The most expensive rock album ever made began with a simple refusal. Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist and chief sonic architect of Fleetwood Mac, did not want to make another Rumours. That record had sold ten million copies by early 1978, and the obvious next step was a sequel, or two, or three. Buckingham wanted the opposite: something sparse, strange, and jagged enough to make the band feel alive in a post-punk world. The result was Tusk, the twelfth studio album from Fleetwood Mac, released in the United States on 12 October 1979.
Double album, double trouble
The stakes were enormous from the first day. Mick Fleetwood, the drummer and co-founder, decided early that Tusk would be a double album, which doubled the studio time, the tape, and the arguments. Buckingham was so determined to break the band's own formula that he recorded several songs at his home studio on a 24-track machine, playing every instrument himself. Songs like 'The Ledge', 'Save Me a Place' and 'That's Enough for Me' came out of those solo sessions. When he asked Fleetwood for permission, the drummer agreed on one condition: the rest of the group had to be brought into the process.
The sessions at The Village Recorder in Los Angeles ran through 1978 and 1979, and they were not peaceful. Producer Ken Caillat remembered Buckingham creating tension from the first day, asking for every knob to be turned 180 degrees, taping microphones to the floor, and singing while holding a push-up position. In one moment of stress Buckingham cut his own hair with manicure scissors. Caillat later admitted he tried to bury some of the guitarist's harsher textures in the mix. The rest of the band went along with the experiment partly to keep Buckingham from leaving Fleetwood Mac altogether.
The million-dollar studio gamble
Money made the pressure worse. The production was first estimated at around one million dollars, then the real figure came in closer to 1.4 million, which made Tusk the most expensive rock album of its time. A plan to use the Beach Boys' studio collapsed when the band's lawyer said they would have to pay for the space even if they never set foot in it. Instead, Fleetwood Mac turned to Jordy Hormel, who offered to build them a separate room at The Village Recorder. Producer Ken Caillat advised buying the studio as the cheaper option, but Fleetwood's lawyer chose to rent it, and the room became Studio D.
Buckingham's methods were deliberately homemade. On some tracks he used a Kleenex box as a snare drum, while Fleetwood layered his own drumming over Buckingham's demos. The sound of Tusk was meant to be darker than the dense, polished dynamics of Rumours, with fuller low frequencies and more high end. To get there, the album was recorded on magnetic tape running at 30 inches per second with Dolby noise reduction to tame the hiss. Tusk also became one of the first albums mixed digitally, in the same year as Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop.
Leaks, early shipments and label panic
The label was terrified long before anyone heard the record. Warner Bros. Records had planned a marketing campaign through a New York advertising agency, but Fleetwood Mac pushed back, saying they were being sold like chewing gum. Then the album itself started leaking. To fight the spread of poor-quality tape copies, Warner Bros. shipped Tusk to stores a week early, with the first deliveries going out on the weekend of 5 October 1979. The company worked triple shifts to print enough copies and hand-delivered the album to as many radio stations as possible before the official date.
The cover became its own small legend. Photographer Peter Beard spent two weeks in the studio taking Polaroids of the band and their surroundings, and he added images of elephant tusks to the artwork. During one session Beard photographed Caillat's dog Scooter biting the producer's leg, and that snapshot became the cover of Tusk. The image was odd, immediate, and slightly unhinged, which suited an album that refused to behave like a blockbuster. Beard also slipped several pictures of Scooter into the collages, including a cut-out of the dog's head on a naked woman's body.
When the sales figures arrived, the gamble looked like a failure. Compared with Rumours, which had sold ten million copies by February 1978, Tusk managed four million, and Warner Bros. called it a commercial disappointment. Christine McVie later admitted the band had feared a fight with Buckingham over the album's direction, and she had mixed feelings about the finished work: sometimes she loved it, sometimes she hated it. But the album never disappeared. In 2013, NME placed Tusk at number 445 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Tusk remains the moment Fleetwood Mac chose friction over comfort. Buckingham got his wish: no Rumours 2, no Rumours 3, just a double album full of sharp edges, home recordings, and a dog on the cover. It cost a fortune, confused the label, and sold a fraction of its predecessor. Yet the same stubbornness that made it a commercial risk is what kept it from becoming a museum piece. The band walked away from the easiest payday in rock history and made something they could argue about for decades.
The band walked away from the easiest payday in rock history and made something they could argue about for decades.