to make than ‘Tusk’. One of the reasons why ‘Tusk’ cost so much is that we happened to be at a studio that was charging a f– of a lot of money. 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 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...I got a lot of support from the band during the making of ‘Tusk’; everyone was really excited about it. Then, when it became apparent that it wasn’t going to sell 15 million albums, the attitude started to change — which was sad for me in a way, because it makes me wonder where everyone’s priorities are. They changed their attitude about the music, after they realized it wasn’t going to sell as many copies. That’s not really the point of doing it. The point is to shake people’s preconceptions about pop...For me, the ‘Tusk’ album was the most important album we made, but only because it drew a line in the sand that, for me, defined the way I still think today. I was trying to pave some new territory for us, but another way of looking at it is that I was causing trouble. Had we all wanted the same thing for the same reason, I probably never would have made solo albums.”

Mick Fleetwood: "We’ve never stayed one way for very long, and I don’t think we ever will. We’ve always changed a lot whether or not players have changed. Doing a double album didn’t make any business sense at all. But it meant a lot to us, artistically — whether we could still feel challenged. We really, really are pleased with it. We’ve also, I think, got enough discretion to know if the songs aren’t up to standard, in which case we’d have just put out a single album.”

Christine McVie: "We didn't really like ['Tusk']. We just kind of went (rolls her eyes) okaaay. Because it was so different from 'Rumours'. Deliberately so. In hindsight, I do like that record, but at the time me and Stevie would be like: 'What the hell is he doing in the toilet playing an empty Kleenex box for a drum?' ... ‘Tusk’ sold nine million copies — so it can’t be too shabby, can it? But a lot of people gave us flak about that album. It’s very different, very different, very Lindsey Buckingham. I’ll have to say that. He was going through some musical experiments at the time.”

'Tusk' went to number twenty-seven in Japan; eighteen in Spain; eleven in Canada; eight in Sweden; six in Norway; four in Austria and the US; three in France, the Netherlands, and West Germany; two in Australia; and number one in New Zealand and the UK.

http://www.fleetwoodmac.com/

"Tusk" the title track was a top ten hit all over the world.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10nys_fleetwood-mac-tusk-original-video_music

Fleetwood Mac - Tusk (Original Video) by newcanadian

"Sara"

Nicks: "'Tusk was a very uncommercial album. Sara was a very commercial song. I didn’t write it to be a commercial song. I wrote it as a demo in Dallas, Texas after a concert on the Fourth of July…. way way long time ago…. and uh…. never in a million years dreamed that it would make any record. It was just a really special song to me ... Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl," she said, "I would have named her Sara. But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick's wife, Sara Fleetwood."