Fleetwood Mac reached the pinnacle of their fame after the release of their 1977 album, Rumours, the massive success of which helped bolster their 1979 follow-up—an “intensely heavy” record, per Stevie Nicks—to No. 1 in the United Kingdom. The band’s twelfth studio album (and only the third to feature Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham) failed to reach the top of the Billboard charts in the United States but still enjoyed an objectively impressive No. 4 peak. Despite this international chart performance, Warner Bros. wrote off the Rumours follow-up as a commercial failure after selling only four million copies.
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The record label’s reaction seemed to echo that of the band. As Nicks later recalled, everyone was eager for another win. But they struggled to get off on the right foot. Whereas Rumours felt like a “perfect, off-the-top-of-our-head thing,” Nicks said Buckingham began the ideating process by insisting he didn’t want to do a remake of their 1977 hit record with such ferocity that it confused his bandmates. “The rest of us were like, ‘What do you mean? Why would any of us want to do Rumours over?’ He announced it so viscerally, so demandingly, that I think he scared all of us.”
The interpersonal dynamic didn’t get better from there. Fresh from her split with Buckingham, Nicks spent the first three months of making Tusk in an affair with drummer Mick Fleetwood. That affair ended after Fleetwood struck up a fling with one of Nicks’ friends. “It was a very strange atmosphere,” Nicks recalled. “I was like, ‘Lindsey with your new ideas be damned. Mick, you be damned also. Christine, John, and I will…be the keepers of the gate while you guys go to complete and utter crazy land.”
Fleetwood Mac’s Next No. 1 Album in the U.K. Was “Intense Heavy”
Just as Lindsey Buckingham demanded early on in the production process, Fleetwood Mac took a hard left turn from their 1977 album, Rumours. Their 1979 follow-up, Tusk, was completely different from the previous record, both in terms of writing style, band dynamics, and, consequently, the songs themselves. The album was full of African rhythms, instruments, and chants, which the band reflected in their surroundings by decorating their studio in floor-to-ceiling tribal decor, complete with a large pair of tusks on the recording console. “It was kind of like living on an African burial ground,” Stevie Nicks described. “It was heavy. Intense heavy. Sometimes it wasn’t very happily heavy. We were all down with getting heavy. But Lindsey [Buckingham] was really trying to make it weirder and heavier than any of us were able to quite comprehend.”
Unfortunately for the band, the “intense heavy” feeling they were imbuing into their Rumours follow-up didn’t translate to any major hits, á la “Dreams” or “Go Your Own Way”. Still, there were plenty of notable tracks on Tusk. Both the title track and “Sara” broke into the Top 40 in the U.K. and U.S. “Sisters of the Moon” and “Not That Funny” have also become staples in Fleetwood Mac’s catalogue in the years since their release.
In a somewhat ironic way, the album that Warner Bros. deemed a “commercial failure” is one of the most quintessentially Fleetwood Mac albums there is. Rife with relationship drama, conflicting creative visions, and copious amounts of drugs, Tusk marks a sort of Icarian descent of Fleetwood Mac. The band would enjoy Top 40 hits in the years that followed, but nothing like the staggering success of Rumours, which remains one of their most popular albums to this day.
(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
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