“Uncompromising,” poses Rob Trucks in “The Warning Shot” to his installment of Continuum’s album-didactic novella series, comes up missing in adjectives barnacled to 1979 Fleetwood Mac opus Tusk. Trucks’ own wagging member, Tusk, offers no less.
The author’s feisty read notched only my second toe dipped into the 33 1/3 set, now up to 83 titles, including five reviewed in this week’s rock & roll Summer Reading. My debut inkling, John Darnielle’s immersion in Black Sabbath doom merchant Master of Reality, had more to do with the Mountain Goats’ singer-songwriter doing the spilling than the actual subject matter. Darnielle’s masterful pay-off and Trucks’ personal and reportorial case for the follow-up to one of the best-selling albums in music history – Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors – found me scanning Tusk’s endpage of further treatises (hello Joe Bonomo’s Highway to Hell) besides a 33 1/3 thesis to the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, which arrived here at the paper alongside this particular volume.
“Music is personal.
Tusk is a symbol.”
So goes Truck’s Tusk mantra, and beyond its expertly winnowed front and backstory – including reminder that the LP title stemmed from band founder Mick Fleetwood’s love of penis jokes – the white elephant herder’s journalistic revelations and general insight add yet more layers to the double album’s controversial standing. Foremost in evidentiary delights are testimonials from New Pornographer A.C. Newman, Wolf Parade, Kaki King, and Steely Dan’s Walter Egan, and even more so personally, a quote from a Chronicle Q&A in which Tusk architect Lindsey Buckingham becomes the “Terrence Malik of rock”!
Better still, the idea of Tusk as another of the era’s punk and New Wave-influenced classic rock upticks – see the Stones’ Some Girls, the Who’s Who Are You, the Kinks’ Low Budget and Give the People What They Want – further cements in Trucks’ interviews with Buckingham and his evocation of Pet Sounds in that both Brian Wilson and Buckingham created high art out of chaos that despite insane group dynamics was wholly individualistic. Tusk’s extreme left turn out of Rumors is analogous to the Clash sprawling out of London Calling with triple-LP Sandinista, a favorite citation personally.
Music is a symbol.
Tusk is personal.
Some of us “got” Tusk right away, even at 14. What was there to get anyway? Instead of 11 compositions divided among three preternaturally gifted singer-songwriters (Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie), now there was 20 peak tracks – with a lot less filler than on Exile on Main Street for example. Rumors was/is perfect, of course – ubiquitous as wallpaper – but two years after its 1977 release, a sea change in popular music was already washing away its sponsoring decade like so many bad Zeppelin bootlegs. In hindsight, the phenomenal success of Rumors caps its era, the 1970s, while its successor Tusk embodies the herky-jerky quirk of a New Wave.
And who says Tusk isn’t Rumors II? Okay, everyone. Yet Mac’s ever fracturing romanticism remains rife in Buckingham’s caustic “What Makes You Think You’re the One” and Stevie Nicks’ hit “Sara,” generally accepted as a chronicle of Mick Fleetwood’s moving on from his liaison with the group’s gypsy to her close friend and Sara Recor. Length, production, sequencing, and specifically Lindsey Buckingham unbound all fracture Tusk out of Rumors II territory, edging it closer to the realm of new sounds up inside the guitarist’s tweaking head – the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello. Tusk was/is brilliant in a way Fleetwood Mac would never repeat.
Rob Trucks is a symbol.
Tusk is Tusk.
With admiration for Tusk the book’s interviewee chapter stops:
Raoul Hernandez’s favorite track off Tusk: “Not That Funny”
Least Favorite track off Tusk: “Beautiful Child”
Favorite Lindsey Buckingham song off Tusk: “Tusk”
Favorite Stevie Nicks song off Tusk: “Angel”
Favorite Christine McVie song off Tusk: “Brown Eyes”
This article appears in July 15 • 2011.