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Fleetwood Mac · S5 E3
Tusk
A USC marching band, a primal scream, and a title track that sounds nothing like Fleetwood Mac
One hundred and twelve members of the USC Trojan Marching Band march onto the field at Dodger Stadium while Lindsey Buckingham's guitar screeches through a wall of speakers and Mick Fleetwood hammers a tribal beat. This is not a halftime show. This is a Fleetwood Mac recording session.
"Tusk" (Fleetwood Mac, official music video, 1979). The moment Lindsey Buckingham's garage experiments went full stadium. A marching band, a baseball field, a mobile recording truck, and the strangest single any platinum-selling band has ever released. This is what happens when nobody tells the guitarist no.
The Idea
It started at a USC football game. Lindsey was in the stands, listening to the Trojan Marching Band blast through their halftime routine, and something clicked. He heard his lo-fi drum loop colliding with a hundred brass instruments in an open-air stadium, and he knew exactly what the title track needed. He called the band's director, Arthur C. Bartner, the next week.
Sources
Fleetwood, Mick and Bozza, Anthony. "Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac." Little, Brown, 2014.
“We pulled up to Dodger Stadium with a mobile recording truck, and there were over a hundred students in uniform waiting on the field. I remember thinking, this is either genius or we've completely lost our minds.”
— Mick Fleetwood, paraphrased from "Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac" (Little, Brown, 2014)
Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles
The home of the LA Dodgers doubled as the most unconventional recording studio in rock history when the USC Trojan Marching Band recorded the title track of Tusk on its field in 1979.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did the USC marching band hear the rhythm track at Dodger Stadium?
Tusk, Fleetwood Mac (1979)
"Tusk" begins with Mick Fleetwood's drums: a basic, almost tribal pattern that owes more to African percussion than rock and roll. Lindsey's guitar enters as a distorted, lo-fi scream, a riff that sounds like it was recorded through a tin can. Then the marching band crashes in, and the song becomes something else entirely: massive, cinematic, almost scary. There are no traditional verses or choruses. The structure is built on repetition and crescendo, the same musical phrase expanding outward until it fills a baseball stadium. Listen for how the brass section plays against Lindsey's guitar rather than with it. The collision is the whole point.
Sources
Fleetwood, Mick. "Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac." Little, Brown, 2014.
Tusk: The Session
Beautiful Child, Fleetwood Mac (1979)
While Lindsey was filling a baseball stadium with marching bands, Stevie Nicks was writing some of the quietest, most vulnerable music of her career. "Beautiful Child" is the opposite of "Tusk" in every way: intimate, whispered, barely there. It's Stevie alone with a piano, singing about longing in a voice that sounds like it might break at any moment. The fact that both songs exist on the same album tells you everything about what Tusk was trying to be.
Beautiful Child, Fleetwood Mac (1979)
"You fall into the night, beautiful child." Stevie wrote this about Mick Fleetwood, with whom she had a brief affair during the Tusk sessions. The lyrics are achingly tender, full of images of nightfall and tenderness. Read them knowing that every person in Fleetwood Mac was romantically entangled with at least one other member at some point, and the vulnerability takes on a different weight. This band turned their personal wreckage into art so beautiful it hurts.
How did the marching band hear the rhythm track during the Dodger Stadium recording?
The title track is done, but Lindsey isn't the only one with an epic on this album. Stevie Nicks has written an eight-minute song she refuses to cut, and it might be the most beautiful thing on the entire record. Next: "Sara," and the mystery of who she's really singing about.
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