I had never heard of this album until it was featured in Melody Maker's "Unknown Pleasures" book in 1995. A few more years passed before I heard a note of music from it, via the Fleetwood Mac Greatest Hits compilation. After that, more than a decade passed until I heard the full album. I bought the 2CD reissue, wrote a post about it, and all these years later I mostly agree with everything I wrote. Nevertheless, I didn't particularly like "Tusk". I would dig it out once in a while and subject myself to it for the sake of investigating it's merits because there's little doubt that it's notable album in rock history by one of rock's all-time great bands. I had read the essays, heard about the revisionist histories, knew about its critical resuscitation but still couldn't find much to like about it.
You see, when I was growing up and became "aware" of the FM radio rotation, just about every track from "Rumours" was regularly played on the radio -- some five years after it was first released. In the 80's, both "Mirage" and "Tango In the Night" were massive hit albums that ensured Fleetwood Mac's position as radio (and music video!) stalwarts through the end of the decade. "Tusk", on the other hand, might as well have never existed. The songs weren't on the radio, nobody talked about it, and nobody seemed to own it.
"Tusk" rode the post-"Rumours" momentum wave and sold millions of copies (it is a double album, so each sale counted as two copies). Why exactly did it become invisible for the bulk of the next twenty years? There was no "Rumours hangover" -- nobody rejected "Tusk" because they were tired of FM's dominance. Tracks from "Rumours" remained on the radio for years, so clearly the public wanted more Fleetwood Mac. Michael Jackson didn't experience a "Thriller hangover", huge albums are regularly followed by more huge albums. In "Unknown Pleasures", Simon Reynolds puts most of the blame at Lindsey Buckingham's feet, suggesting that his wonton experiments sabotaged "Tusk"'s commercial prospects. He's certainly correct on this point. But he also paints Buckingham as a charlatan looking to remain relevant for the punk and new wave crowd, and failing. This does not seem to be reflected in then-contemporary reviews.
In Stephen Holden's marvelous review for Rolling Stone (December 13, 1979), he calls Buckingham the "artistic lynchpin" of "Tusk", with his compositions being the glue that provides a semblance of cohesion to the album. With remarkable insight, he notes that the era of the multi-million dollar audiophile megaproduction must be reaching its end, while at the same time standing slack-jawed about how wonderful it all sounds. Robert Christgau also praised "Tusk" (assigning it a B+ grade) and Buckingham's songs in particular. Contemporary critics recognized that Buckingham wasn't the problem, rather, he was the standout. With audiences, it was obviously a different story.
Listening to it now, I finally understand what Holden wrote about more than four decades ago. On "Tusk", Buckingham draws inspiration from post punk and transforms it in a way that only he can. He practically invents a new genre for himself, linking crude noisemaking with state-of-the-art studio technology, combining his signature gossamer guitars with lo-fi country-tonk. Stevie Nicks is top form as well. While "Sara" is the most well-known, each of the five songs she contributed is excellent. The weak link, unfortunately is McVie. With the exception of "Think About Me", none of her songs come close to the spark she brought to "Rumours". "Over and Over" is pleasant enough, but it's a continuation of "Rumours", i.e. exactly the sound of a "Rumours 2" that Buckingham sought so desperately to avoid.
The running order does nobody any favours. It's a disjointed patchwork of competing ideologies between the three songwriters. The mood shifts with every song and the album never gets a chance to establish any kind of rhythm. This would be less of a problem in the CD/mp3 age, because you could easily program a new track order. But with LP's, listeners were just as likely to get frustrated and not bother to flip the record over. They should have given each of them an entire album side to do as they wished, but that might have made it feel less like a Fleetwood Mac album and more like three new solo albums by its main composers.
Is "Tusk" better than "Rumours", as some seem to suggest (even Mick Fleetwood claims it's his favourite FM album)? Let's not be ridiculous. But it's a very rewarding album and a fascinating experiment from a band that wasn't known for doing wild experiments during the post-Buckingham/Nicks era.
