Not so long ago, as happens, I was in a Facebook debate
about something I neither knew much nor cared much about. I won’t say with whom
because I don’t want to mischaracterize his position. I don’t even remember
what side he was on. But he certainly knows about music, which can often be a
problem.
The debate—which involved a number of middle-aged
know-it-alls, not just myself—was about the relative merits and ups and downs
over the career span of Fleetwood Mac.
People—dudes, mostly—who know about music know well the
Correct Fleetwood Mac Position (CFMP). According to CFMP, the band’s best
period was in the 1960s, when they were a British blues band. When they met up
with Californians Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and became enormously
popular, so goes CFMP, it all went downhill.
All-knowing music dudes (AKMDs) will tell you it was because
of the influence of then-couple Buckingham and Nicks, but I would suggest that the
AKMD perspective is tainted by the “enormously popular” part of the equation. AKMD’s
are all too often incapable of admitting, for example, that Miley Cyrus has a
fantastic singing voice or that Justin Timberlake has some tight jams. Some AKMD’s
can’t even bring themselves to enjoy The Beatles or Prince, although they’ll
say they recognize what’s good about it, because they simply cannot like music
with broad popular appeal.
Fleetwood Mac started as a good—sometimes great—band in the
mold of a bunch of other British blues bands in the 1960s and, in the 1970s, transformed
into a band making music not quite like anything anyone had made before and
playing it with remarkable musicianship. And remarkable musicianship and
innovative music are what AKMD’s ordinarily flock toward. Unless it’s
enormously popular, that is.
This wasn’t exactly what the Fleetwood Mac Facebook fight
(FMFF) was about, but it is what I was thinking about at the time. And in that
fight, I found myself defending not only the their 1977 album Rumours (which is
just plainly obvious) but also the follow-up, 1979’s Tusk. It was only upon
further reflection that I realized I don’t really know Tusk. I mean, I think I
do, but I asked myself when was the last time I heard it. I’ve never owned a
copy. I think I heard it, or at least some of it, from my cousin Chloe when it came
out. I think I read a review that said it was their "White Album" and that must
have impressed me terribly as a youth hungry for conventional wisdom. [Rolling
Stone’s review, it turns out, read “Like The White Album, Tusk is less a
collection of finished songs than a mosaic of pop-rock fragments by individual
performers."] I remember looking at the record cover at the store and
wanting it, but it was a double album! $15.98 was a serious investment at the
time—and then the time was gone.
I asked in the wake of that FFMF myself what songs I could
name off of the album. Not even call to memory, just name. Well, there’s the
title track, of course, which I will always love, but the only other song I
could come up with was “Sara,” and once I realized I was singing Hall and
Oates’ “Sara Smile” in my head I couldn’t come up with the Fleetwood Mac
melody. On an album with 20 songs, an album I was defending as great, I could
remember exactly one. That’s five percent. That’s a nickel. That’s nothing. Apparently,
I just like the idea of defending Tusk.
So, on Thanksgiving night, 2017, with the apartment to myself, I
sat down to listen to Tusk, discs one through three of the 2015 remastered
“Deluxe Edition” reissue, on Spotify: the entire set of songs thrice over in
original and alternate takes, demos and remixes. (The last two discs in the set
are recordings from the 1979-80 tour and contain material from other albums so
they were excluded from this listening session.)
The first thing I discovered was that the song “Tusk” does
not kick off the album, as it did in my memory. No, it’s the second to last
song on the fourth side. At the same moment I discovered “Again and Again” is
actually the lead-off song, a huge and enjoyable hit. The second thing I
discovered is that, well, it all sounds like Fleetwood Mac. It was all
familiar, pleasant, likeable, and certainly Christine McVie’s “Again and Again”
and “Think About Me” and Nicks’ “Sara” (oh, right, that’s how it goes) were
happy memories, but song after song passed me by like a gentle stream. That is,
until a pair of Buckingham songs in the middle of what would have been side
two.
Fleetwood Mac was a remarkably talented outfit. The rhythm
section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie pounds without letting you know
they’re pounding. Christine McVie brings a welcome maturity (not in age but in
wisdom) to the songwriting while Nicks is the obvious allure but let’s face it,
her presence necessitates McVie as a ballast. A band with Nicks as the only
woman would be pretty hard to take, almost as bad as Jefferson/Jefferson
Airplane/Starship/Starship. But Lindsey Buckingham, with his electric
finger-picking and his under-control fury, is what puts the band above and
beyond such cocaine-fueled yacht-rock compadres as Ambrosia, America, Orleans
and the Eagles.
The one-two Buckingham punch of “That’s All for Everyone”
and “Not That Funny” was the first time I felt glad to be listening to the
record, for what I now felt like was maybe the first time. The songs aren’t up
there with his contributions to Rumours (“The
Chain,” “Go Your Own Way”), but they’re intelligent, enjoyable pop. Side two
ends with “Sisters of the Moon,” a great Nicks song. Or is it just great
because it’s on the heels of the Buckingham double shot? No, it’s great and it’s
on the heels of a Buckingham double shot. Fleetwood Mac is all about chemistry
and pop albums—at least back when they were sold on physical media—are all
about sequencing.
Nicks holds fast, kicking off side three with “Angel,” a
song that seems to be about losing an angel but that she sings with such
defiance you know she’ll find another. Then there’s a toss-away, two-minute
Buckingham country stomp and then a pair of McVie songs. Why is it so hard to
love McVie’s songs? Was the band toying with us by setting up the gypsy and the
matron, so that when we get the latter we are left wanting the former? Unfair,
I know, and I almost always like her songs whereas I can hate a Stevie Nicks
song. Even “Don’t Stop,” her biggest song and likely the band’s best-known song,
doesn’t hook in a way that can’t be unhooked. I was intrigued by the
Buckingham/McVie record that came out last year. I excitedly listened to it
once (via, I believe, an NPR stream), extolled its virtues on social media and
never listened again. So, yeah, a pair of McVie songs. I’m sorry, Christine.
I’d like to like you more than I do. And then a forgettable Buckingham song.
They happen. More than occasionally. And from there the album kind of goes limp
again. Until the second to last song. Ahhhhh… the second to last song.
The album’s titular and penultimate track opens with an
indifferent crowd vacillating, wavering. It’s mysterious—are we at a concert? a
party? a train station?—but we can’t focus long enough to consider the question
because our thoughts are flattened by pounding drums. “Tusk” (the song) picks
up from the reprise of the Beatles “Strawberry Field Forever” and gave us Gwen
Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” (another song that AKMD could never admit is good)
and then it’s gone. Three minutes, thirty-eight seconds, right in the ballpark
for a pop song, but no matter how many times you hear it, you can’t get to it.
It’s as impactful as it is ethereal. It was an unlikely hit single (#8 in the
U.S., #6 in the U.K.) in a particularly unstable year for popular music.
Leaving it there wouldn’t have worked. Nothing on the album
anticipates it, there’s no real right place to put it, but putting it last
would have been selling us a beat bag. McVie’s “Never Forget” cradles us in its
arms in the way she’s so good at. It’s just a pop album, she says, we’re just a
pop band. Don’t worry about who’s hurting whom (she would, of course, know the
proper usage of who and whom). We’ll all be fine, yourself included.
The deluxe edition reissue doesn’t add much more than
minutes to the album. There’s multiple versions of “Tusk” as well as
Buckingham’s “I Know I’m Not Wrong,” and we get the unreleased
slightly-punkish-in-a-Richard-Thompson-sort-of-way Buckingham tune “Out On the
Road.” But more is rarely better and it isn’t here.
Rumours sold 10 million copies in the year after its
release. Tusk sold 4 million in its first year. It was reportedly the all-time
biggest sales decrease from one album to the next. But sales figures are
unimportant. The question is, do I still want to defend Tusk now that I know
what I’m defending? Well, I will argue that listening to the 70s version of
Fleetwood Mac, listening closely, is a joy, even when the songs aren’t great.
Pick a song and pick an instrument to follow. I guarantee you’ll be surprised
at what you never noticed before. That doesn’t make it a masterpiece, but it
does make for a band that can sustain the years.
