50 great things about Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk"

The part where Lindsey's voice goes up and you can't tell where his ends and Christine McVie's starts. Or maybe it's all Lindsey overdubs. Either way, that song RULES.

I have no problem with it at all, but you know.. some might.

32. The distorted power chords in "Sisters of the Moon," which sound like they're being played through a broken practice amp.

Everyone else pretty OTM.

dude, where ya been?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=rhino+fleetwood+mac+tusk&btnG=Google+Search

So...

34) It reminds me of the delicious hot dog I ate at the one college football game I ever went to, which I think was USC vs. Notre Dame ("we" lost).

Fuck! Major x-post with Todd!

TS: A-Claps vs. Tusk

So, 15 more to go?

it's been said above but needs to be repeated, Brown Eyes RULES and for me it's the best christine song BY FAR. It's just incomparable. Those drums! Those sha la las! That Peter Green!

hi!

the twinkling guitar at the end of the “who-ooh-ooh-oooooh”s <3

masterpiece

here's a thing about Tusk that annoys me: why did it come with 4 LP inserts when it's only a double album? It's got two extra inner sleeves jammed in there. Explain this.

Lemme call Mick and Stevie, hold up

I believe the two "inner-inner" sleeves are meant to go into the bigger inner sleeves.

This checks out. They fit, and 2 of them are numbered 1/2, the others say 3/4.

That said, my used copy only has 3 inserts, so now I gotta go to discogs and see which one I'm missing...

(it's the one with the giant ear on it)

I just finished Get Tusked by Ken Caillat and Hernan Rojas, which is mentioned in a couple of other Mac threads but not this one yet. Apparently, one plan was for the record to be released as two albums a few months apart, with the second album slotting into the packaging of the first.

Other highlights of the book are photos of the McVies in SS uniform and blackface for Halloween, descriptions of every mic used on every track of every song, lots of information about the authors' sex lives, a list of Lindsey's favourite punk albums, Brian Wilson's visit to the studio, Stevie threatened with machine guns in Chile... Nearly 40 years later,Caillat is still not fond of most of Lindsey's tracks.

lots of information about the authors' sex lives

these sections were definite turds dropping into the cocktail glass of the book for me

I found my copy of Tusk in a thrift store, completely disassembled, with the records loose in a bin. I remember coming across the extra sleeves and initially getting excited that there was another loose copy of Tusk in the store. I figured it out pretty quickly though. Despite this, it played pretty well.

_ lots of information about the authors' sex lives_

these sections were definite turds dropping into the cocktail glass of the book for me

He ends up marrying the girl in the Tusk book and it all takes a little more centre stage, IMO. But I was listening to the 2nd CD of the 2004-ish reissue of Tusk on the way to camping holiday this weekend and things mentioned in the book popped up in my head, so I'd recommend it for a deeper understanding of the album and its environs.

I met Caillat a few years ago after a talk he gave about Rumours, but the main thing I wanted to do was ask him about the production of "Storms" (whose intimacy, space, and minimalism I find devastating) and he seemed genuinely excited to talk about it. He was basically saying, hey, nobody ever asks me about this track, and I put a *lot* into it.... so let me tell exactly how we set up her mic....

tell *you* exactly

I love stuff like that. Producers are often fascinating, and I love when I get a chance to interview them and get under the skin of projects they worked on. The artists themselves are so often "over" what they made, or feel the need to pretend they are.

It really underscores how infrequently producers - or musicians, for that matter - are asked about *anything* technical, or deeper-dives into what they do. Like, where would that information even be published? There was a recent Tape Op issue that featured an interview with Harry Connick Jr., and it was fascinating, just him talking about the equipment in his studio, his love of analog recording and tech, revealing that he's proficient in lots of surprising instruments (from drums to brass), just tons of stuff I've never read him talking about.

hence the fascination with the Rubin-McCartney interviews

Records are a pretty poor financial investment but I was thinking today that if I cleared out every unplayed used copy of Tusk between the mid-90s and like, 2005 and resold them to normies for $10-15 today I’d be able to pay off my loans

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) August 10, 2021

Add in all the copies of Rumours and the S/T and we're talking house money.

Seriously had that thought a few months ago that if I would have started squirreling away every classic rock warhorse I saw in the bins for consistently less than a buck, I’d definitely have been able to pay off a big chunk of my student loans at the least. But, who knew?

There are no cheap copies of Rumours out there, which is bizarre when you think just how many copies were originally produced and purchased.

i used to have an unplayed copy of tusk i picked up around 2008-ish…. totally disappeared from my apartment ;_;

obv i played it a lot myself

Shit, the cut out bins were LOADED with Tusks in the early nineties.

I don't remember mycopy of Tusk costing much, and it's got like four inlays in there or something

I found my copy of Tusk entirely disassembled in a thrift store bin in 2007. As in both records and each sleeve were in a different location. The vinyl was still about VG+, miraculously.

"Don't say that you love me!" said every vinyl copy of Tusk at Reckless Records in 1993.

Lol Alfred. Now the cover photo makes perfect sense.

One thing that really blows my mind is how expensive the album was to start with. It listed for $16.98 for the vinyl set upon release, which adjusted for inflation today is $63.55. Of course, very few people who actually bought it then probably paid list, but still. I believe even then that was a pretty high price point for a double, although understandable given this was the beginning of 'superstar pricing' not to mention the cost of packaging and the recording itself.

I found a pretty seriously water-damaged copy at my local record store for £7 or so a few years back that plays absolutely fine (the inner sleeves however are all gummed together), and that will do me. My first copy was the CD with the edited Sara, which seems criminal now.

Wasn't there some hoohah about "Tusk" getting premiered in its entirety on the radio, allowing people to record it, and the band/management/label blaming that for soft sales?

edited "sara" and the remixed "i know i'm not wrong," the latter of which was retained for the 2004 double-disc reissue and for literal years made me think my vinyl copy was flawed but just for that particular song

xp

i prefer the og "i know i'm not wrong" now, it breathes more, but sometimes i miss the tricked-out quality of the remix

Wasn't there some hoohah about "Tusk" getting premiered in its entirety on the radio, allowing people to record it, and the band/management/label blaming that for soft sales?

Yeah, a chain of radio stations were allowed a full-length album premiere by Warner's, which backfired.

We don't know to what extent it affected sales; WB will want a villain. The price had a lot to do with depressed sales.

I think I remember paying $14 for it when it came out.

I paid $1, but I had to walk to the record store in a snowstorm.

I gave the album a good close headphone listen this morning. So many hidden little details. My latest revelation is that, unless my ears are deceiving me, what I thought was a harpsichord in "Not That Funny" may actually be Lindsey's pretty tightly capoed guitar. Or maybe his guitar sped up? Which all makes sense, given that I think the Lindsey songs are pretty much all Lindsey, bar a Mick part or two.

Per Wiki, it's kind of an "In My Life" move:

Some of the electric guitars were detuned and recorded at high speed before being slowed down to 30 inches per second.[5] Buckingham multitracked the electric guitar parts on a Stratocaster and treated the instrument with a variable speed oscillator (VSO) to achieve a phasing effect.[7] The electric guitars were also sent through a tape recorder and mixing console to achieve a lower pitched, compressed, and thicker sound. The inverse occurred for the acoustic guitars, which were recorded at a slower speed but sped up with the VSO so that the instrument would resemble a harpsichord or music box.

Wow. Iirc the Beatles (or George Martin) used an actual harpsichord, though also sped up.

No, wait, Martin played a piano then sped it up to sound like a harpsichord! This shit is so cool, it's ironic that no one seems to do shit like this anymore, considering how easy it all is to do digitally. Or maybe they do it and it's hard to tell, because people are messing with stuff digitally so much more?

Yeah it's much easier to just record the piano part in MIDI and choose a harpsichord voice

but also, while there's a million cool and interesting and unique effects you can create in the digital environment, they're inherently different than effects that rely on the actual tools of analog recording. no one is speeding up or slowing down tape anymore, or running guitars through tape recorders and analog consoles, because no one is actually using any of that stuff.

doing it digitally, per se, is really doing something else altogether.

Do people use some digital equivalent of Varispeed, just tweaking the tempos and pitches a touch? Like, every song on "Highway to Hell" is slightly off-key, iirc, because each one has been sped up and slowed down ever so slightly for the desired effect. Same with a lot of stuff of the era.

that definitely exists, though digital offers the option, unavailable in analog recording, of tweaking the speed *without* changing the pitch.

(and either way, the analog and digital versions are at heart two different effects, kind of like playing the same chord played on different instruments. not better or worse, just different.)

Yeah, the most conspicuous place I come across things essentially varispeeded into the wrong pitch is on youtube, where I presume posters alter the pitch slightly to escape getting slapped down by automatic detection for copyright. At the same time, I only recently learned that youtube itself allows you to slow down or speed up a song afaict *without* altering the pitch, which is a useful way to learn songs.

There actually WAS an obscure analog device for changing speed without affecting pitch (and vice versa): Eltro information rate changer

hadn't realized how unfairly short "never make me cry" is. sounds like the intro is a cut from a longer performance? that entire instrumental performance is just a beautiful bit of restraint for the band in the shadow of the album.

I regard it as a coda to "Brown Eyes."