Following up the biggest album in the world is a problem most bands would love to have. After Rumours sold in its tens of millions, Fleetwood Mac could have made Rumours II and retired on the proceeds. Lindsey Buckingham had other ideas. He wanted to burn the formula down — and the title track of 1979’s double album Tusk was his declaration of war: a whispered, chanting, drum-looped oddity built from a soundcheck riff, a box of tissues, a leg of lamb and the entire University of Southern California marching band, recorded live in a baseball stadium. Buckingham called it “the centerpiece” of the album, a song that “embodies the spirit of rebelling against those expectations in every way possible.”
From Soundcheck Riff to Studio Obsession
The song began life as the “Stage Riff” — a groove Buckingham played at soundchecks to check levels, which the band ran through the same way night after night. It was Mick Fleetwood who suggested developing it into the title track of the still-unnamed album. Early attempts in the studio went nowhere, and the idea was shelved for months before Buckingham returned with a new treatment, refining the chord progression with Christine McVie.
Producers Richard Dashut and Ken Caillat then set about making the track as un-Rumours-like as possible. They transferred Buckingham’s 16-track recording onto 24-track tape and dampened the drums to kill their overtones. Hunting for what Buckingham called a “hypnotic feel,” they found a 15-second passage of drumming they liked and built a literal loop of two-inch tape — strung across the studio, running around a microphone stand pressed into service as a spool — and let it circle for ten minutes while the song was laid over it. The loop had been cut for a different, slower song; for “Tusk” they simply sped it up with a variable speed oscillator.
Then there were the noises. The sessions accumulated a menagerie of found sounds: a Kleenex box being struck, bottles clinking, whips, screams, animal sounds. Fleetwood, wanting a particular slapping percussion effect, first tried hitting his own leg, then went to a butcher, bought a leg of lamb and beat it with a spatula — an overdub that, mercifully or not, never made the final mix. Engineer Hernán Rojas even contributed shouted Chilean profanities, buried somewhere in the cacophony. As for the title, it meant nothing at all. “Suddenly, Mick was just walking around, saying ‘tusk’ all the time, and it was a nice sounding word,” Buckingham explained. “There’s no specific hidden meaning behind it.” He admitted he had almost wanted the song “to be alienating, in which I think it was.”
One Hundred and Twelve Musicians in a Baseball Stadium
The marching band was Fleetwood’s inspiration, drawn from a holiday in Barfleur, France, where a village brass band woke him one morning. “I saw the entire village dancing in the streets. They were following the band,” he recalled. “I grabbed the remainder of my bottle of Beaujolais from the night before and went down to join in. That joyous, irresistible cacophony is what I heard when I listened to that loop of the riff.”
Back in Los Angeles, Fleetwood called the University of Southern California and reached Tony Fox, assistant director of the Trojan Marching Band. Fox and band director Arthur C. Bartner worked out the arrangement with the band at the Village Recorder, and then Fleetwood dropped the real plan: they would record at Dodger Stadium. The band worried about the cost of hiring a stadium — until Dodgers player Ron Cey, a fan who had dropped in on Fleetwood Mac sessions, helped secure the venue for free. A mobile studio was installed, and 112 members of the Trojan Marching Band recorded their parts outdoors, on the move — because the band played while marching to keep time, Caillat captured them with shotgun microphones as they passed. Even the muttered “How are the tenors?” in the song’s intro is a loop of chatter from that day’s session.
John McVie missed the whole thing — he was in Tahiti — which is why, in the music video built from the session footage, Mick Fleetwood carries a life-size cardboard cutout of the bassist and props it in the stands with the rest of the band. Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, can be seen twirling a baton, a skill retained from high school. The band did not forget the debt: on 4 October 1980, during a USC football game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Buckingham, Nicks and Fleetwood presented the Trojan Marching Band with a platinum disc for their work on the record. The relationship never really ended: Buckingham performed “Tusk” with the Trojan ensemble at USC’s Bovard Auditorium in April 2015, and in November 2025 Fleetwood joined the marching band for its halftime show — the drummer and the band, still playing his tune nearly half a century on.
Folding a stadium recording into a studio track was its own technical ordeal. Back at the Village Recorder, Caillat and Dashut used the variable speed oscillator to stretch and squeeze the marching band’s performance until it locked with the band’s “cacophony tape” of effects, and Fleetwood overdubbed a reversed cymbal crash — recorded at a different tempo from everything around it — to hurl the song out of its central drum break. The finished master is three and a half minutes long and contains multitudes: a tape loop, a whisper, a drum freakout, a wall of brass, and the stray sounds of a Los Angeles afternoon.
A Lead Single Designed to Provoke
Warner Bros. insisted on releasing “Tusk” as the album’s first single, ahead of the LP in September 1979, with Christine McVie’s “Never Make Me Cry” on the B-side. Fleetwood said he wanted a single that would “pique people’s interest” and “provoke people,” and it worked on both counts. The release even supplied its own chaos: the first Capitol-pressed shipment had to be recalled because of a scratch on the B-side, and CBS re-pressed the single, delaying it in shops.
Even the packaging was a provocation: in many territories the single’s picture sleeve used the album cover’s photograph of Scooter, producer Ken Caillat’s dog, snapping at a trouser leg.
Commercially, the provocation succeeded. “Tusk” spent three weeks at No. 8 in the United States, reached No. 6 in Britain — where it was certified silver and became the band’s biggest UK hit since a 1973 reissue of “Albatross” — and hit No. 3 in Australia, No. 4 in New Zealand, No. 5 in Canada, No. 6 in Austria and No. 7 in West Germany. In Britain it set a curiosity of a chart record: with Fleetwood Mac plus 112 marching musicians, Record Mirror‘s Alan Jones noted it contained “the largest ensemble ever to chart in Britain” — over 100 performers on one hit single.
Critics did not know what to make of it, which was rather the point. Billboard called it “an eerie combination of vocals and a heavy percussion track”; Cash Box found a “mesmerizing quality”; Rolling Stone‘s Stephen Holden, reviewing the album, called it Buckingham’s “most intriguing” contribution, “an aural collage” that was Fleetwood Mac’s equivalent of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9.” Later writers reached for superlatives: Uncut ranked it alongside Public Image Ltd’s “Death Disco” as “the most avant-garde hit single of 1979,” The A.V. Club called it Fleetwood Mac’s “weirdest hit” — and one of their best — and Record Collector‘s Kris Needs labelled it Buckingham’s “most controversial creation,” a record “seemingly accompanied by a raised middle finger.” Rolling Stone‘s Ryan Reed, more bemused, marvelled at a lead single with its bone-dry tom-toms mixed louder than the whispered vocals.
The parent album divided people in the same way. The double LP Tusk arrived trailing expectations no record could have met, and for years it was filed as the band’s noble folly — too long, too strange, too Buckingham. Simon Reynolds, writing in Melody Maker‘s Unknown Pleasures guide, called the title track a “daft little ditty” that captured the “not-right” aura of the whole album, comparing its mock-tribal rhythms, restive found sounds and punctilious horns to the German experimentalists Faust — and conceding it got by partly on the blind loyalty of the fans. Time has reversed the verdict. The album is now routinely cited as the band’s artistic peak, and its title track is Exhibit A: the moment the world’s most successful band used its capital to make the least commercial sound it could imagine, and dragged a marching band along to prove the point.
On stage, the song stayed gloriously impractical. Christine McVie, unsure what to play, picked up an accordion that happened to be lying around and played the riff on it. Fleetwood dreamed of recreating the recording with a local marching band every night; at the L.A. Forum the Trojan band actually joined them, baton twirlers and all, and they returned for The Dance in 1997. Most bands celebrate their biggest album by repeating it. Fleetwood Mac celebrated Rumours by marching a university band into Dodger Stadium and chanting a word that meant nothing — and took the result into the top ten on three continents.