There is no other album in the rock canon that sounds quite like a band eating itself alive and calling it art.
Fleetwood Mac had every reason to play it safe in 1979. Rumours had sold twenty million copies. The machine was printing money. Instead, Lindsey Buckingham walked into Village Recorder in West Los Angeles with a four-track cassette recorder, a head full of ideas borrowed from the Talking Heads and Elvis Costello, and something to prove to everyone in the room — including himself.
The Studio as Argument
The double album was recorded across more than a year, bouncing between Village Recorder and Criteria Studios in Miami, with additional sessions at Davlen Sound Studios and Record Plant in Los Angeles. Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut engineered and co-produced alongside Buckingham, and the sessions were, by all accounts, an extended negotiation between five people who had stopped trusting each other.
Mick Fleetwood wanted the USC Trojan Marching Band on the title track. And he got them. One hundred twelve musicians, recorded on the field at Dodger Stadium.
That's the thing about Tusk — the madness is always in service of something. Buckingham's obsessive de-tuned guitar on "The Ledge," the ghostly tape loop that opens "What Makes You Think You're the One," the way "Sara" takes nearly seven minutes to say goodbye and earns every second of it. These weren't accidents. They were arguments won by one person in a room of five.
Who Played What
John McVie holds the whole sprawling thing together from the bottom. His bass work on "Over & Over" is quietly one of the most tasteful performances on the record — unhurried, deep in the pocket, completely at odds with the chaos around it. Christine McVie anchors the pop center with "Think About Me" and "Brown Eyes," warm and unshowy, the adult in the room. Stevie Nicks delivers "Sara" from somewhere far away, and you believe every word because she wrote it while she was still inside it.
And then there's Buckingham on "Not That Funny" and "I Know I'm Not Wrong" — nervous, angular, almost new wave, like someone who'd been listening to Parallel Lines on repeat. He had. The band was not entirely pleased.
The One Nobody Bought
Tusk stalled at number four. By Rumours standards, it was considered a commercial disappointment. Warner Bros. had pressed millions of copies expecting another phenomenon, and instead got a willfully strange art project with a marching band and a guy recording guitar parts in his bathroom.
History has been kinder. Listen to it now and you hear every strange left turn that made the eighties interesting — the splintered production, the democratic weirdness, the refusal to smooth anything over.
It doesn't sound like a compromise. It sounds like five people who had nothing left to lose playing exactly what they wanted to hear, consequences be damned.
Put on side three sometime, late, with the lights low. Let "Sara" run out past the five-minute mark. There's a reason Nicks said she loved that song more than anything else she'd written. You'll hear it.