Your Softness Fades Away: Fresh Ears on "Tusk"

The snide response that ran through my head as I replayed this odd chimera of a record from 1979 was Griel Marcus's infamous lede for his review of Bob Dylan's Self-Portrait: "What is this shit?" Now, after having listened to all 74-and-a-half bewildering minutes of it, I have more to say. For one: How can something so strange also be so boring? Another: Not only how did this record happen, but how did this band survive it?

Am I being too harsh? I don't think so. I actually once owned this album on cassette, and my half-remembered 11-year-old's impression of it—as an unprepossessing grab bag with a transfixing but uncharacteristic title track and the epic Stevie Nicks essential, "Sara," and little else to recommend it—doesn't seem all that far off after all these years. I can now parse the three distinct songwriting voices jostling for attention here—mad power-pop savant Lindsey Buckingham, squishy-soft balladeer Christine McVie, wind-chime chanteuse Nicks—and I can even appreciate the ambition, almost entirely originating with Buckingham, to depart from the slick guitar grooves of their previous two records, Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. But rather than producing their generation's equivalent of the White Album or OK Computer, Buckingham pushed his band off "The Ledge."

For all its vaunted expense—at $1 million, the priciest rock record ever made up to its date—Tusk sounds for all the world like a series of demos, some fascinating, some grating, many not ready for prime time. This isn't just the case with a series of eerily similar-sounding manic Buckingham concoctions ("The Ledge" is the best of a mangy, fuzz-guitar-driven lot that includes "Not That Funny," "That's Enough for Me," and "I Know I'm Not Wrong") but with a few of McVie's bland, diffident not-quite-ballads ("Never Make Me Cry," "Never Forget," and "Over and Over," surely one of the least auspicious album openers of all time), and even Nicks's affecting but half-formed "Storms." This first-draft-like rawness wouldn't be such a liability if the songs were stronger, but this feels for the most part like a catalogue of also-rans.

Some of the album's most interesting moments are when the sounds of these distinct writers seem to blend, as in the decent single "Think About Me," which nicely harmonizes the Buckingham edge with the McVie bounce, or "Sisters of the Moon," in which Nicks's minor-key mysticism gains a biting guitar edge. Likewise "Walk a Thin Line," though headed by Buckingham, sounds like a synthesis of all three writers' voices. I even detected a bit of healthy cross-pollinating: Nicks's sweet "Angel" sounds a bit like her version of a McVie song, while McVie's moody, incantatory "Brown Eyes" sounds like she's wandered into Nicks's shadowy realm.

The more I write about it, honestly, the more I'm curious to give some of these songs another chance; I really do love the Mac at their best, and Buckingham and Nicks, in their wildly varying ways, never fail to seize my interest, even if they don't always hold it. For all the essential demo-ness of the record, Buckingham doesn't skimp on fussy layers and filigrees; in "What Makes You Think You're the One," for instance, a swarm of guitars buzzes over a punkish march tattoo. In general the record conveys restlessness, as if Buckingham can never quite settle on a guitar sound he likes as he attempts to leave the Mac's hit-making sound behind. By contrast, McVie's lovely "Honey Hi" and Nicks's aptly named "Beautiful Child" both benefit from relatively straightforward, uncluttered arrangements.

Which leaves the 6-minute-plus expanse of "Sara," a towering cathedral of piano chords over a pedal-point bass filled by Nicks's signature rasp, as ever somehow both earthy and unearthly, and "Tusk," one of the most exhilaratingly weird pop singles of any era. Apparently it arose from a riff Buckingham would use for the band's sound checks, which drummer Mick Fleetwood earmarked as a promising basis for a song. Thing is, there's not just one riff in "Tusk" but a mass of them, interlocking and building like a kind of rock Bolero, from a drum pitter-patter over disorienting found sounds to the full brass attack of the USC Trojan marching band.

Here, as on much of the record, Buckingham's lead vocal seems clenched with anger, and the song's seething paranoia and rejection ("Don't say that you love me!") is miles away from the California sunshine of their earlier (and later) records, conjuring a kind of apocalyptic noir landscape (one reason it was such an inspired choice as the soundtrack of the first episode of the series The Americans). If Buckingham's impulse to take his band into new territory mostly falters on Tusk, he succeeded with "Tusk," which touches down in an alien world no one has visited before or since, certainly not Fleetwood Mac.