Lindsey Buckingham took $1.4 million of Warner Bros. Records' money, ten months of studio time and a 112-piece marching band, and turned in a double album that began with a softly chiming Christine McVie ballad and detoured, four sides later, through Chilean profanity, lamb chops used as percussion, and the Spirit of Troy stomping through Dodger Stadium. Tusk was the most expensive rock record ever made up to that point, and the second-biggest band on the planet handed it in as the follow-up to Rumours.
Released on 12 October 1979 in the United States and a week later in the United Kingdom, Tusk was Fleetwood Mac's twelfth studio album, their first as a four-times-platinum global act, and the first written entirely in the shadow of their own commercial peak. It was also, by Buckingham's own admission, designed to upend that peak. Where Rumours had been an immaculate piece of California pop machine-tooled in a single Sausalito room, Tusk was a sprawling, lopsided, twenty-track collage assembled across three studios, mixed digitally before most listeners owned a CD player, and trailed by a label that no longer trusted what its biggest asset was doing.
The album peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and topped the UK chart. It went double platinum in the United States and earned Grammy and year-end accolades for its art design. It also taught Warner Bros. an expensive lesson in what happens when a guitar player who has just discovered Talking Heads is given the keys to the most lucrative recording session in pop. Forty-six years on, Tusk is regularly cited as Fleetwood Mac's bravest record. In 1979 it nearly broke them.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Fleetwood Mac |
| Album | Tusk |
| Release date | 12 October 1979 (US), 19 October 1979 (UK) |
| Label | Warner Bros. Records |
| Producers | Fleetwood Mac, Richard Dashut, Ken Caillat |
| Studios | Studio D, The Village Recorder, Los Angeles; Lindsey Buckingham's home studio; Dodger Stadium (location recording for "Tusk") |
| Genre | Pop rock, avant-pop, new wave, soft rock |
| Track count | 20 |
| Total runtime | 73:45 (double LP) |
| Billboard 200 peak | 4 |
| UK Albums Chart peak | 1 |
| Other notable peaks | NZ 1, Australia 2, France 3, Netherlands 3, Germany 3, Austria 4, Norway 6 |
| Certifications | 2x Platinum (US, RIAA); Platinum (UK, BPI); 3x Platinum (Australia, ARIA); Platinum (Netherlands, NVPI, NZ); Gold (France, Germany) |
| Estimated sales | Approximately 4 million worldwide |
| Key singles | "Tusk" (US 8, UK 6), "Sara" (US 7), "Not That Funny", "Think About Me", "Sisters of the Moon", "Angel" |
Coming off Rumours
By the autumn of 1977 Fleetwood Mac were the biggest American rock band in the world, and they were not American. Rumours had moved ten million copies in nine months, sat at the top of the Billboard 200 for thirty-one weeks across two non-consecutive runs, and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The Rumours Tour had taken the same five musicians who had not been speaking to one another in Sausalito and parked them in football stadiums for a year. Mick Fleetwood, the band's de facto manager as well as its drummer, had built a touring operation big enough to require its own freight planes; John McVie, the bass player who shared his name with the band, had quietly bought a boat.
The label arithmetic was simple. Warner Bros. wanted a Rumours sequel: an album that delivered four or five singles, a sleeve that could be reordered indefinitely, and a tour that filled out 1980 and 1981. The band had other ideas, or rather, one of them did. Buckingham had spent the back end of the Rumours cycle buying records by Talking Heads, Devo, Television and the Clash, and had begun to see Fleetwood Mac's hard-won pop sheen as a creative cul-de-sac. The journalist Bob Stanley later wrote that Buckingham was "desperate to make Mac relevant to a post-punk world", and described what eventually emerged as "unleavened weirdness, as close to its predecessor as the Beach Boys' lo-fi Smiley Smile had been to Pet Sounds. Much of it sounded clattery, half-formed, with strange rhythmic leaps and offbeat tics."
Buckingham was direct about the strategy. He told Billboard years later that he intended Tusk to subvert the expectations of "Rumours 2 and Rumours 3, which is kind of the business model Warner Bros. would have liked us to follow." Mick Fleetwood backed him almost from the start. Once Fleetwood decided the project would be a double album, the band were locked into something Warner Bros. neither had asked for nor knew how to sell.
Buckingham's revolt
Buckingham's argument was partly aesthetic and partly tactical. The aesthetic case was that the slick West Coast rock Fleetwood Mac had perfected was already being satirised by the new wave generation; the tactical case was that he was thinking seriously about a solo career and was, according to Caillat, threatening to leave the band if he could not push the next record somewhere stranger. The other four acquiesced. Christine McVie later told Classic Rock that the band was apprehensive about clashing with Buckingham over the creative direction of Tusk, and that her own feelings about the finished record swung between extremes.
"Sometimes I love it, sometimes I simply hate it."
Christine McVie, quoted in the Grand Forks Herald, 1988
John McVie, the bass-playing eye of the storm, was blunter. He summarised the finished album as "the work of three solo artists", a description Buckingham did not really dispute. In a 2013 Classic Rock interview, Buckingham said the McVie women supplied "that sweetness" and he supplied "the complete nutcase. That's what makes us Fleetwood Mac." The framing matters because it explains the album's structure: Tusk is not a band album in the way Rumours was. It is three writers' worlds laid out in parallel, mixed onto the same vinyl, occasionally interrupting one another.
Studio D and the Village Recorder
The first plan was to record the album at the Beach Boys' studio in Santa Monica. Dennis Wilson, who was dating Christine McVie at the time, offered the room. Then a Beach Boys lawyer informed Fleetwood Mac that they would have to pay for the facility regardless of whether they used it, and the deal collapsed. Geordie Hormel, owner of The Village Recorder, stepped in with an offer to build a custom studio for the band. Caillat advised the band to buy the new room outright on the assumption that it would be cheaper in the long run. Mick Fleetwood's lawyer overruled him and rented it instead. The room, christened Studio D, ate the lion's share of Tusk's budget across roughly ten months of sessions in 1978 and 1979.
The custom build let Caillat and Dashut chase a different sound from Rumours. Where Rumours had been mixed for tight dynamics and radio compression, Tusk was tracked at a tape speed of 30 inches per second through a Dolby noise-reduction chain, aiming for fuller low end and brighter top. Studio D was equipped with a Studer multitrack and a mixing console nicknamed "Tusk" because of the fake elephant tusks the engineers had mounted on it, a nickname that would later be retrofitted, in some retellings, as the source of the album's title.
Caillat also had to manage Buckingham, whose studio behaviour had become difficult enough that the producer mentioned it in print decades later.
"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."
Ken Caillat, Tape Op, 2013
Caillat was not always sympathetic to where Buckingham wanted to go. He later admitted attempting to bury some of the harsher textures in the mix when he could get away with it. The sessions were also famously chemical. The journalist Adam Webb described the Tusk recordings, in a 2003 Guardian piece on Dennis Wilson, as a "cocaine blizzard" from which McVie's then-boyfriend "never really came out". Buckingham himself defended the cost in plainer terms.
"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."
Lindsey Buckingham, quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock, 2015
Recording the album
The Village sessions ran in parallel with a second front line at Buckingham's home studio in Bel Air. He had installed a 24-track machine in the house and was tracking entire songs alone, playing every instrument, then bringing the tapes back to The Village to be reintegrated. "The Ledge", "Save Me a Place" and "That's Enough for Me" were largely or entirely cut at home. For some of those tracks, Buckingham played a Kleenex tissue box as a snare drum substitute and let Fleetwood overdub real drums on top of the demo. Three of the album's twenty tracks therefore began life as one-man Buckingham recordings, which is part of why John McVie's "three solo artists" line was not entirely a complaint.
Buckingham's experiments at Studio D were almost as eccentric. The recording is dotted with charango, kalimba, tack piano, hand-claps, animal sounds and looped found sounds, none of which had any real precedent in Fleetwood Mac's catalogue. Hernán Rojas, an engineer who had been promoted to assistant on the project, recorded a Spanish-language sample for the title track that turned out to be the Chilean phrase "puta la cagó", a piece of profanity now buried somewhere in the back of the mix. Mick Fleetwood at one point hit a leg of lamb with a spatula in pursuit of a percussive sound he had originally tried by slapping his own thigh. The lamb take was scrapped, but the experiment was characteristic of the room.
A short list of the unusual tools that ended up on the record:
- Tack piano on "Sara", doubled with Christine McVie's grand piano.
- Charango and kalimba played by Buckingham across several tracks.
- Tissue boxes used as a snare-drum substitute on Buckingham's home demos.
- A 15-second drum loop, hand-spliced into a circular two-inch tape that ran across the room on a microphone stand and another fixture standing in for spools, then sped up with a variable speed oscillator to provide the propulsion under the title track.
- Shotgun microphones used to chase the USC marching band as they marched in formation.
- Reversed cymbal crashes overdubbed by Fleetwood to disguise the seam where the marching-band recording, cut at a different tempo, was edited into the master.
The mixing stage was almost as expensive as the tracking. Tusk was one of the first major-label rock albums to be mixed digitally, the same year as Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop, and the technology was not yet quite ready. Caillat later said that the digital masters created unexpected problems with the vinyl pressing process, and that Warner Bros. had to convene a meeting of every major US vinyl manufacturer after the album shipped to ask why so many copies came back from retail with surface noise.
The USC Trojan Marching Band at Dodger Stadium
The single fact most people remember about Tusk is that there is a marching band on it. The single fact almost no one remembers is why. The story originates with Mick Fleetwood on holiday in Barfleur, a small port town in Normandy, where he was woken one morning by a local brass band parading through the streets.
"I saw the entire village dancing in the streets. They were following the band. I grabbed the remainder of my bottle of Beaujolais from the night before and went down to join in. That joyous, irresistible cacophony is what I heard when I listened to that loop of the riff."
Mick Fleetwood, Play On, 2014
The riff in question was a sound-check exercise Buckingham had been playing every night on the Rumours Tour, working title "Stage Riff". Fleetwood arrived back in Los Angeles convinced the song needed a marching band, called the University of Southern California athletic department, and was put through to Tony Fox, assistant director of the USC Trojan Marching Band, and then to its director Arthur C. Bartner. Bartner and Fox came down to Studio D, sketched out an arrangement with the band, refined it on campus, and then needed somewhere to record it.
The location was Dodger Stadium. Caillat wanted an outdoor recording so that the brass would have natural air around it; Bartner wanted the band marching while they played, because that is how they kept time. The Dodgers initially quoted a substantial rental, which Fleetwood offered to absorb personally, before the third baseman Ron Cey, a regular visitor to the recording sessions, arranged for Fleetwood Mac to use the stadium for free. A mobile truck was rolled in, 112 musicians took the field, and Caillat ran shotgun mics down the line as the band marched. John McVie was in Tahiti during the session and is represented in the music video by a cardboard cutout that Fleetwood carries around the stands.
While mixing, Caillat and Dashut used a variable speed oscillator to align the band's recording with the band's own rough tape of sound effects, a loop they were calling the "cacophony tape". The drum-led intro that finally made the record contains, somewhere in the chatter, a snippet of someone asking "How are the tenors?" lifted from the Dodger Stadium session. The next October, Buckingham, Nicks and Fleetwood presented Bartner's band with a platinum disc on the field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during a USC football game.
Personnel and credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, percussion, charango, kalimba | Lindsey Buckingham | Played all instruments on several home-studio tracks |
| Vocals, tack piano | Stevie Nicks | Tack piano on "Sara" doubled with Christine McVie's piano |
| Vocals, keyboards | Christine McVie | |
| Bass guitar | John McVie | In Tahiti during the Dodger Stadium session |
| Drums, percussion | Mick Fleetwood | |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Guitar | Peter Green | Plays on "Brown Eyes". Green's first credit on a Fleetwood Mac record since 1970. |
| Horns and percussion | USC Trojan Marching Band | 112 musicians, recorded at Dodger Stadium for "Tusk" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producers | Fleetwood Mac, Richard Dashut, Ken Caillat | |
| Engineers | Richard Dashut, Ken Caillat, Lindsey Buckingham | Buckingham took an engineering credit for his home-studio work |
| Assistant engineer | Hernán Rojas | Recorded the Chilean profanity sample buried in "Tusk" |
| Assistant engineer (digital mix-down) | Rich Feldman | One of the earliest digital-mix credits in major-label rock |
| Mastering | Ken Perry | At Capitol Records |
| Artwork | ||
| Art direction and design | Larry Vigon | Replaced longtime sleeve designer Herbert W. Worthington |
| Photography | Peter Beard | Polaroids of band, dog and elephant-tusk imagery |
| Photography | Norman Seeff | Group portraits in the gatefold |
| Photography | Jayme Odgers | Composite upside-down ceiling photograph in the booklet |
The songs
Stephen Holden's Rolling Stone review famously framed Tusk as "less a collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual performers", and a record that compares well to the Beatles' White Album in shape, if not in folklore. The fragmentation is part of the point. Side one and side two roughly alternate Christine McVie pop and Buckingham nervy miniatures; side three skews toward Stevie Nicks; side four ends with the title track and a Christine McVie hymn. The song-by-song highlights below pick out the standouts and the strangest digressions.
Over & Over
Christine McVie opens the album with one of its most conventional songs, a slow piano ballad of resignation and devotion. Several retrospective reviews have pointed out the violence of placing this lush, unhurried opener immediately before "The Ledge"; the gear change is so abrupt it functions as a thesis statement for the record.
The Ledge
Buckingham at his most jittery: 2:02 of nervous strumming, multitracked vocals and almost no Fleetwood Mac. Tracked at his home studio with a tissue-box snare. It exists as an answer to Talking Heads in the way Rumours had no answer to anything.
Sara
Stevie Nicks's tribute to Sara Recor, a close friend, with reflections on her own shifting relationship with Mick Fleetwood layered underneath. The album cut runs 6:26; early CD pressings trimmed it to 4:39, and the unedited version did not appear on disc until the 1988 Greatest Hits and the 2004 reissue. Nicks's tack piano is doubled against Christine McVie's grand. It became the album's biggest US hit and its emotional centre.
Storms
One of Nicks's most personal lyrics, written about her relationship with Fleetwood, set to a quiet, almost folk arrangement. It was never released as a single and is now widely cited as the record's hidden masterpiece.
Sisters of the Moon
Nicks at her most occult, drawing on the same imagery she had been developing across Buckingham Nicks and her Fleetwood Mac contributions. Released as a single in remixed form in 1980.
Not That Funny
Three minutes of Buckingham snarl, the closest the band came to a punk pastiche on the record. Released as a UK single in March 1980.
Brown Eyes
Christine McVie's languid, half-spoken night piece, notable for the uncredited guitar on the fade: Peter Green, the band's founder and the man who had named it after its drummer and bassist a decade earlier, dropping back in for his first Fleetwood Mac appearance in nine years.
Beautiful Child
Nicks again, written about a relationship with a man considerably older than her. Domenic Priore has argued that this and "That's All for Everyone" most strongly carry the influence of the Beach Boys' unreleased Smile, the master tapes of which Buckingham accessed during the sessions.
Walk a Thin Line
A late-side highlight from Buckingham, all mandolin chime and close-harmony vocals, often singled out as the album's most underrated track.
Tusk
The title track and lead single. Built around a "Stage Riff" that Buckingham had been using as a sound-check exercise on the Rumours Tour, refined into a chord progression with Christine McVie, propelled by a hand-spliced drum loop, expanded with Chilean profanity, animal sounds and bottle clinks, and finally launched skyward by 112 USC musicians at Dodger Stadium. Buckingham later called it "the centerpiece" of the album, "embodying the spirit of rebelling against those expectations in every way possible". Released on 21 September 1979, three weeks before the album, it reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and number six on the UK Singles Chart, where Record Mirror reported that it featured "the largest ensemble ever to chart in Britain".
Never Forget
Christine McVie closes the album the way Buckingham would not: a generous, melodic, near-traditional Fleetwood Mac song. After eighty-one minutes of controlled chaos it acts as a deliberate exhalation.
Singles and chart performance
| Single | Released | B-side | US Hot 100 | UK Singles | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Tusk" | 21 September 1979 | "Never Make Me Cry" | 8 | 6 | Reached number 5 in Canada and number 3 in Australia. Capitol-pressed first run was recalled because of a B-side scratch. |
| "Sara" | 5 December 1979 | "That's All for Everyone" | 7 | 37 | Edited to 4:39 for the single and the first CD pressing of the album. |
| "Not That Funny" | 7 March 1980 | "Save Me a Place" | Not released | Did not chart strongly | UK-only physical release. |
| "Think About Me" | March 1980 (US) | "Never Make Me Cry" | 20 | Did not chart | Slightly remixed for radio. |
| "Sisters of the Moon" | June 1980 | "Walk a Thin Line" | 86 | Did not chart | Single mix differs from the LP version. |
| "Angel" | July 1980 (UK) | "That's All for Everyone" | Not released | Did not chart strongly | Late campaign release as Tusk Tour wound down. |
The parent album peaked at number four on the Billboard 200, where it spent close to nine months on chart, and at number one in the UK and New Zealand. It went to number two in Australia, number three in France, the Netherlands and West Germany, and into the top ten across Scandinavia. RIAA double platinum was awarded for shipments of two million copies in the United States; the BPI awarded UK platinum for shipments past 300,000. Worldwide sales sit somewhere around four million copies, a figure regularly described as a flop only because the record it followed had moved at least five times that many.
Tracklist
| # | Title | Writer | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Over & Over | Christine McVie | 4:35 | Side one opener; lead vocal Christine McVie | |
| 2 | The Ledge | Buckingham | 2:02 | Cut at Buckingham's home studio | |
| 3 | Think About Me | Christine McVie | 2:44 | Yes (US) | Lead vocal C. McVie with Buckingham |
| 4 | Save Me a Place | Buckingham | 2:40 | Home-studio recording | |
| 5 | Sara | Nicks | 6:26 | Yes | Album version restored on 1988 Greatest Hits and 2004 reissue |
| 6 | What Makes You Think You're the One | Buckingham | 3:28 | ||
| 7 | Storms | Nicks | 5:28 | Often cited as the album's quiet masterpiece | |
| 8 | That's All for Everyone | Buckingham | 3:04 | B-side to "Sara" and "Angel" | |
| 9 | Not That Funny | Buckingham | 3:19 | Yes (UK) | CD mix differs from LP mix |
| 10 | Sisters of the Moon | Nicks | 4:36 | Yes | Single edit remixed |
| 11 | Angel | Nicks | 4:53 | Yes (UK) | Side three opener |
| 12 | That's Enough for Me | Buckingham | 1:48 | Home-studio recording | |
| 13 | Brown Eyes | Christine McVie | 4:27 | Uncredited guitar by Peter Green | |
| 14 | Never Make Me Cry | Christine McVie | 2:14 | B-side of "Tusk" and "Think About Me" | |
| 15 | I Know I'm Not Wrong | Buckingham | 2:59 | CD mix differs from LP mix | |
| 16 | Honey Hi | Christine McVie | 2:43 | Used in NBC's Parenthood, 2013 | |
| 17 | Beautiful Child | Nicks | 5:19 | Often cited Smile influence | |
| 18 | Walk a Thin Line | Buckingham | 3:44 | ||
| 19 | Tusk | Buckingham | 3:36 | Yes | USC Trojan Marching Band; lead vocals Buckingham with C. McVie |
| 20 | Never Forget | Christine McVie | 3:40 | Album closer |
Artwork and packaging
Larry Vigon, a designer brought in to replace Herbert W. Worthington, who had handled the previous two Fleetwood Mac sleeves, hired three photographers from different disciplines: Peter Beard for documentary, Norman Seeff for portraits and Jayme Odgers for composite work. Beard spent two weeks in Studio D taking polaroids of the band and its inner circle. During one session he photographed Caillat's terrier Scooter biting his trouser leg. That polaroid became the front cover.
Mick Fleetwood had originally promised Stevie Nicks the cover would feature her dancing. Nicks later told Caillat she had placed a curse on Scooter for "stealing her cover". Beard incorporated several more images of the dog throughout the gatefold collages, one of which superimposed Scooter's head onto a naked woman's body. According to Dashut, Beard cut his hand with a razor blade while assembling one of the collages and bled into the artwork. The collage motif also accommodated several photographs of elephant tusks, which is where the album title's now-disputed origin lies.
Norman Seeff's group portraits, taken in low light with a moonlit gazebo behind the band, had to be shot in pieces because, by his recollection, the five members would not stand in the same frame in a cooperative mood. Jayme Odgers's upside-down booklet photograph, with Fleetwood clinging to a chair on the ceiling and the McVies still planted on the ground, was assembled from individual shots after the band refused to be photographed together. Odgers credited the band's obstinance for the eerie, levitating quality of the final image. Warner Bros. balked at including it; Fleetwood spent two hours convincing them the photo would generate exactly the kind of conversation the album needed. The art direction was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Album Package category in 1981.
Release and reception
The release was almost as eventful as the recording. Warner Bros. Records leaned into the album with what Rolling Stone called the largest marketing push in the company's history at that point, including a motorised in-store display silk-screened with the polaroid of Scooter. Buckingham, characteristically, told Rolling Stone in 2013:
"I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Bros. put that on in their boardroom and listened to it for the first time."
Lindsey Buckingham, Rolling Stone, 2013
To pre-empt poor-quality home-taped copies, Warner Bros. brought the official street date forward by a week, distributing the album to retailers from 5 October. Then the RKO radio chain obtained an advance pressing and played the entire album, end to end, on stations across the United States. Warner Bros. obtained an injunction stopping RKO from continuing the broadcasts, barred them from claiming exclusive access, and demanded RKO surrender every copy so the label could trace the leak. Mick Fleetwood would later argue that mass home-taping from those broadcasts was the single biggest reason Tusk underperformed Rumours commercially.
Critically, the contemporary verdict was guarded. Stephen Holden, in Rolling Stone, called the title track Buckingham's "most intriguing" contribution and likened it to "Revolution 9". Robert Christgau awarded a B+ in the Village Voice and dismissed Nicks and McVie's contributions while admiring Buckingham's. Music Week thought it "did not have the same impact" as Rumours. Ed Harrison in Billboard called it "an artistically successful venture" but argued it would have been "an incredible follow-up to Rumours" condensed to a single disc. Cashbox went considerably further:
"It will be six months before people really realize what a creative masterpiece the two-LP set is."
Cashbox, 20 October 1979
Retrospective reviews have been kinder. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine eventually rated it five stars and called it "a peerless piece of pop art" rivalling Rumours. Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich gave the 2015 deluxe reissue 9.2 and described the record as "self-indulgent" and "terrifically strange". Uncut, Mojo and Record Collector all reviewed the deluxe edition at four stars or above. NME placed Tusk at number 445 in their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2013.
Touring
The Tusk Tour ran from October 1979 to September 1980, nine months of dates across the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The German leg shared a bill with Bob Marley. The band carried an Oberheim Four Voice synthesiser played by keyboard tech Jeffery Sova to cover the marching-band horn parts, with an Oberheim OB-X kept in reserve backstage in case the Four Voice failed mid-set.
Christine McVie, expecting to play a percussion part for live versions of "Tusk", instead grabbed an accordion she had spotted backstage and learned the riff that night. Mick Fleetwood's original idea had been to recreate the title track every night with a different local marching band. The plan proved unworkable, but at the L.A. Forum the USC Trojan Marching Band did join Fleetwood Mac onstage, with baton twirlers in the aisles and, by Fleetwood's own account, full-stride horses involved. The recordings from the tour formed the basis of Fleetwood Mac Live, released in December 1980. Notable additions to the package over the campaign included:
- An advance "Fleetwood Mac Day" in Los Angeles on 10 October 1979, declared by mayor Tom Bradley, with the USC band performing the title track and the band receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
- A platinum-disc presentation to Bartner's Trojan Marching Band on 4 October 1980, on the field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum during a USC football game.
- A return to the marching-band format on Fleetwood Mac's 1997 live album The Dance, with the Spirit of Troy reprising the title track.
- Standalone reunions with the marching band as recently as Fleetwood's halftime appearance at USC in November 2025.
Reissues and legacy
Tusk has been reissued repeatedly. A 2004 Rhino remaster added a second disc of outtakes, sessions and live recordings. The 2015 deluxe edition expanded the album to five CDs and a DVD, including the entire Tusk Tour live show, the alternate "Alternate Tusk" sequence with different vocal takes and mixes, and Jim Irvin's liner-note essay drawing on fresh interviews with the band, Caillat and Dashut. A separate Alternate Tusk single LP, sleeved with a black-and-white version of Odgers's upside-down composite, was issued through Rhino in 2016. Camper Van Beethoven recorded a full-album cover version, also titled Tusk, in 2003. Buckingham endorsed the project, telling the Austin Chronicle the band "took some of the songs to such different places".
The album's afterlife stretches well beyond Fleetwood Mac's catalogue. R.E.M., Tame Impala, Arcade Fire and the War on Drugs have all cited Tusk as a touchstone, particularly for its texture and its willingness to break a hit-album formula. Sam Anderson's 2015 New York Times Magazine "Letter of Recommendation" treated the record as a kind of secular scripture; KQED's Nate Waggoner argued it was "everything that's missing from music today". The Dance's revival of the title track introduced the song to a generation that had grown up with Rumours but had never had to grapple with its weirder twin.
For Fleetwood Mac themselves, Tusk was a turning point. Mirage in 1982 was a deliberate, label-friendly retreat to the Rumours template. Buckingham left in 1987 and rejoined in 1997. Christine McVie left and rejoined. Stevie Nicks's solo career outsold the band more than once. But Mick Fleetwood, asked to rank his favourite Fleetwood Mac albums in his second memoir, placed Tusk second, behind only the Peter Green-era Then Play On. John McVie's "three solo artists" line had landed exactly right; Buckingham, in the Classic Rock interview that produced the "complete nutcase" remark, had simply embraced it.
Things you might not know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The most expensive rock album ever made | Production costs reached approximately $1.4 million, equivalent to more than $6 million today, surpassing every previous rock recording. |
| The dog on the cover | The polaroid is of Ken Caillat's terrier Scooter biting Caillat's own trouser leg, taken by Peter Beard during a Studio D session. |
| Stevie Nicks cursed the dog | Mick Fleetwood had promised Nicks a cover featuring her dancing. After the polaroid won out, she told Caillat she had put a curse on Scooter for "stealing her cover". |
| Peter Green's quiet return | The uncredited guitar fade on "Brown Eyes" is played by Peter Green, the band's founder, his first appearance on a Fleetwood Mac record since 1970. |
| Lamb chops as percussion | Mick Fleetwood bought a leg of lamb to hit with a spatula in pursuit of a percussive sound. The take was scrapped, but the experiment is documented in Caillat and Hernan Rojas's 2019 book. |
| Tissue boxes for snare drums | Several Buckingham home demos used a Kleenex box as a snare substitute. Fleetwood overdubbed real drums on top of the demos when the tracks moved to The Village. |
| Chilean profanity in the title track | Engineer Hernán Rojas's contribution to the cacophony tape included the Chilean phrase "puta la cagó", a piece of profanity now buried in the back of "Tusk". |
| Dodger Stadium for free | The 112-piece USC Trojan Marching Band session at Dodger Stadium was secured at no charge through Dodgers third baseman Ron Cey, a regular visitor to the recording sessions. |
| John McVie was in Tahiti | The bass player was on holiday during the marching-band recording. He appears in the music video as a cardboard cutout carried around the stands by Mick Fleetwood. |
| One of the first digital mixes in rock | Tusk was mixed digitally in 1979, the same year as Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop, with Rich Feldman credited on digital mix-down equipment. |
| RKO leaked the album early | The RKO radio chain obtained an advance copy and played Tusk in full across multiple stations. Warner Bros. obtained an injunction and pulled the official release date forward by a week. |
| $16 list price | Tusk launched in the US at a then-unprecedented $16 list, equivalent to roughly $71 today. Fleetwood Mac had originally floated the idea of two separately priced single albums; Warner Bros. overruled them. |
| Camper Van Beethoven covered the lot | The American alternative band remade the album in its entirety as their own Tusk in 2003. Buckingham praised the cover. |
