New box set expands, reveals Fleetwood Mac’s enigmatic opus

When the five members of Fleetwood Mac reconvened in the studio in 1978 to record the follow-up to their massively successful/decade-defining/inescapable disc Rumours, it would have been painfully easy to simply spit out Rumours II.

Instead, they took 13 months and spent a then-unprecedented $1 million-plus to birth Tusk, a double album of 20 songs spanning 72 minutes. The effort defied expectations, confounded some fans, sold “only” 4 million units, and produced only two singles resembling hits: the tribal-sounding title track (recorded with the 112-piece University of Southern California Trojan Marching Band), and Stevie Nicks’ ethereal “Sara.”

However, a funny thing happened with Tusk in the ensuing 35 years. Its standing among both Mac fans and musicians has skyrocketed, as has respect for the wildly diverse songs and experimentation. Now, Rhino/Warner Brothers has released Tusk: The Deluxe Edition. The 5-CD/2-LP/1-DVD set includes the original album remastered, a bevy of outtakes and alternate takes, and plenty of live material from the ensuing tour.

In the booklet of liner notes and rare photos, Jim Irvin celebrates the potpourri grab bag of music, spearheaded by Lindsey Buckingham’s newfound infatuation with the sounds of punk and New Wave music, and a desire to not repeat the same old formula. He would even adopt an entirely new look for the photos shoots and tour of closely cropped hair, suits, and…uh…heavy makeup.

“Listening to Tusk is like walking around a ridiculously eclectic art gallery curated by someone who’s keeping their aesthetic a secret,” Irvin offers. “And old master next to an abstract, a kinetic sculpture next to a watercolour. It makes no sense at first.”

Though, contrary to the established Rock History Narrative of him fighting for the change alone, both Nicks and Mick Fleetwood and not just Buckingham were also eager to shake things up, according to their own comments today.

And what of the effect as a whole? Buckingham certainly brings an un-Mac-like tension, nervous energy, and biting sarcasm to efforts like the deranged square-dance sound of “The Ledge,” the punkish “What Makes You Think You’re the One,” the biting “Not That Funny,” and the “rockabilly on acid” of “That’s Enough For Me.”

Stevie Nicks, always given something of a short shrift in terms of songwriting since she doesn’t play an instrument (not counting the tambourine), offers some of her finest work in the longing “Storms,” an upbeat “Angel,” elegiac “Beautiful Child,” and mysterious “Sisters of the Moon,” which surprisingly resurfaced on the set list for the Mac’s recent reunion tours.

Only Christine McVie’s contributions seem slight and listless — both lyrically and musically — save for some soft-and-gentle work on her usual romantic balladry in “Over and Over” and “Brown Eyes.”

Tusk‘s recording period saw Christine’s involvement with both Grant Curry (the band’s lighting director) and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, while Buckingham fell into an intense involvement with record-company exec/former model Carol Ann Harris (who later wrote a not-that-flattering book about the relationship, Storms).

The shocker, fans later found out, was the news of Nicks and Fleetwood’s brief-but-intense involvement. It led to Fleetwood’s divorce from Jenny Boyd…who had previously had an affair with previous lineup guitarist Bob Weston…and was the sister of Rock’s Greatest Muse, Pattie Boyd, who sent both George Harrison and Eric Clapton into romantic bliss and yearning, poured out on vinyl.

And when Nicks and Fleetwood’s involvement ended, Nicks’ best friend, Sara Recor (partial inspiration for the song), took up with Fleetwood without either bothering to tell Nicks about it, which crushed her (are you following all of this?).

Thus, Nicks admits today that a number of her songs are about Fleetwood, and it’s not hard to interpret many of hers and Buckingham’s lyrics as continued musical snipes and judgments on their relationship.

Of the demos and alternate versions, there’s some very interesting development chronicled in the songs “I Know I’m Not Wrong” and “Tusk” as Buckingham — like he did with much of the material — tinkered with them in his own studio extensively before bringing them to the band. It was a way of songwriting that gave him more control, but which the band agreed to abandon after Tusk.

And on the live discs, listeners will find a band surprisingly willing to take risks with tempos and delivery onstage with material recorded in studio. And that includes tunes from their previous two records, Fleetwood Mac and Rumours.

So, while the hefty Deluxe Edition of Tusk may be for Mac Addicts only (and those with record players), less expensive options included a 3-CD Expanded Edition and a 1-CD Remastered effort.

In either case, for what attention and sometimes derision it received on release, Tusk is the one effort in the band’s discography whose standing has improved with time. Oh, and the meaning the title? It was Fleetwood’s slang term for a penis. You’re welcome for that.

Bob Ruggiero / Houston Press / Monday, December 28, 2015

After all of the mythologising — the most expensive rock album ever produced; a staggering commercial failure; a Lindsey Buckingham vanity project with the Fleetwood Mac name attached; what happens when too much money meets too much blow — Tusk remains a singular oddity in Fleetwood Mac’s oeuvre. By the time its recording commenced in June 1978, the band were in the stratosphere of commercial success: their previous album, Rumours, had shipped millions of copies and was on its way to becoming one of the best selling albums of all time. Yet the music that had inspired Buckingham during his respite from the gruelling Rumours tour was the opposite of commercial: the debut albums from The Clash and Talking Heads, both recorded on the cheap. As Rob Trucks recounts in his 33⅓ entry on the album, Tusk began its life as an ultimatum from Buckingham to band leader Mick Fleetwood: Buckingham had new songs he was going to record. In response, Fleetwood shot back another ultimatum: Buckingham was either in the band or out of it. The stage was set for a collision: between the moneyed, high-gloss world the band inhabited and the scrappy upstarts who were shaking that world’s foundations; between Buckingham’s musical ambitions and Fleetwood’s determination that Fleetwood Mac stick together as a band.

Tusk, therefore, is riven through with contradictions. It contains some of the band’s glossiest work, of the sort that would have made the executives at Warner hopeful that Tusk could function as Rumours Redux: the gorgeous “Sara,” Stevie Nicks’s aching paean of love and loss; Christine McVie’s rock burner “Think About Me,” complete with acid lyrics that would fuel further speculation about the band’s private lives; the lapidary “Storms,” featuring Nicks at her most pitilessly introspective. Yet these songs find themselves nestled between Buckingham’s off-kilter, deliberately lo-fi ditties: deliberately truncated songs (none longer than 3:32) with unusual, unresolved melodies, in which Buckingham affects a falsetto and Fleetwood sounds as though he were drumming with a set of cardboard boxes. You’d be hard-pressed to call these numbers “punk” per se — they thrum through with Buckingham’s interest in folk and blues traditions, and they were after all recorded at phenomenal expense — but they preserve punk rock’s affinity for simplicity and concision. In many ways they sound like exactly what they are: punk rock reflected back through the funhouse mirror of a platinum-selling band with a well-documented cocaine problem, a limitless recording budget, and a background in blues.

It’s no secret that Tusk performed poorly on its release, shipping a mere two million copies in its first few months of existence compared to the over ten million copies that Rumours shifted. Just who the fault can be pinned on remains the subject of some debate. Did Tusk‘s commerical failure, as Warner’s executives insisted, derive from Buckingham’s outré songwriting? Was it, as Mick Fleetwood argued, because the album was prematurely leaked to the RKO radio network, who proceeded to play it in order, much to the delight of home tapers? In the long view, such considerations are immaterial: given the album’s strange afterlives — including a start-to-finish cover version by Camper Van Beethoven and becoming a formative influence on Carl Newman’s work with The New Pornographers — it seems that Tusk has ultimately vindicated itself.

The latest remaster and reissue of the album — the third such intervention to have happened since the 1980s — is about as comprehensive as anyone could hope for. In addition to the original album, which has been given a crisp buff and polish (albeit one that could have preserved a little more of the original release’s dynamic range), and a second disc of single versions and demos (many of which originally appeared on the 2004 remaster/reissue), it also includes a start-to-finish version of Tusk in hitherto unreleased alternate takes and two discs of live material from the band’s 1979-1980 Tusk tour. Mac anoraks will find that the second disc’s collection of successive demos — which map out the progression of both “I Know I’m Not Wrong” and the title track from their early incarnations through to near-finished versions — illuminates the band’s creative processes.

Perhaps more interesting is the third disc, sequenced from unreleased alternate versions: while many songs sound essentially like rough-hewn versions of what would appear on the final release, it’s worth listening to just for the lengthy version of “Sara,” in which Nicks elaborates on the song’s themes in an extended outro. The live material on discs four and five is perhaps less essential: much of it is actually from prior albums rather than Tusk, and perhaps inadvertently demonstrates the cold shoulder with which the public received the album. (When Christine McVie introduces “Over & Over” to a crowd at St. Louis by informing them that it’s from the new album, the reception is rather more muted than the ecstatic cheers that greet the version of “Dreams” recorded at Wembley on the same tour.) Perhaps most interesting about these discs is the valiant attempt by the band to fit Buckingham’s Tusk songs into the stadium-rock mode: “Not That Funny” shifts into bombast, with Fleetwood hammering the kit and Buckingham belting out his lines, and Buckingham shreds out a solo that wouldn’t have been out of place on Rumours at the conclusion of “What Makes You Think You’re The One.”

These efforts to make Tusk‘s material appeal to the band’s demographic demonstrate just how much it began its life as an album out of time, an artifact that could not have been produced at any other juncture in history but one that, equally, sounded completely ill-at-ease in the cultural moment that produced it. Perhaps fittingly, time has been kind to Tusk, and the album doesn’t require the ultra-deluxe treatment to make a compelling case for its relevance — those two LP’s worth of creative tension, that juxtaposition of the rough and the smooth, are worth returning to with or without the context provided by this reissue.

(Editor’s note: This article was edited for spelling and grammar. You can read the original article here.)

Chad Parkhill / The Quietus / Wednesday, December 16, 2015