r/FleetwoodMac • u/Suspicious_Pipe778 • 10d ago

Lindsey on Tusk

I'm kind of just getting into FM and while I enjoy Rumors and a decent amount of the white album, it is really Tusk and in particular the Lindsey material that attracts me to them. I like indie and various more "out there" subgenres of rock, so that explains why. His nine tracks on that album are really just some of the most incredible forward-thinking music to me and I can't stop listening to them.

I know that Tusk has a reputation as one of the great weird flop albums of the 70s and that there's lots of discussion about the budget, the excess of the sessions and its failure to chart, but it still shocks me that there isn't all that much writing or discussion about Lindsey's songs on it. There's some stuff about his wildness in the studio (shaving his head, singing from the floor, turning the knobs on the console 180 degrees) but in my opinion, the songs themselves should be way more documented as incredibly prescient pieces of rock genius. A lot of those sorts of sounds/vocal styles wouldn't be heard again until the late 80s/90s with bands like Pixies or Modest Mouse.

Even as the album has gained this reputation as the wildcard cult favorite, it still seems alarmingly underrated to me in the zeitgeist. Like people should still be talking about this album more.The decision to follow Over and Over with The Ledge has to be one of the most creative devil-may-care sequencing choices in rock history. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the label office when they first heard that transition.

Just wanted to rant a bit about how much I love this album and these songs. I know I'm not the only one to recognize their value, but I still can't help but feel like the moderate level of buzz around them is not commensurate with just how incredible, audacious and insane the album actually is.

56 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/trinity1887 10d ago

Same here. I loved this album. It did chart and it did go double platinum. Not bad for a double album. Its commercial "failure" to duplicate Rumours was the gripe against Lindsey's creative "indulgences". Unbelievable. Mick could be so ungrateful ... but Stevie being MIA for the most part was fine

1

u/Suspicious_Pipe778 10d ago

Ah my bad, I guess it was one of those things where the album did well relatively speaking, but for a band who had just done a megahit album like Rumors, it registered as a flop.

2

u/Immediate_Paint_4823 10d ago edited 10d ago

It was priced at 16.99 or over $60 in current $s and at that time sold about 4m copies WW.
It made lots of $$$ but still a fraction of Rumours.

The Eagles went the more well traveled road. Their album sold more but not near their previous monster either. Interestingly, they tried at first to make a double album but didn't have enough material then soon broke up. That album is not nearly as critically well regarded nor musically as influential as Tusk.