It’s early 1986 in the ski town of Mammoth and a major snowstorm has hit. Not very interesting in itself, nothing very remarkable. Add to this a half-dozen or so members of a frankly dubious but well intentioned alternative college rock band and a four-track recorder and the story gets kind of interesting. Add to this a camper van low on gasoline and a deserted cabin house and some imbalanced individuals and you have the makings of a modern myth. Throw in a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ album and you have nothing short of a legend.
Yes it may seem a nightmarish scenario, but apparently it really did happen: they really did have a copy of ‘Tusk’- and the boys weren’t afraid to use it.
With a story replete with references to The Shining and a hundred-and-one daft teenage slasher-flicks of the fifties and eighties, it’s inevitable that the likes of Camper Van Beethoven took one look at this album and thought, ‘We’ve got a four-track – lets re-record it’. The fact that messrs, Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood and Mac had taken years to hone this sadly neglected 70’s classic into a double-album of sometimes epic magic seems not to have deterred them. And whether you applaud the sheer audacity of the undertaking or indeed take umbrage with it, you can’t deny that it all is in actual fact ever so slightly entertaining (not least because tracks like ‘Angel’, ‘Beautiful Child’, ‘Never Make Me Cry’, ’Walk A Thin Line’ and title track ‘Tusk’ are all excellent ‘choons’ – a status that is in no way undermined by the versions you have here – quite the opposite).
You could (and indeed, might if you haven’t had a girlfriend for years) trade hours with your friends discussing its validity: whether or not the casual listener could ever ‘listen’ it, whether or not it’s actually finished, whether or not you should simply own a copy of the original, or whether it’s a ‘fans only’ offering – the merry truth of the matter is – it’s quite good in an ad-hoc screwball kind of way.
And if it wasn’t for those meddling kids…we might never have had lo-fi perhaps to start with.