On this day (October 12) in 1979, Fleetwood Mac released Tusk. After the massive success of Rumours, the band worried that they would be placed into a box and made to record the same album over and over. To nip that issue in the bud, they looked to different influences, including the budding post-punk movement, and created a daringly experimental album. The production came with a hefty price tag. With a budget of roughly $1.4 million ($7.1 million in 2026), it was the most expensive rock album ever recorded.
When Fleetwood Mac were preparing to record Tusk, keyboardist Christine McVie was dating Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. The Beach Boys were starting renovations on their studio. So, Wilson offered to build the new space to the band’s specifications. Producer Ken Caillat bought a new recording console for the studio. Then, they saw the contract.
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“At one point, the Beach Boys’ attorney said, ‘Before we get too far in, we need to have you guys sign a contract.’ They got together. The Beach Boys said if they were going to spend all this money building a studio for the band, they’d still have to pay for the whole year or whatever it was,” Caillat recalled.
So, he reached out to Georgie Hormel at the Village and asked him to build a studio for the band. Hormel agreed and offered to sell the studio space to the band for roughly a million dollars. The band’s legal team decided to pay rent on the newly constructed studio. The band didn’t return to that space, Studio D, for decades.
Most of Fleetwood Mac Would Have Been Fine with Making Another Rumours
Rumours was so massively successful that Tusk was viewed as a failure despite selling millions of copies. The label wanted Fleetwood Mac to go back to the studio and try to replicate that success. As Ken Caillat recalled, most of the band would have been more than happy to do that. Lindsey Buckingham, though, drew a line in the sand. He threatened to “walk out” if they didn’t follow his lead.
[RELATED: The 3 Undisputed Best Songs From Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 Album ‘Rumours’]
“The conventional wisdom was, ‘You blew it.’ A lot of people were pissed off at me for that,” Buckingham told Billboard.
“For me, being sort of the culprit behind that particular album, it was done in a way to undermine just sort of following the formula of doing Rumours 2 and Rumours 3, which is kind of the business model Warner Bros. would have liked us to follow,” he said. “That could’ve been the beginning of kind of painting yourself into a corner in terms of living up to the labels that were being placed on you as a band.”
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