Picture the most uncomfortable band meeting in rock history. You have just made one of the biggest albums on the planet. Everybody wants the sequel. And your guitarist tells the room he would rather walk away than make it. According to producer Ken Caillat, that is roughly where Lindsey Buckingham stood after Rumours, and the rest of Fleetwood Mac agreed to get weird instead.
The result landed on October 12, 1979. Tusk arrived on Warner Bros. as a double album that cost about $1.4 million, reportedly the most expensive rock record made to that date. It sold around four million copies worldwide against roughly ten million for Rumours. It peaked at No. 4 in the US and No. 1 in the UK, and the label treated it as a commercial failure.
Here is my take: the label’s math was right and the label was wrong. Tusk is the only Fleetwood Mac album that sounds like a band risking something. Buckingham, chasing a sparser, post-punk-flavored sound, cut songs like “The Ledge” and “Save Me a Place” alone at home, playing every instrument himself. The title track brought in the USC Trojan Marching Band and still reached No. 8 on the US chart. AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine later called the whole thing “a peerless piece of pop art.” Blender, for the record, thought it was two discs’ worth of ideas stretched over too few good songs. That argument is the reason we are still talking about it.
Also this week
October 13, 1947: Sammy Hagar was born in Salinas, California. He rose to fame fronting Montrose, then became Van Halen’s second lead vocalist (1985 to 1996, and again from 2003 to 2005) and later co-founded Chickenfoot. He went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Van Halen in 2007. Taking a job everyone said could not be done, and doing it loudly, is its own kind of brave.
October 16, 1972: Creedence Clearwater Revival announced they were done. Fantasy Records and the band put out a statement five months after the Mardi Gras tour wrapped, as personal, financial and legal strain piled up. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau had called Mardi Gras the worst album he had heard from a major rock band, judged against the group’s own standard. Tusk is what it looks like when a band lets one member push the experiment. CCR is what it looks like when it does not.
October 16, 2025: A year ago, Ace Frehley died at 74 in Morristown, New Jersey, after a fall at home earlier that month. The original Kiss lead guitarist and creator of the Spaceman character was inducted into the Rock Hall with Kiss in 2014, and the news hit hard across every generation of hard rock fans.
October 18, 1926: Chuck Berry was born in St. Louis. He was part of the very first Rock Hall class in 1986, and “Johnny B. Goode” is the only rock and roll song on the Voyager Golden Record. His 60th birthday concert, organized by Keith Richards, became the film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. Every riff on this page owes him rent.
Your turn
Was Tusk a bold masterpiece the market was not ready for, or did the label have a point that it needed an editor? And if a band hands you a risky double album after a monster hit, do you want the safe sequel or the strange one? Pick a side in the comments.
Sources: Wikipedia (Tusk, Mardi Gras, Sammy Hagar, Ace Frehley, Chuck Berry), Ultimate Classic Rock, Blabbermouth, InternetFM and Songfacts calendars.
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