50 great things about Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk"

I met Caillat a few years ago after a talk he gave about Rumours, but the main thing I wanted to do was ask him about the production of "Storms" (whose intimacy, space, and minimalism I find devastating) and he seemed genuinely excited to talk about it. He was basically saying, hey, nobody ever asks me about this track, and I put a *lot* into it.... so let me tell exactly how we set up her mic....

tell *you* exactly

I love stuff like that. Producers are often fascinating, and I love when I get a chance to interview them and get under the skin of projects they worked on. The artists themselves are so often "over" what they made, or feel the need to pretend they are.

It really underscores how infrequently producers - or musicians, for that matter - are asked about *anything* technical, or deeper-dives into what they do. Like, where would that information even be published? There was a recent Tape Op issue that featured an interview with Harry Connick Jr., and it was fascinating, just him talking about the equipment in his studio, his love of analog recording and tech, revealing that he's proficient in lots of surprising instruments (from drums to brass), just tons of stuff I've never read him talking about.

hence the fascination with the Rubin-McCartney interviews

Records are a pretty poor financial investment but I was thinking today that if I cleared out every unplayed used copy of Tusk between the mid-90s and like, 2005 and resold them to normies for $10-15 today I’d be able to pay off my loans

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) August 10, 2021

Add in all the copies of Rumours and the S/T and we're talking house money.

Seriously had that thought a few months ago that if I would have started squirreling away every classic rock warhorse I saw in the bins for consistently less than a buck, I’d definitely have been able to pay off a big chunk of my student loans at the least. But, who knew?

There are no cheap copies of Rumours out there, which is bizarre when you think just how many copies were originally produced and purchased.

i used to have an unplayed copy of tusk i picked up around 2008-ish…. totally disappeared from my apartment ;_;

obv i played it a lot myself

Shit, the cut out bins were LOADED with Tusks in the early nineties.

I don't remember mycopy of Tusk costing much, and it's got like four inlays in there or something

I found my copy of Tusk entirely disassembled in a thrift store bin in 2007. As in both records and each sleeve were in a different location. The vinyl was still about VG+, miraculously.

"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.