So last month I posted what I felt were the best albums of last year, and if you read the post, you'll see that it wasn't so much 'the best of the year in music,' but rather a 'here's what my favorite bands did this year,' because I'm kinda out of touch and lame. So lame, in fact, that I actually thought the best album released last year was a reissue of a 36-year-old record.
I am, however, not quite lame enough to actually stick that on the top of the list. I remember when the album of the year on my local radio station was the reissue of Exile On Main St. (in fact, I think Rolling Stone magazine happened to concur with them on that, if memory serves) and boy, did I think that was lame as all get-out, so I decided not to repeat that mistake, or at least make a halfway decent attempt to cover up how lame I am... or at the very least appear slightly cooler than Rolling Stone magazine, because damn, if you're as lame as they are, you might as well just kill yourself and get it over with.
In all fairness, I don't really feel anyone needs an excuse to talk about Tusk. It is, simply put, one of the greatest pop/rock records ever made, flawlessly merging the seamless pop machine Fleetwood Mac had already become with the grander, bolder and grittier side the band had long flirted with. It's been criticized for its overindulgence and pomp, but there's hardly a song on its twenty-strong tracklist that doesn't serve a purpose in the record's overall structure. Even the weaker numbers (Honey Hi, Angel, Save Me A Place) not only provide a respite from the intensity and darkness of the stronger songs, but also fill in the picture a bit better, offering more glimpses into the culminated sonic world crafted by the album's grand architect: the quietly obsessed guitar god that is Lindsey Buckingham.
Indeed, it's Buckingham's songs that form the bulk of both the album's runtime and the edge of its sonic experimentation, nine songs of aggressively minimal folk rock, as sharp and pointed and no-punches-pulled as the razor-thin desperation in the gifted Californian's voice. And when it came time to flesh out his fellow songwriters' work, the sugary-sweet Christine McVie and the wistfully whimsical Stevie Nicks, he more than rose to the challenge, sharing lead vocal duties on the irresistible 70s power-pop of Think About Me and forcefully driving home the dark grandeur of his former girlfriend's hypnotic mantras in Sisters Of The Moon, to name but two examples.
The production on McVie and Nicks's songs is a tad more traditional-minded than the unapologetic experimentation of Buckingham's work, attesting to one of two possibilities: either a benevolent understanding that you can't really follow up an album like Rumours with twenty tracks of something that sounds like it was captured on a tape recorder halfway through a vicious cocaine binge (The Ledge, That's Enough For Me), or it further hints at the never-ending ego conflicts and drama that were never far from Fleetwood Mac's surface. There was certainly enough bad blood between Buckingham and Nicks at that point for her to have specifically circumvented his authority when it came to production choices on her contributions.
The rhythm section that has forever formed Fleetwood Mac's backbone is no less excellent, with Mick Fleetwood fully embracing Buckingham's minimalism, paring it down to almost nothing on almost every song, only letting loose on the bizarre sales-killer of a single that is the album's title track. John McVie, meanwhile, keeps flawless step with his bang-on-the-money slides and hooks, filling the essential space underneath Buckingham and Nicks's cocaine-covered snarls and hisses and Chris McVie's airy frolicking. They really were the consummately perfect band, completely rounding out and complementing each other's strengths and weaknesses... until Tusk, of course, did away with that.
They never really reached Tusk's level again. The dejection following Tusk's disappointing sales and reception took physical form on the monstrous marathon that was the Tusk tour: two years of hardcore drug use and hedonistic excess as the members' sometimes vitriolic dislike of one another resulted in fight after fight after fight. By the time they hit the studio again in 1982 to make the dead-eyed Mirage, the fire had pretty much gone out of them completely. There were flashes of brilliance, sure, especially from Buckingham on the pointed Can't Go Back, Book Of Love and the utterly superb Eyes Of The World, but all of them sound like Tusk outtakes, frankly, while McVie and Nicks continued to hone their pop craftsmanship to perfection on Love In Store and Gypsy, respectively.
1987's Tango In The Night proved to the band's undoing in all but name, with a reluctant Buckingham and a tireless Chris McVie somehow conjuring up a darkly lavish pop album while the rest of the band drank and drugged themselves into oblivion. Buckingham was out of the band before the Tango tour even left the gate, and while there have been glimpses of substance in the 27 years since, the Fleetwood Mac everyone knew and loved pretty much ended with Buckingham's departure. As if to further drive home how badly the band needs him, his return for 1997's shameless nostalgia-fest The Dance, 2003's pretty-darn-good Say You Will and 2013's surprisingly excellent Extended Play EP have all been far, far more satisfying than 1990's laughable Behind The Mask and 1995's utterly hopeless Time.
So for better or for worse, Tusk was the band's real triumph, and it seems they gradually came to understand that, as last December's lavish 5-CD, 2-LP and DVD package is about the most loving and definitive treatment a record could ever hope to get. They realized where it was they peaked, and finally, finally gave Tusk the in-depth look it so richly deserved... or maybe they just gave up trying to milk more money out of Rumours and turned their attention to another record.
Whichever the case may be, the final results are undeniable. The CDs are, naturally, the real treat here. The first disc is only a qualified success: a brand-new digital remaster of the original album. The crisp sterility of digital media seemed to demand a master that sounded better, or at the very least clearer, than the original, but as I said, it's somewhat troubled; an album that's already as obsessively perfectionist as Tusk can only be improved upon so much, and the crystal clarity of the new master often renders the smooth blend of the album's carefully complementary instrumentation moot, as the instruments all seem to drift out of touch with each other. Nevertheless, hidden gems often emerge out of the murk, such as the gorgeously harmonized backing vocals on Storms, and the playfully panned drum overdubs on Walk A Thin Line take on a new life.
More important than any specific accomplishment, however, is the overall effect of the remaster: it delivers final, unquestionable proof that Tusk sounds as great in today's sterile, digital age as it did on reel-to-reel. If it really had been released in 2015, it would easily have rivaled anything put out that same year in terms of accessibility, experimentation and songcraft. All you really need to do is replace Chris McVie's old Moog with a shiny new Korg, slap some digital effects on the vocals and the drums here and there, and presto: Tusk could be the best album Tame Impala never made.
Holy fucking shit, do I sound old for a 29-year-old sometimes.
Anyway. Discs 4 & 5 are live recordings from the grueling Tusk tour, offering better takes and audio quality than the 1980 Live album ever did. It especially excels in capturing the angst and desperation of The Chain, which can only have darkened over time as the relationships in the band deteriorated. For the most part however, it contributes little of real value, other than perhaps further underscoring how utterly exhausting that tour must have been. Rumor has it that in order to recoup Tusk's losses, Warner made sure that every single set on the whole tour was recorded, so we could theoretically be getting unheard recordings from the Tusk tour until the heat-death of the universe.
But it is on Discs 2 & 3 are where the reissue really shines. Disc 2 takes the exhaustive approach, rifling through the vaults for what seems like damn near every take of every song on Tusk, some of them featuring more heavily than others; pretty much the entire second half of the disc consists exclusively of alternate takes of I Know I'm Not Wrong and Tusk. Disc 3 is the more literal one; titled "The Alternate Tusk," it employs carefully curated alternate takes to recreate the album track-for-track (which I personally feel was a somewhat unfortunate decision, seeing as how one of Tusk's weaker elements is its completely out-of-whack sequencing; a new and reconsidered tracklist would have been more than welcome, either on Disc 1 or 3). The versions fluctuate between being interesting and possibly superior to their original placeholders (Not That Funny's guitar effects give it a juicy, synthlike luster), to unacceptably paltry and justifiably scrapped early stabs at songs; Sara seems especially sub-par, with its jarringly crisp off-beat piano and backing vocals, ridiculous eight-minute runtime and unintentionally hilarious spoken dialogue at its outset ("I wanna be a star! I don't wanna be a cleaning lady!").
It's important to remember that for all his faults and tyrannical reputation, Buckingham's ego had nothing on Nicks's, and judging by how terrible Sara would have been had Nicks been allowed to have her way with it, maybe much of the conflict between them stemmed from Buckingham having to reign Nicks in when the Welsh Witch started taking things a bit too far. Their respective solo careers certainly back this up, with Nicks's laissez-faire attitude to making records serving up more than a few unlistenable clunkers, especially when her Klonopin abuse began to really take hold, while Buckingham's mixture of disciple and eccentricity, while far less commercially successful, has given us more resilient work.
Perhaps more than anything, The Alternate Tusk proves that Tusk doesn't really deserve its reputation at being overly indulgent in its experimental tendencies. On the contrary, Tusk is actually remarkably accessible compared to most of the directions rock was taking at the time. It's a tight, methodical record that only employed experimental strategies when it served the music. For evidence of this, one need look no further than The Alternate Tusk, the record Tusk could have been: an all-over-the-place mess that has more in common with modern indie, somehow, which I guess is a kind of testament to the evolution music has undergone since 1979. In a weird way, The Alternate Tusk is just as much of a modern update of Tusk as Disc 1 is; it's the kind of record Tusk would be if it were released today, only in a bad way, rather than a good way. For all its faults, however, The Alternate Tusk, as a companion to Disc 2, is still of great interest to any scholar interested in seeing how Tusk came to be.
Every take is dated, allowing one to hear in fascinating detail exactly how the songs evolved and took shape. Brown Eyes, Over & Over and You'll Never Make Me Cry stay more or less intact throughout its evolution, testament to Chris McVie's if-it-ain't-broke methodology, but judging by the early versions of Honey Hi and Never Forget, McVie might have been far happier if her songs on Tusk had been a sort of awkward drumless free-for-all hippie kindergarten jamboree, which admittedly would have made her weaker numbers stand out a bit more; even Mick Fleetwood's bracing uptempo work can't quite turn her more shapeless kiddie pop numbers into rock songs on the original Tusk, so maybe it would have been better to just leave them in their unformed state rather than force the issue.
Think About Me changes in one significant way: All three vocalists combine their prodigious talents on the final version, whereas Buckingham contributes no clearly discernible vocals on the earlier one. The delivery of the titular hook is slightly stunted on the older take, whereas the album version elongates a crucial syllable, turning the drab "think about me" into the far catchier "think abooooout me," and I have a sneaking suspicion that the change was Buckingham's contribution.
That's Enough For Me apparently began life as more of a folk-country romp until the decision was made to go hardcore bedroom-fi on its ass ("Shit, that's fast," a stunned Chris McVie balks at the tempo in the earlier take). It slows down enough for some decidedly narcotic-sounding experimentation in a later and largely instrumental take; the finished version is a kind of combination of both, possessing both the speed of the earlier take and the drugginess of the later one (or maybe they decided to just redo the later take but using cocaine this time rather than weed and wine).
Save Me A Place similarly started off as a completely acoustic number, with the major difference between the two being that the latter stayed unplugged into its final form. Presumably, this was done to give Tusk some more variety, but I doubt any amount of experimentation could have kept it from becoming one of Tusk's weaker songs, and to make matters worse, it's on the finished album's first side, thoroughly derailing the considerable momentum The Ledge and Think About Me have accumulated ahead of it (see tracklist grievances above).
It is without a doubt Stevie Nicks's songs that see the most logical evolution, with Beautiful Child and Sara being little more than weird, meandering jam sessions at first. No conscious changes are made; the band just tightens as their familiarity with the songs grows, and the inclusion of Nicks's songs seem mostly a formality on Discs 2 & 3; tellingly, an earlier version of Storms is the only previously unreleased take of a Nicks song on Disc 2.
But the early versions prove an important point about Nicks's methodology: how dependent she has always been on the raw emotion in her troubled, torn and cocaine-shattered voice, and true emotion is often the hardest thing to capture in any studio environment. There is nothing inherently wrong with the two early takes of Storms on the Tusk reissue; the Disc 2 version is reminiscent of her earlier hit Landslide, with its bold, reverberating acoustic guitar, gentle organ and ramshackle, barely-there percussion (there is no bass guitar). The Disc 3 version is even simpler, with nothing but Nicks's breathy croon and Buckingham's steady fingers methodically plucking out the arpeggios.
Neither one of them is technically inferior to the final version heard on the album, and either one could easily have replaced the familiar version, were it not for the fact the take on the album has one of the most gut-wrenchingly sad and powerful vocal performances ever captured on tape, and it is truly irreplaceable, possibly the finest moment in Stevie Nicks's career. The resignation, loss and sadness in her voice just aren't the sort of thing you can produce; you just have to wait for it to appear and hope someone remembered to hit 'record.'
When one listens to them all in sequence, it becomes immediately clear why there are so many fucking versions of I Know I'm Not Wrong on Disc 2: the song went through a long series of tweaks and tests before Buckingham arrived at the finished version: an in-studio creation if there ever was one. Lyrics slowly take shape while Mick Fleetwood's drum work goes through several stages of complexity in a distinctly non-linear evolution. The song's central keyboard hook bafflingly disappears in some of its intermediate incarnations, and the Disc 3 version is a Buckingham/Nicks duet rather than a Buckingham solo lead. The process seems frustrating, torturous, even, as Buckingham agonizes on the record clearly intended to be his masterpiece.
Meanwhile, the multiple iterations of the title track reveal what we all already knew about it: that it was always just a weird, pointless jam song, and although listening to all those different versions back-to-back can be a trippy, mantra-like experience, its earlier versions are just as impenetrable and cheap, if a little more daring. Which is all perfectly fine, provided you don't factor in the story of its recording and promotion.
The entire history of that song just makes no fucking sense to me, any which way you look at it. A rambling blues groove, unadorned by any kind of hook, that is then given certifiably insane premium treatment when Buckingham and Fleetwood spontaneously decide that they need to record the entire USC Marching Band performing it with them in Dodger fucking Stadium. The results are barely audible in the final mix, completely negating the ridiculous expense they went to in recording it. Again, this is by no means a serious problem; lots of bands have blown money on experiments that just didn't work, but then, on top of everything else, it is promoted as the album's lead fucking single, no doubt leaving most of 1979 America with the impression that the band had completely lost their marbles on drugs (which I suppose is partly true). If Lindsey Buckingham had intended to prove to the world that they were not going to get a sequel to Rumours, then by God, he had done it. I honestly can't think of a better way to kill the album, especially not when there were at least eight other songs better suited to role of lead single than the weirdly alienating Tusk.
In the end, perhaps the story of Tusk the song became in most people's minds the story of Tusk the album: driven to excess by drugs and ego, Fleetwood Mac had made a bloated beast of a record that had cost more money than the economies of most African countries at the time, and maybe it was time we all stopped giving a shit about them and started listening to Blondie or whatever. And meanwhile, anyone who actually went and bought the damn thing will have finally been able to hear what Fleetwood Mac are truly capable of, only to realize that everyone else had stopped caring. It must have been a weird thing to experience.
