On a Friday, Dr. Arthur C. Bartner, the 85-year-old retired USC band director, stood at the 50-yard line of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before the Trojans’ game against Northwestern, scanning for an old friend. Mick Fleetwood, the 79-year-old Fleetwood Mac drummer, appeared; they embraced. “The look on his face was priceless,” Bartner said. “There was a genuine appreciation and love for our relationship through the years.” Bartner told Fleetwood, “You made my career,” and later Fleetwood joined the Trojan Marching Band to play “Tusk” with them again, 46 years after the original performance.
In 1979 Fleetwood convinced Bartner to lend the Spirit of Troy to record “Tusk,” the title track of an album made at the height of Fleetwood Mac’s fame after Rumours. Rumours had spent 31 weeks at No. 1 and sold more than 40 million copies, and the band was given a then-unprecedented $1 million budget to make their follow-up. Fleetwood, inspired during a sleepless night in Barfleur, Normandy — where a brass parade marching past his lodging sparked the notion that wherever a marching band goes, people follow — proposed using a brass or marching band to develop a guitar riff Lindsey Buckingham had been playing.
Back in Los Angeles, Fleetwood phoned USC’s band offices. Assistant director Tony Fox called back and confirmed it was really Fleetwood. Bartner and Fox met Buckingham and Fleetwood at Village Recorders to arrange the score, then refined it with the USC band. Fleetwood then suggested recording live at Dodger Stadium — an expensive idea. Dodger third baseman Ron Cey, a fan who had hung out with the band during rehearsal, arranged for the stadium to be donated for the session.
On June 4, 1979, 112 members of the Spirit of Troy, in full uniform, recorded at Dodger Stadium. The result mixed Fleetwood’s tribal toms, Buckingham’s riff and distinctive vocals, and the massive band behind them. The band filmed the session; engineers ran cables to remote trucks, Bartner stood on a ladder conducting, and drum major Rodney Davis held up music and made last-minute adjustments. Davis, a standout student leader from Carson, California, was the first Black drum major at USC and served three years; close-ups of him high-stepping in the resulting video became memorable when it aired on MTV in 1981.
Rehearsals were cinematic: students relaxed in dugouts, uniforms lay in the outfield, and Fleetwood’s manic, freeform drum solo required the directors to coax some consistency out of a performer who joked, “Anything I’ve ever done and still do, I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.” For timing in the cavernous stadium Fleetwood pounded the ground with his foot to keep the massed musicians aligned. Warner Bros. even supplied a life-size posterboard of bassist John McVie, who was sailing to Tahiti, so the band could pretend he was present. Stevie Nicks was captured twirling a baton she learned as a child, and Fleetwood called her “the official twirler of the day.”
The finished track, released three months later, included studio additions — even Fleetwood slapping a leg of lamb with a spatula — and became a striking, unconventional single meant to signal this album was not a Rumours sequel. “Tusk” became Fleetwood Mac’s biggest U.K. hit since 1973 and made the combined ensemble one of the largest to chart in the U.K. The single sold more than a million copies and the album went platinum. At halftime of the 1980 USC homecoming game, Fleetwood Mac presented Bartner with a platinum album — the first college marching band to receive such an honor.
The collaboration was unique: marching bands had borrowed pop songs before, but rarely had a college band’s directors helped write or arrange a track and recorded the original with a major rock group. The Dodger Stadium shoot became one of the early behind-the-scenes music videos; the band’s discipline and adaptability were essential to making the apparently freeform middle section sound spontaneous.
Bartner and Fox later watched the project ripple out. In December 1979 Fleetwood Mac toured and the Trojan band joined them for five Forum shows. In 1997 the band reunited for The Dance at Warner Bros. Studios, with the Trojan Marching Band joining again on an updated “Tusk” and closing with “Don’t Stop.” That live recording sold more than five million copies in the U.S., earning the band and USC a second platinum album.
Under Bartner and Fox, the Trojan Band had become “Hollywood’s Band,” appearing in films such as The Naked Gun and Forrest Gump, at the Oscars and Grammys (including performances with Beyoncé, Hugh Jackman, Outkast and Radiohead), and Bartner directed the All-American College Marching Band at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Fox retired in 2016 after 45 years; Bartner retired in 2020 after 50.
College Marching founder Michael Barasch noted that while many marching band staples — Alabama’s “Dixieland Delight,” West Virginia’s “Country Roads,” Tennessee’s “Rocky Top” — are beloved, USC’s claim is unique because they recorded the original track with the artist. Fox said the song is “so unique because of that drum beat” and because it’s “our tune,” given to USC in a lasting collaboration. Students performed parts of the stadium sessions live; the recording preserved a moment when student musicians — many non-music majors — were part of making history.
“Tusk” has been woven into USC rituals: it’s part of the pregame show, played in postgame and at special events. In 2010 an alumni band joined the Trojan Marching Band — 800 members — to perform “Tusk” at a halftime celebrating Bartner’s 40th anniversary. In 2015 Lindsey Buckingham visited USC to lecture and perform, calling Tusk a backlash against superstardom and an experimental, avant-pop statement that set him on a path to be an artist rather than just a craftsman. Critics later described the album as improbably punk, a ramshackle double record full of experimental sounds, with “Tusk” emblematic of its uncontained spirit.
The song’s life extended beyond USC. Students added a chorus chanting “U-C-L-A SUCKS”; Alabama’s Million Dollar Band adopted the tune as an unofficial fight song. Fleetwood took pride in the collaboration and the way the song found a second life in the marching band world. He and Bartner remained close, attending games together over the years. Fleetwood still tracks the Trojans on TV and said hearing that rhythmic beat in a stadium always hits him: “Oh my God. They’re still playing it.”
Bartner has been struck by the song’s reach. At his granddaughter’s wedding an 84-year-old man approached him to say he plays “Tusk” every time he washes the dishes — “Some man in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, washes dishes to ‘Tusk,'” Bartner marveled. For Bartner, Fox and the generations of USC students who took part, the project was never about money — they recall a modest flat fee — but about giving students an unforgettable role in a historic collaboration. Fox put it simply: “It’s Mick’s baby. He gave birth to it, and we helped. But Mick is an honorary member of the band. He is part of our history.”
