50 great things about Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk"

I have no problem with it at all, but you know.. some might.

32. The distorted power chords in "Sisters of the Moon," which sound like they're being played through a broken practice amp.

Everyone else pretty OTM.

dude, where ya been?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=rhino+fleetwood+mac+tusk&btnG=Google+Search

So...

34) It reminds me of the delicious hot dog I ate at the one college football game I ever went to, which I think was USC vs. Notre Dame ("we" lost).

Fuck! Major x-post with Todd!

TS: A-Claps vs. Tusk

So, 15 more to go?

I sort of like to think it's the 70s rock-queen version of "Turn the music up in the headphones!"

Let's be clear that it's not Mick's hair that's being raised. More like "razed"...

52. When Stevie gives it up for Joe Simon on "Sara." Too bad she didn't learn as much from him as she did from Jimmy Webb.

53. That I now so love a record that lets Stevie Nicks thank "the poet in my heart," when that kind of shit made me gag in the fall of '79 (when I lived and died by 'Rust Never Sleeps' and 'Repeat When Necessary').

54. Imagining the rest of the group listening to something like "What Makes You Think You're the One" and going, "We have to stop Lindsey from bringing in demos!"

Is this the soundcheck version from the live album? or a different recording?

"Don't say that you love me!" said every vinyl copy of Tusk at Reckless Records in 1993.

Lol Alfred. Now the cover photo makes perfect sense.

One thing that really blows my mind is how expensive the album was to start with. It listed for $16.98 for the vinyl set upon release, which adjusted for inflation today is $63.55. Of course, very few people who actually bought it then probably paid list, but still. I believe even then that was a pretty high price point for a double, although understandable given this was the beginning of 'superstar pricing' not to mention the cost of packaging and the recording itself.

I found a pretty seriously water-damaged copy at my local record store for £7 or so a few years back that plays absolutely fine (the inner sleeves however are all gummed together), and that will do me. My first copy was the CD with the edited Sara, which seems criminal now.

Wasn't there some hoohah about "Tusk" getting premiered in its entirety on the radio, allowing people to record it, and the band/management/label blaming that for soft sales?

edited "sara" and the remixed "i know i'm not wrong," the latter of which was retained for the 2004 double-disc reissue and for literal years made me think my vinyl copy was flawed but just for that particular song

xp

i prefer the og "i know i'm not wrong" now, it breathes more, but sometimes i miss the tricked-out quality of the remix

Wasn't there some hoohah about "Tusk" getting premiered in its entirety on the radio, allowing people to record it, and the band/management/label blaming that for soft sales?

Yeah, a chain of radio stations were allowed a full-length album premiere by Warner's, which backfired.

We don't know to what extent it affected sales; WB will want a villain. The price had a lot to do with depressed sales.

I think I remember paying $14 for it when it came out.

I paid $1, but I had to walk to the record store in a snowstorm.

I gave the album a good close headphone listen this morning. So many hidden little details. My latest revelation is that, unless my ears are deceiving me, what I thought was a harpsichord in "Not That Funny" may actually be Lindsey's pretty tightly capoed guitar. Or maybe his guitar sped up? Which all makes sense, given that I think the Lindsey songs are pretty much all Lindsey, bar a Mick part or two.

Per Wiki, it's kind of an "In My Life" move:

Some of the electric guitars were detuned and recorded at high speed before being slowed down to 30 inches per second.[5] Buckingham multitracked the electric guitar parts on a Stratocaster and treated the instrument with a variable speed oscillator (VSO) to achieve a phasing effect.[7] The electric guitars were also sent through a tape recorder and mixing console to achieve a lower pitched, compressed, and thicker sound. The inverse occurred for the acoustic guitars, which were recorded at a slower speed but sped up with the VSO so that the instrument would resemble a harpsichord or music box.

Wow. Iirc the Beatles (or George Martin) used an actual harpsichord, though also sped up.

No, wait, Martin played a piano then sped it up to sound like a harpsichord! This shit is so cool, it's ironic that no one seems to do shit like this anymore, considering how easy it all is to do digitally. Or maybe they do it and it's hard to tell, because people are messing with stuff digitally so much more?

Yeah it's much easier to just record the piano part in MIDI and choose a harpsichord voice

but also, while there's a million cool and interesting and unique effects you can create in the digital environment, they're inherently different than effects that rely on the actual tools of analog recording. no one is speeding up or slowing down tape anymore, or running guitars through tape recorders and analog consoles, because no one is actually using any of that stuff.

doing it digitally, per se, is really doing something else altogether.

Do people use some digital equivalent of Varispeed, just tweaking the tempos and pitches a touch? Like, every song on "Highway to Hell" is slightly off-key, iirc, because each one has been sped up and slowed down ever so slightly for the desired effect. Same with a lot of stuff of the era.

that definitely exists, though digital offers the option, unavailable in analog recording, of tweaking the speed *without* changing the pitch.

(and either way, the analog and digital versions are at heart two different effects, kind of like playing the same chord played on different instruments. not better or worse, just different.)

Yeah, the most conspicuous place I come across things essentially varispeeded into the wrong pitch is on youtube, where I presume posters alter the pitch slightly to escape getting slapped down by automatic detection for copyright. At the same time, I only recently learned that youtube itself allows you to slow down or speed up a song afaict *without* altering the pitch, which is a useful way to learn songs.

There actually WAS an obscure analog device for changing speed without affecting pitch (and vice versa): Eltro information rate changer

hadn't realized how unfairly short "never make me cry" is. sounds like the intro is a cut from a longer performance? that entire instrumental performance is just a beautiful bit of restraint for the band in the shadow of the album.

I regard it as a coda to "Brown Eyes."