Dave WilsonNov 10, 2025, 08:00 AM ETCloseDave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.Follow on X
ON FRIDAY, DR. Arthur C. Bartner, the 85-year-old retired band director at USC, stood at the 50-yard line of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before the Trojans’ game against Northwestern, looking for an old friend.
Suddenly, Mick Fleetwood, the legendary drummer from Fleetwood Mac, showed up. He saw Bartner, and his face lit up. The 79-year-old drummer embraced his old friend in a huge hug.
“The look on his face was priceless,” Bartner said. “I mean, there was a genuine appreciation and love for our relationship through the years.”
In 1979, the two men joined forces to make American music history, when Fleetwood convinced Bartner to lend him the Trojan Marching Band for the recording of “Tusk,” the title track of a Fleetwood Mac album at the height of the band’s powers. It would go on to earn both bands two platinum albums and create an iconic marching band song.
Michael Barasch, the founder of College Marching, which covers bands across the country, said nobody else has what USC has in “Tusk.” He cited the popularity of “Dixieland Delight” at Alabama, “Country Roads” at West Virginia and “Rocky Top” at Tennessee as comparable examples. But there’s one big difference. “None of those bands can say they recorded the original track with the artist,” Barasch said.
That’s why Bartner became something of a star and his group became known as “Hollywood’s Band.” On Friday, he felt the need to remind Fleetwood of what the collaboration did for him.
Soon after, Fleetwood joined the Trojan Marching Band to play their creation together once again. For Bartner, it was a “joyous occasion.” Not only did he get to surprise Fleetwood, but he got to see Fleetwood play “Tusk” in person once again, 46 years after the first performance.
“At 85 years old, how lucky, how blessed am I to have an evening like this?” Bartner said. “There’s not many people that can live such a moment in your life and get to do it twice.”
“Rumours,” released in 1977, was one of the biggest albums in history, leading to packed stadium shows around the world and putting the group on par with Led Zeppelin and The Eagles. Led by classics such as “Dreams,” “Go Your Own Way” and “Don’t Stop,” the record spent 31 weeks at No. 1 and has sold more than 40 million records.
Afterward, the band set out on an adventure in record making, exploring new sonic techniques and hoping to rebel against their record label. They were given a massive budget of $1 million, making the album, at that point, the most expensive of all time. L.A.’s legendary Village Recorders studio built the band a new studio for them to record it in, including a custom booth at Stevie Nicks’ request that was decorated to evoke a sunset in Tahiti.
“Everyone in the band, including Lindsey, thought I was round the twist,” he told ESPN, using a British phrase for, well, being nuts. “But I said, let’s have a brass band develop that riff.”
He returned to Los Angeles, 5,600 miles from his source of inspiration, and set his plan in motion. He placed a call to the USC band’s offices, wanting to talk to someone from the Trojan Marching Band. It’s Mick Fleetwood, he said. They said they’d have to call him back.
USC’s band was no stranger to being in the middle of showbiz. They turned up frequently in movies and TV shows. But, still, the directors weren’t used to one of the biggest names in music cold-calling them. There were always concerns it could be a prank call from some kid. Worse, it could be someone from UCLA.
Tony Fox, the assistant director, called back. He was stunned to find it genuinely was Fleetwood on the other end.
So Bartner, the longtime band director, and Fox, his trusted assistant and the arranger for the band, headed to Studio D at Village Recorders. There, the two college band directors worked with Buckingham and Fleetwood, two rock music giants, to arrange the score. Then they went back to USC and fine-tuned it. They got another call from Fleetwood.
He was even further round the twist. He told them they were going to record the track live at Dodger Stadium.
“That for sure nearly ended with me being taken to a mental institution by my fellow band members,” Fleetwood said. “They said it would cost a fortune. I said, ‘I’ll pay for it.'”
But the band had a very famous fan in Dodger third baseman Ron Cey, a perennial All-Star who would become the 1981 World Series MVP. He had hung out with the band during the recording process before. And he had enough clout to call in a favor.
“He said, ‘I’ll get ’em to donate the place and open it up for you. I love this idea,'” Fleetwood said.
So on June 4, 1979, they showed up, 112 members of the Spirit of Troy, in full uniform, to record a song with Fleetwood Mac at Dodger Stadium. “Tusk” was born, and it became an iconic part of both bands’ careers — the tribal, hypnotic toms of Fleetwood, mixed with Buckingham’s riffs and screeching vocals, and a huge band behind it. Fleetwood’s vision came to life.
In everyone’s memories, it’s one of the most Los Angeles series of events. And it has become an iconic part of USC’s history.
MARCHING BANDS HAVE long adopted popular music into stadium anthems. The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” has become a staple worldwide. “Neck,” started as a 1984 song by Cameo called “Talkin’ Out The Side of Your Neck,” was arranged to become an HBCU band favorite, then soared into infamy at LSU where fans inserted lyrics so explicit that the school banned the song entirely.
But, according to Bartner and Fox, there was nothing like this that had ever come before, where a band’s own directors helped create a song, then recorded the original with the band, a true collaboration.
It was no small undertaking. The band filmed a video of the surreal scene, one of the first behind-the-scenes videos ever released of a rock band’s process. Engineers ran wires across the warning track to remote trucks. Bartner stood on a ladder in the middle of the field, surveying his charges, as Rodney Davis, his drum major, held up the music in front of him to conduct.
Rehearsals were done live in the stadium: students practiced in dugouts and uniforms laid strewn in the outfield awaiting the final performance. There were on-site adjustments, not the least of which came from Fleetwood’s manic drum solo in the middle of the song, which he never seemed to play the same way twice.
“Anything I’ve ever done and still do, I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing,” Fleetwood joked. “I don’t even know what a verse or a chorus is, but I know in the moment I’m always on the edge of f—ing everything up.”
For a band with hundreds of members that couldn’t adapt on the fly, that posed a problem. The directors had to beg their new friend to try and stick to a plan.
“I remember going down on the field and I actually hadn’t been playing in quite a while and I forgot how exhausting that middle bit was,” Fleetwood said. “It’s actually freeform. Everything they did was performance learned. And that really pays tribute to the band and their discipline, knowing that it sounded like it was just made up.”
Students could freely chat up any of the members during rehearsals. Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood and Christine McVie were all in attendance. John McVie, however, was sailing to Tahiti. So Fleetwood called Warner Bros. and asked if they had a full-size image of him, and they delivered, so a life-size posterboard of John was carried around all day.
Nicks, famously, was captured on video adeptly twirling a baton like a college majorette. Fleetwood said that was no act, and that she had grown up as a twirler.
“Stevie, she was the real deal,” Fleetwood said. “The whole spinning thing, it’s something I never learned to do with drumsticks. So I was unearthly jealous of her, like Tommy Lee or something. That was an impromptu idea, which of course was fantastic. She took the boys into battle stomping out with high-heeled boots on. She was the official twirler of the day.”
Nicks walked around watching rehearsals, and in outtakes of the video shoot, asked, “Who are we to deserve the USC band?”
After lunch on the field, the band suited up and recorded the final version. Fleetwood had headphones on with his hands over them, staring at the ground. With such a large ensemble playing in such a cavernous setting, keeping time was a monumental task, and Fleetwood was pounding the ground with his foot.
“I actually remember doing that,” he said. “I had the track in the cans. I was sort of a desperate Dan. That stomping on the ground was for a very real reason, especially being a drummer. This thing’s got to be in time.”
The finished product became the first single off the highly anticipated album. Fleetwood wanted it to have an unusual sound and to signal that he wasn’t putting out a sequel to “Rumours.”
“Tusk” was released just three months after the Dodger Stadium session, with plenty of studio sounds added to it, including Fleetwood slapping a leg of lamb with a spatula. The song was Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hit in England since 1973, and the combined group became the largest ensemble ever to chart in the U.K., but could not surpass the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s 320-member recording of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the United States.
Fleetwood calls Bartner a “total, total legend” and is proud of how close they became. In the following years, they’d go to USC games together. He takes immense pride in the collaboration.
BARTNER AND FOX are both retired from USC now. Fox left in 2016 after 45 years and Bartner in 2020 after 50. Bartner served as the director of the 800-member All-American College Marching Band for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Under their direction, the Trojan Band performed in movies such as “The Naked Gun” and “Forrest Gump,” at the Oscars three times, including once with Beyonce and Hugh Jackman and with Outkast at the Grammys. In 2009, they again performed at the Grammys with Radiohead, and found themselves rehearsing with the band at the same studio where Fleetwood Mac was rehearsing, with Buckingham calling it a “passing of the torch.”