Tusk by Fleetwood Mac (1979) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: After Rumours made them the biggest band in the world, Fleetwood Mac spent thirteen months and a then-unheard-of $1.4 million building their own studio to make its opposite — a sprawling…
After Rumours made them the biggest band in the world, Fleetwood Mac spent thirteen months and a then-unheard-of $1.4 million building their own studio to make its opposite — a sprawling twenty-song double album, half of it Lindsey Buckingham's lo-fi, punk-rattled experiments taped on a bathroom floor, with a marching band recorded at Dodger Stadium on the title track. It 'only' sold four million, was written off as a folly, and is now the record that Fleetwood Mac fans argue about the hardest.
Fleetwood Mac's twelfth studio album, released in October 1979 — the follow-up to Rumours, and a deliberate refusal to repeat it. Twenty songs across four sides, recorded over roughly thirteen months in a studio the band custom-built with their Rumours royalties, at a cost later revealed to be about $1.4 million — the most expensive rock album made up to that point. Lindsey Buckingham dragged the group toward lo-fi experiment and the energy of punk; Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie held the centre. Warner Bros. called it a disappointment. It is the most interesting thing the band ever did.
By 1978 Fleetwood Mac had a problem most bands would kill for: Rumours. Their 1977 album had become one of the best-selling records ever made, a perfectly poised set of soft-rock heartbreak that had turned five people who mostly weren't speaking into a global institution. The obvious move was Rumours II — more of the same, banked for another decade. Lindsey Buckingham, the band's guitarist and increasingly its studio auteur, wanted the opposite. Rattled by the punk and new wave breaking around him and bored by the machine the band had become, he pushed Fleetwood Mac toward something willfully strange: a double album, sprawling and unpolished, that would sound nothing like the record that had made them rich.
The money went into a room. Rather than return to a conventional studio, the band effectively built their own — Studio D at The Village Recorder in West Los Angeles, customised to their specifications over thirteen months of near-continuous work, complete with a vocal booth reportedly decorated to Stevie Nicks's taste. Co-produced with Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat, the sessions ran long, loose and expensive. The bill was first put at around a million dollars and revealed years later to be closer to $1.4 million, which made Tusk, at the time, the most costly rock album ever recorded — a fact that would haunt its reputation the moment the sales came in under Rumours.
What that budget bought was not gloss but grit. Buckingham recorded much of his half of the album at home and then chased the same rawness in the studio: taping microphones to a tile floor, singing lying down or in a push-up position, using a Kleenex box for a snare and having Mick Fleetwood overdub the drums, deliberately scraping his guitar tones toward distortion. His songs — 'The Ledge', 'What Makes You Think You're the One', 'Not That Funny', 'I Know I'm Not Wrong', the title track — are nervy, clipped and often close to lo-fi, a major star's answer to the year of the Sex Pistols. Around them, Christine McVie ('Think About Me', 'Over & Over', 'Brown Eyes') and Stevie Nicks ('Sara', 'Storms', 'Sisters of the Moon', 'Beautiful Child') wrote the record's more familiar, luminous songs. John McVie called it the work of three solo artists sharing a sleeve, and he wasn't wrong.
Then there is the title track, the album's single most improbable gesture. Mick Fleetwood — inspired by a brass band he'd heard in the French village of Barfleur — decided 'Tusk' needed a full marching band, and so the USC Trojan Marching Band was recorded playing along at Dodger Stadium on 4 June 1979, arranged and conducted by the band's longtime director Arthur C. Bartner. The same day doubled as the promo-film shoot: John McVie, off sailing, was represented by a life-size cardboard cutout while Stevie Nicks twirled a baton. A pop record built from a bathroom-floor drum sound and a hundred-plus college band members at a baseball stadium — that is the whole spirit of Tusk in one song.
The rollout was a small disaster. Roughly two weeks before release, RKO radio stations played the entire double album across several major US markets and openly invited listeners to tape it; Warner Bros. scrambled for injunctions and rush-serviced the real record to radio, and Mick Fleetwood would later call the leak a 'milestone of stupidity' he blamed for denting sales. When Tusk arrived on 12 October 1979 — priced high as a double LP — it reached number four in America and number one in Britain and sold around four million copies. By any normal measure a hit; next to Rumours' ten-million-plus, it read in the Warner Bros. boardroom as a costly indulgence, and the narrative of Tusk-as-folly set in almost immediately.
Tusk is not in our hundred, and the reason is simply that the hundred is closed. But the case for it has only grown: this is the record where the biggest band in the world, at the exact peak of its commercial power, chose risk over repetition — a lavishly funded, deliberately ragged double album that anticipated the lo-fi and indie instincts of decades to come, and that artists from Camper Van Beethoven onward would treat as a sacred text. Rumours is the album Fleetwood Mac are loved for. Tusk is the one that shows what they were actually capable of when they stopped trying to be loved.
Because Tusk sold in the millions as a double LP, the game here is not scarcity but condition and edition. Clean 1979 US originals (Warner Bros. 2HS 3350, embossed gatefold with the two illustrated inners) are common and cheap — the thing to hunt is a genuinely sharp, unfaded, still-embossed copy, ideally sealed, since the gatefold and inners are what date and grade a copy. US pressings came from several plants (Winchester/Specialty, Allied and a Capitol-mastered variant among them), which collectors distinguish by the runout stampers rather than the near-identical sleeve. For sound, many listeners prefer the 1979 UK pressing (Warner Bros. K 66088), rated as more open and dynamic than the common US cut. The modern prize is the out-of-print 2015 Rhino super-deluxe box (5CD + DVD + two 180g LPs), which gathers the remaster, singles and outtakes, The Alternate Tusk, and a full 1979 live disc. Two things to avoid: the 1987 single-disc CD, which for years carried the truncated 4:37 'Sara' rather than the full 6:22 album take, and any listing claiming an 'official half-speed master', which does not exist.
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