Pod Insights Snap Judgment The Real Fleetwood Mac - Snap Classic About this episode Elmer Gantry gets an offer to join a notoriously unstable rock n’ roll band on a tour of the US. What could possibly go wrong? And the infamous Pine Tar Game of baseball superstar George Brett… told by the bat boy.
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The Real Fleetwood Mac
Elmer Gantry gets an offer to join a notoriously unstable rock n’ roll band on a tour of the US. What could possibly go wrong?
Thanks, Elmer, for sharing your story with us! Learn more about Elmer Gantry’s music in this blog post that producer John Fecile wrote for Aquarium Drunkard. https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2023/11/03/elmer-gantrys-velvet-opera/
Kirby Gregory still performs with the band Curved Air https://www.curvedair.com/.
Read an extensive history https://webstore.ugly-things.com/ugly-things-57-p457.php of Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera from the magazine Ugly Things.
Listen to a 10-song Spotify playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/31zlARqGynMUEAiGdDsBbT?si=bd256095157b48b9 that we put together of Elmer’s songs and other tunes from the story.
Special thanks to Mike Stax, Anja Stax, and David Prest.
Original score by Dirk Schwarzhoff, produced by John Fecile, artwork by Teo Ducot.
The Bat Boy And The Pine Tar Bat
Every baseball fan has heard of the superstar hitter George Brett and his infamous Pine Tar Game…but have you heard of the bat boy’s version?
For more info, check out Daniel Barbarisi’s story https://www.wsj.com/articles/n-y-yankees-dugout-has-both-the-talkative-and-the-silent-1406767818 in the Wall Street Journal.
Sound design by Renzo Gorrio, produced by Davey Kim.
Season 17 – Episode 25
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:54 Glynn Washington? Snappers, I have a confession to make.
1:59 Glynn Washington? The truth is, the truth is that
2:04 Glynn Washington? every single aspect of my professional life, actually, every single aspect of my life in general, has been predicated on the idea of fake it till you make it. If someone asks me, "Hey, can you act, write, dance, draft, direct, run, draw, and pose swim?" I've almost always said, "Yeah, I can do that."
2:34 Glynn Washington? Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it absolutely did not work.
2:42 Glynn Washington? Those times are called hard lessons. But generally, I'll tell the kids, "Go ahead. Give whatever it is a go. What's the worst that could happen?" Well, it turns out that there are, in fact, certain things that you might not want to fake. Today's show, The Real Fleetwood Mac. We're gonna soft rock out this piece. My name is Glenn Washington. You're gonna wanna turn up the volume a little bit because you're listening to Snap Judgment.
3:21 Glynn Washington? Our story comes from the golden age of classic rock. Tour buses, stadium, concert hall, mullet, shimming under the bright sweaty spotlight. All the rock star stuff. And as such, there might be some language and references to drug use. Bad rock stars, bad. Crewster John Facil grabs the mic and goes through search of the real Fleetwood Mac.
3:49 Glynn Washington? Snap Judgment.
3:50 Speaker 02 I'm all good. I'm gunned up and ready to fire. Here we go, three, two, one.
3:59 Speaker 03 Rich Engler is a concert promoter in Pittsburgh.
4:02 Speaker 02 Been doing this for 54 years, over 6,000 concerts.
4:07 Speaker 03 And in 1974, he gets a call from an agent in New York telling him that the band Fleetwood Mac is looking for a venue in Pittsburgh to host the first show of their US tour.
4:18 Speaker 02 I said, "Oh, you mean the first on the whole tour? This would be fantastic."
4:25 Speaker 03 Fleetwood Mac.
4:29 Speaker 03 Before Stevie Nicks joined the band, they were bluesier, harder rocking, more psychedelic. Even in the early 70s, they were incredibly popular. Maybe not as big as they eventually became, but they had hits like "Black Magic Woman."
4:47 Speaker 02 I said, "This will be big news. I'll be able to advertise. Come be a part of the first date on the tour of Fleetwood Mac coming from England." You know, wow, this is a super show.
5:00 Speaker 02 So, day of the show comes.
5:03 Speaker 03 Minutes before Fleetwood Mac's set, Rich peers out from backstage at thousands of rock fans. He takes a deep, dank whiff.
5:11 Speaker 02 The whole place was smoked up. It was like an atomic bomb went off.
5:17 Speaker 03 But there's a problem.
5:18 Speaker 02 There was no appearance yet of the band. I don't see any Fleetwood Mac.
5:25 Speaker 03 He doesn't see a single member of the band. Not even Mick Fleetwood, the band's namesake. A long-haired, 6'6" drumming powerhouse. He's hard to miss. Rumors have been circulating that Fleetwood Mac is breaking up and that the band members are at each other's throats. So, Rich has reason to be worried.
5:45 Speaker 02 There's nobody, you know, they have not arrived yet. What is going on? And all of a sudden, boom, the door opens up. I see one, two, three, four, four or five guys walk in and straight back into the dressing room.
5:59 Speaker 03 Rich doesn't recognize any of these dudes, but they are definitely not Fleetwood Mac.
6:04 Speaker 02 And then the next thing I see is this guy. He was a little older. He didn't have a suit on, but he was kinda, kinda dressy.
6:13 Speaker 03 This guy introduces himself as Fleetwood Mac's manager.
6:17 Speaker 02 And I said, "Where's Fleetwood Mac?" He said, "They just walked right by you." I said, "What are you talking about?" I thought those were the roadies. He said, no, that's Fleetwood Mac. And I said, hang on, are you kidding me? I've done dates with them in the past. That's not them. He goes, well, listen, this is Fleetwood Mac as it is today. Forget about those other guys. They're out. You're never going to see them again. This is Fleetwood Mac. And I go, oh, no, no way. I said, this is not happening. He rears back his arm like to slug me. He starts to swing and as he swings, I, I lunge forward.
7:01 Speaker 02 My natural instinct was to, you know, dive at him.
7:04 Speaker 03 Rich wraps his arms around the manager's chest and the two topple backward into a wall. A security guard comes rushing over.
7:12 Speaker 02 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you guys breaking up? What's going on? Next thing I know, the band runs on stage and they start playing. What has just happened? I'm, I'm in the twilight zone. I'm like pacing around. I didn't know what to do. I know people were going to be so, so upset and, and this is total BS.
7:36 Speaker 03 What Rich doesn't know is that the guys in the band are feeling pretty much the same way he is.
7:44 Speaker 04 You know, going on stage, just thinking, my God, you know, we don't really want to be doing this. This doesn't feel right, but we didn't know how to get out of it.
7:53 Speaker 03 The front man of the band billed as Fleetwood Mac that night was a blonde singer with a soulful, ragged voice who went by the name Elmer Gantry.
8:03 Speaker 04 A lot of people say, oh, Elmer, you were in the bogus Fleetwood Mac. I mean, it was his years ago. Yeah, that's right.
8:09 Speaker 03 The real reason Elmer was on that stage and felt like he couldn't leave was because he'd been asked to go on by drummer Mick Fleetwood himself.
8:19 Speaker 05 We knew what we knew, which was that we were doing it because Fleetwood had come to our house and said it all and laid it all out.
8:27 Speaker 03 Just two months before the show in Pittsburgh, Elmer was living in South London with guitarist Kirby Gregory. The two were writing and recording music together when they got a call from Kirby's manager, who also happened to manage Fleetwood Mac. And he told them that Mick Fleetwood wanted to meet them.
8:45 Speaker 05 He said, "Okay, well, Mick'll call you." So Mick did call, and then he came over to where we were living.
8:53 Speaker 03 Mick Fleetwood parked his Morgan sports car outside their flat and ducked his head as he passed through the doorway. Wirey, wearing a loose shirt, his signature pair of wooden balls hanging from his belt.
9:06 Speaker 05 But he seemed, he seemed damaged, actually, very depressed.
9:11 Speaker 03 Here's what Mick Fleetwood said in his autobiography.
9:14 Speaker 06 "I couldn't take it anymore. I was coming unglued emotionally. It was heartbreak heaped on heartache for me."
9:22 Speaker 05 He'd just split up with his wife, she was [BLEEP] the singer. He said he's, he really needed a rest, needed to get his head together.
9:30 Speaker 03 So Mick was headed to Africa for some R and R. And while he was gone, he wanted Elmer and Kirby to help him form a new lineup of Fleetwood Mac, with Elmer as the lead singer and Kirby on lead guitar.
9:42 Speaker 05 And I thought, "Well, this makes perfect sense, actually. We've got the kind of, you know, British blues rock background. We would just slide into these positions naturally, really." So it seemed, it wasn't even really a surprise. It was exciting, it was delightful, but it wasn't really a, it wasn't like, "Oh, my God, you've, why did you think of us?" I mean, that never occurred to me. You know, it was obvious why we would have been thought of, because of who we were and what we were doing, what we'd been doing, you know?
10:14 Speaker 03 In the 60s, Elmer fronted Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera, a band known for their wild shows and the song Flames, covered by an early version of Led Zeppelin. They'd even shared a bill once with Fleetwood Mac.
10:28 Speaker 05 I was definitely known. I mean, I may not have been famous, but I was notorious.
10:34 Speaker 03 Kirby, on the other hand, was in the band Curved Air. He was barely out of his teens, but he could shred with the best of them.
10:42 Speaker 05 And he had a kind of **** guitar, and yet he did wonderful things with it.
10:49 Speaker 03 Together, they were a dynamic duo. They played all over London, even though they didn't make a whole lot of money doing it.
10:56 Speaker 05 You know, we had this old, secondhand, beaten-up old truck, and literally the front was held on with gaffer tape. It was that kind of, you know, that kind of struggle and having a whip round to see what we could afford on the way home from a gig to eat. It was that kind of stuff. And is there enough money to pay for the gas, you know?
11:13 Speaker 03 Now, here was a bona fide rock star, a guy who'd made it big time, the very Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac himself, offering them the biggest opportunity they'd ever had.
11:25 Speaker 05 It was like, oh, God, we're gonna, we're gonna actually have roadies. We're gonna have, like, decent equipment. Well, at last, there might be a possibility of getting, kind of, some regular income.
11:36 Speaker 03 Plus, they were fans of Fleetwood Mac, and they were excited to take the band into a new era.
11:42 Speaker 05 Would you like to join Fleetwood Mac? Yeah, obviously. Who wouldn't, you know?
11:48 Speaker 03 So, that afternoon in their flat with Mick Fleetwood, they talked about what they would play on their upcoming tour of America.
11:56 Speaker 05 We went through a whole load of numbers to include in the set, and he said, well, that's no problem. I obviously know all those.
12:02 Speaker 03 Working with Fleetwood Mac's manager, Elmer and Kirby would enlist the musicians, keeping Mick Fleetwood and possibly one or two others from the old lineup. Did you have any reservations about the fact that it was only Mick Fleetwood?
12:17 Speaker 05 Ah, well, there'd been something like 12 lineups of Fleetwood Mac up until that point.
12:22 Speaker 03 It's true. Not a lot of job security in Fleetwood Mac. After a couple of hours, Mick Fleetwood left Elmer and Kirby's flat, satisfied.
12:31 Speaker 05 He seemed kind of enthusiastic. It seemed like it was real and it was gonna happen. And he said, I'll be in touch before we all go to the States.
12:43 Speaker 03 Elmer and Kirby start phoning up musicians to join the band. Some are friends, like the bassist.
12:49 Speaker 05 We've just been offered this. It's fantastic, you know, do you want to get involved?
12:52 Speaker 03 A keyboard player signs on.
12:54 Speaker 05 He was a great pianist when he was sober, but he was rarely sober.
12:59 Speaker 03 And finally, a temporary drummer to play with them until Mick Fleetwood has had time to get over his heartbreak or whatever.
13:07 Speaker 05 It was all supposed to be secret, all supposed to be hush, hush. And we rehearsed, we rehearsed the set that we had put together, stopped missing around, you know, Rattlesnake Shake, all those old Mac numbers.
13:18 Speaker 03 Weeks go by, and they don't hear from Mick Fleetwood. But then it's time to get on the plane and go.
13:25 Speaker 05 We were a bit annoyed that he hadn't come down to rehearsals, but I don't think the plan was ever for him to travel with us. I thought Mick would be going first class under his own steam, you know?
13:43 Speaker 03 January 1974. Elmer first steps foot in America, a place he'd never been.
13:50 Speaker 05 Everything was discovery, new discovery, exciting. I mean, it was one of those things that when you're sort of 14 or 15, you know, it's like, I want to have a hit record and I want to tour America.
14:04 Speaker 03 And their first stop is that show booked by promoter Rich Angler.
14:08 Speaker 02 How are you, my friend?
14:10 Speaker 03 At a theater in Pittsburgh.
14:12 Speaker 02 It's 3,500 seats. So I go on sale, boom, the thing sells out like right away.
14:18 Speaker 05 It was rammed, absolutely rammed.
14:21 Speaker 03 The band is ready to rock, but their star drummer Mick Fleetwood.
14:26 Speaker 05 Right, where's Mick?
14:27 Speaker 03 MIA.
14:28 Speaker 05 We said, well, where is he?
14:32 Speaker 03 Feeding Elmer and the boys information is Fleetwood Mac's manager, Cliff Davis.
14:37 Speaker 05 Cliff said, he's not coming, he's not here. We said, well, cancel the gig then. This, we're not going on and we need to just go.
14:45 Speaker 03 But Cliff is not one to take no for an answer.
14:48 Speaker 05 Saying, look, you're going to get [BLEEP] nicked. I've signed a contract for the band to go on and. You can't do that sort of thing over in the States. You'll end up in jail. And of course, we felt incredibly vulnerable because we'd never been there before. We didn't know how anything worked. Cliff was the man with the tickets and the money. What do you do if you're sitting in jail in Pittsburgh? You don't, you don't know what's going on, you know?
15:13 Speaker 03 Even within the already very shady world of 70s rock managers, Cliff Davis had a reputation. He was known to be eccentric, aggressive even, barking out orders in his thick Cockney accent while practicing karate.
15:29 Speaker 05 You'd be discussing something in the office and he'd be walking around spinning nunchuckers. He was really good at it, you know, I saw him destroy a chair just standing there one day.
15:40 Speaker 03 Did you know that he was a big karate enthusiast?
15:43 Speaker 02 Did you just make that up?
15:45 Speaker 03 Rich Angler, the promoter, who got into that awkward man tussle with Cliff Davis.
15:51 Speaker 02 Oh my goodness. I'm glad the security guy was there. I, I might not have lived. I might have taken me out in a stretcher.
16:00 Speaker 03 He had to watch helplessly as a band featuring none of the original Fleetwood Mac members took the stage.
16:06 Speaker 02 I couldn't believe it. I was in the middle of a bogus Fleetwood, Fleetwood faux Mac.
16:15 Speaker 03 As Elmer grabs the mic, he's feeling loose, ready. He'd already thoroughly prepared with what he called his gig kit.
16:23 Speaker 05 Some speed, a quarter bottle of rum and some weed. Getting the balance between like being disinhibited enough, but being functional enough.
16:34 Speaker 03 The band doesn't feel like they have a choice now. They don't know what the consequences will be if they don't hold up their end of the bargain.
16:42 Speaker 05 It was just about get on, let's get on, show them what we can do. This is, this is going to be good. And there were some numbers you'd go, this is going to blow them away.
16:50 Speaker 02 And the band went straight into rattlesnake shape.
16:55 Speaker 02 To my astonishment and amazement, the band was actually good. They learned all the songs and they were pulling off this tune. The audience, they're like going nuts, loving it. The crowd was going crazy.
17:14 Speaker 03 Not many seem to notice that this Fleetwood Mac ain't exactly Fleetwood Mac.
17:19 Speaker 02 We either gave three or five refunds out of 3,500 people.
17:25 Speaker 05 Went down the **** storm, did two encores. It was fantastic. It was just went down a bomb. We played really well. It was amazing.
17:34 Speaker 03 When Elmer gets offstage, though, that's when reality hits. There's no way this tour can go on without Mick Fleetwood.
17:42 Speaker 05 Our hearts sunk. You know, what are we gonna do?
17:45 Speaker 03 Elmer and the band are being paid by the gig, so cutting the tour short now, that'll really hurt financially. But manager Cliff Davis reassures them, "Don't worry, Mick is still coming."
17:59 Speaker 05 It was just, no, he couldn't make it for tonight. He is coming, but he just hasn't got it together. He's still sort of in a very depressed mood. It was like, well, okay then, he could have come out after, you know, before the second gig or third gig, you know?
18:16 Speaker 03 As the band makes their way up the East Coast, they don't hear word one from Mick Fleetwood, and Elmer has no way of contacting him.
18:23 Speaker 05 We weren't given any phone numbers for him. So, yeah, we were kind of hanging on.
18:31 Speaker 03 Meanwhile, the press is beginning to notice that Fleetwood Mac is light of Fleetwood. Articles start appearing with titles like "Really the Mac?" and "Will the real Fleetwood Mac please stand up?"
18:43 Speaker 05 That was kind of nasty, nasty stuff. And we thought, this is really bad.
18:49 Speaker 03 Many of the articles note that Mick Fleetwood is still a member of the band and intending to join them. But by the time the tour reaches New York City, he still hasn't shown.
19:00 Speaker 05 Because of the publicity in the media and the press, that kind of stuff, the worry was going onstage and were you gonna get hit by a bottle before you even started playing?
19:10 Speaker 03 Half an hour before going onstage at the Academy of Music in New York City, for the first time ever, Elmer loses his voice.
19:18 Speaker 05 I could hardly speak. You know, I reacted really badly to air conditioning. I mean, the fact that I smoked and there was an amount of fags as well.
19:28 Speaker 03 Cliff insists that the band go on and play anyway, without Elmer.
19:33 Speaker 05 You know, an instrumental set, no matter how good it was. Was not really what the audience had come to see, you know. And I felt bad for the other boys because I just figured, yeah, we need to do this together.
19:45 Speaker 03 After limbering up with some karate moves, Cliff goes onstage to address the increasingly hostile crowd. He takes the microphone and calls for silence.
19:56 Speaker 05 He said, "I am Fleetwood Mac."
20:03 Speaker 05 We took that with a pinch of salt and went, "They're [bleep] nuts."
20:08 Speaker 03 Cliff Davis claimed to own the rights to the band name Fleetwood Mac, which meant in his mind, he could put anybody he wanted onstage and call them Fleetwood Mac.
20:19 Speaker 05 That kind of belief that, you know, if, if, if you've got a bit of paper that says that you've registered the name, then you, you're entitled to do that. And he saw no problem with it at all.
20:31 Speaker 03 Elmer watches from the sidelines as the band is forced to take the stage and play a 45-minute instrumental set. And he starts to realize something.
20:41 Speaker 05 That we got caught in the crossfire between the Mac and Cliff.
20:49 Speaker 03 Across the pond, Mick Fleetwood has started giving statements to the press, saying things like,
20:55 Speaker 02 "We're the real Fleetwood Mac, yeah, for sure."
20:58 Speaker 05 That they'd been wronged and we were, you know, a bogus band trying to trade on their success.
21:04 Speaker 06 "I couldn't allow other musicians to tour under our name, whoever they were."
21:10 Speaker 05 I knew absolutely that he was lying. If Mick at any time had phoned up and said, "Look, I don't want to do this, we're not going through with it," it would have ended. You know, it would have ended during rehearsals. It would certainly have ended before we went.
21:25 Speaker 05 It's almost like years, years in the business and working towards something like this, and then it's completely destroyed and you've lost all credibility.
21:34 Speaker 05 I felt, I don't know, more devastated than angry, I think. Felt kind of betrayed and let down.
21:40 Speaker 03 Mick Fleetwood practically signed them up to do this tour. And now, they're stuck.
21:47 Speaker 05 Simply, we couldn't have afforded to, to get home. I mean, Cliff wasn't going to go, "Well, here's your ticket home, off you go then." He wasn't going to do that. There was no way. He was insistent that he was going to push this through and it was going to be a success.
22:02 Speaker 03 Cliff is already forging ahead after the NYC show. To keep the band out of legal trouble, he renamed them.
22:10 Speaker 05 You know, Cliff's gonna change it to The New Fleetwood Mac.
22:13 Speaker 03 They're now The New Fleetwood Mac.
22:16 Speaker 05 And it's our job to go on stage and prove how good we are.
22:20 Speaker 03 But the bad press continues to follow them wherever they go. Articles calling the band members phony, faceless, masquerading unknowns.
22:30 Speaker 05 These unknowns, all this cobblers.
22:33 Speaker 03 As the band moves west, gigs start to get cancelled left and right. People calling, complaining, asking for refunds. The deputy attorney general of Idaho even files a lawsuit after their show.
22:46 Speaker 05 But the weird thing was, we carried on and we were still going down a storm. Some of the gigs, they were brilliant. I mean, you know, getting up and performing, you kind of, everything else goes out of the window and you're concentrating on what you're doing. And it was a good lineup, musicians that you, you know, I could rely on to do the job. It felt great and it went down great. Considering the situation that we were in and all the news and the bad publicity, getting encores at gigs was kind of quite surprising.
23:13 Speaker 03 At one show, they lose power.
23:16 Speaker 05 The back line all went down. Everything went down apart from the P A system. And I just scattered and made stuff up for about 10 minutes and got the audience involved and then clapping and stamping and right into it. And when the sound came back on again, there was this [bleep] eruption of applause. You know, you get that kind of feeling when it's all going on. You know, you've got the, you've got the audience. It's not much, not so much you've got them, as they're with you.
23:47 Speaker 03 The New Fleetwood Mac shares stages and holds their own against rock legends like Kiss, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe Walsh.
23:55 Speaker 05 And Joe Walsh said, "I don't know who you are, man," he said, "but you're a [bleep] great band."
24:00 Speaker 03 Sure, there are the occasional boos and people shouting, "Where's Mick?" At least one bottle gets thrown. And it seems like someone, probably a member of the road crew, sabotages Kirby's guitar amp.
24:14 Speaker 05 And we're about to do the sound check, and we find that the wires have all been ripped out the back of the AC-30.
24:21 Speaker 03 They just get a new amp and press on. Still, the weight of it all, being labelled as phonies in Rolling Stone and scabs by Mick Fleetwood, slowly grinds them down.
24:32 Speaker 05 We were saying to Cliff, "We want this to stop. We want to go home. We've had enough."
24:38 Speaker 03 When they cross the border into Canada for a show in Calgary, Cliff finally agrees.
24:44 Speaker 05 And we just wanted out. It was humiliating. The TV, the papers, it's just getting worse, you know? And it's all very well soldiering through and going down to sort of 500 people or 1,000 people in a gig, but that doesn't compare to thousands of newspapers out there and the thousands of people that are being reached by snide comments on the TV. You know, we were not going to win that one. It felt like a victory that we managed to persuade Cliff to organise the flights for us to come home.
25:16 Speaker 03 The new Fleetwood Mac had lasted only six weeks. They get on a plane headed to London, and when they land, their problems aren't over.
25:27 Speaker 05 When we get back to England, they were suing all of us, including Cliff, Kirby, myself, everybody involved.
25:35 Speaker 03 The old Fleetwood Mac takes the new Fleetwood Mac to court.
25:45 Glynn Washington? Oh, don't go anywhere. After the break, the Don't Stop Won't Stop music continues. Snap Judgment.
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27:04 Glynn Washington? Welcome back to Snap Judgment, where our almost-not-quite-maybe-Fleetwood-Mac story continues.
27:16 Speaker 05 They were suing all of us, including Cliff, Kirby, myself, everybody involved.
27:22 Speaker 03 Mick Fleetwood has to testify, and he admits that, yes, he'd been to Elmer and Kirby's house to talk about the tour. But it wasn't committal, he says.
27:32 Speaker 05 It was just clearly bollocks, and the judge wasn't buying it. We didn't have to pay a penny. I didn't even have to appear in court.
27:40 Speaker 03 A representative of Mick Fleetwood declined to comment on this story, and he's maintained ever since that he had nothing to do with the tour.
27:49 Speaker 05 The last time I heard anything from the Mac was when Mick Fleetwood was sitting in my living room.
27:55 Speaker 05 I'm still really angry about it. It's amazing how it all comes back with the feelings around it.
28:02 Speaker 03 I mean, if you were going to talk to Mick Fleetwood about all this, what would you, what would you want to say to him?
28:10 Speaker 05 What the happened? And if you weren't happy, why didn't you tell us? Why didn't you just phone up and say, I'm not doing it? Yeah, I'd like to know what was going on.
28:20 Speaker 03 The real Fleetwood Mac relocated to Los Angeles in order to deal with the continuing legal fallout from the tour.
28:28 Speaker 03 There, they met Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and set about becoming the biggest band in the world.
28:40 Speaker 05 I mean, I don't begrudge them that stuff. What I begrudge is, is the fact that it was so devastating to us. I mean, it really destroyed our potential careers, basically. We'd been tainted by the publicity. We couldn't catch a cold, really.
28:57 Speaker 03 Back in London, nobody wanted to work with Elmer and his guitar-playing flatmate Kirby. The calls just stopped coming.
29:05 Speaker 05 I've never been particularly ambitious. It's like even with this thing, you know, my career's been walking through open doors. And that ceased.
29:14 Speaker 03 Kirby was so down, he swore off the music business entirely and moved to the country.
29:19 Speaker 05 He just thought he'd never play again and went off peeling spuds and doing washing up at his father-in-law's hotel, you know.
29:25 Speaker 03 What are you doing?
29:27 Speaker 05 Uh, nothing really at that time. Smoking quite a lot of dope, laying around.
29:35 Speaker 05 I can't really remember, actually, to tell you the truth.
29:40 Speaker 03 And then Elmer got another offer he couldn't refuse, from of all people, Cliff Davis, the recently fired manager of Fleetwood Mac. Why did you say yes to working with Cliff again?
29:54 Speaker 05 I mean, we knew he was a bit of a megalomaniac, but we, our view was that he'd been stitched up by Mick Fleetwood.
30:02 Speaker 05 Cliff decided we should form a band and he would finance us putting a band together. That's how Stretch happened.
30:11 Speaker 03 From the ashes of the new Fleetwood Mac, Rose, Stretch. A group fronted by Elmer, featuring the bass player from the tour and...
30:20 Speaker 05 Kirby came back from the deep low that he'd been in.
30:24 Speaker 03 Kirby, Elmer's musical partner.
30:27 Speaker 05 We auditioned for guitarists and we auditioned for drummers.
30:32 Speaker 03 A lot of musicians who came in weren't actually interested in joining the band.
30:37 Speaker 05 People turning up not good enough or not equipped enough, but really only coming in the first thing, "Oh, tell us about the Fleetwood Mac stuff." The attitude was, "How did you think you could get away with that?" You know? Of course, we didn't think we could get away. We didn't think we were getting away with anything.
30:52 Speaker 03 Finally, they had a lineup and they went into the studio.
30:56 Speaker 05 And we were recording down there and Kirby turned up with this track.
31:00 Speaker 03 A song he'd written during his hiatus from music.
31:04 Speaker 05 I didn't like the style of it much.
31:06 Speaker 03 But Elmer really connected with the lyrics. They were about betrayal and dishonesty. Like, "The only one who knows the truth, that's him, me, and you. The damage is much deeper than you'll ever see."
31:22 Speaker 03 Was it a very conscious comment on the Fleetwood Mac disaster?
31:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, because it was Kirby, Mick Fleetwood, and me. You know, we're the only ones that know the truth. And it was a track that Kirby had written when he was in that kind of deep despair, trying to make sense of it all, just laying down the truth of the situation, how painful it was. "The damage is much deeper than you'll ever see." Well, that's certainly true.
31:51 Speaker 03 They decided to run through it, right there in the studio. Even though Elmer's throat was sore and his voice was really more like a growl.
31:59 Speaker 05 So I had kind of gig throat, which was like it adds a sort of bottom dimension to my vocal range. It was almost like a piss-take. "I'm gonna do a Barry White on this," you know? While we were playing it, Jim, who was the drummer, he missed a beat, which he then realized sounded really good, so he repeated it.
32:29 Speaker 03 For two and a half minutes, Elmer is at a simmer. And then, he explodes.
32:53 Speaker 03 To my ears now, it's a pretty scorching track. Like, you guys sound pissed.
32:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, I didn't think, "Oh, I'm gonna make this really hard hit, and I'm gonna sing it like this." I just sang it, straight from the guts and out of the mouth, you know? Bypassed the brain at all costs.
33:12 Speaker 05 You know, it's just lucky that it ended up being a classic, and I've heard loads of versions of it. You can't choose to create that stuff.
33:23 Speaker 05 You finish a track sometimes, and everybody just looks at one, and they're like, "F***ing hell, we got that."
33:39 Glynn Washington? Now, you might not be surprised to learn that the song Elmer recorded with Stretch that day, "Why Did You Do It?", became the biggest hit of his career. It's been featured in commercials, a Guy Ritchie movie, and Mick Fleetwood has definitely heard it.
33:57 Speaker 06 The song was a direct attack on me for not showing up for the bogus Fleetwood Mac tour, which I'd never promised to do in the first place, of course. All of it was too bizarre.
34:11 Glynn Washington? Elmer and Kirby still make music together. Learn more about their tunes, past and present, on our website, snapjudgment.org.
34:25 Glynn Washington? Thank you, Alma, for sharing your story with us. Thanks as well to Mike Stacks from Ugly Things Magazine and the good folks at Whistledown Studios in London, especially David Prest, who read the excerpts from Mick Fleetwood's autobiography for us. The original score for that piece was by Dirk Swartshoff. It was produced by John Faseal.
35:00 Glynn Washington? Now, after the break, one lucky young man gets the best job in the world. In just a moment. Stay tuned.
35:30 Glynn Washington? Welcome back to Snap Judgment. Today, everyone wants the dream job, but it always goes to someone else. That is the rule. But what happens when that someone else is you?
35:54 Glynn Washington? This story starts back in the early 70s New York, when Merritt Riley was the Yankees' biggest 11-year-old fan. I was hardcore. Well, actually... My mom and dad were big Yankee fans, so I really didn't have a choice, to tell you the truth.
36:10 Glynn Washington? It was always extra special to be at a game.
36:13 Speaker 07 Smelling the grass and smelling the popcorn. You know, always sought to get autographs and meet the players. But at the games, I'd be sitting there watching the bat boy retrieving foul balls. And I always wondered, how in God's name can I become that kid?
36:28 Speaker 07 I figured, you know, what the hell? I'll give it a shot. And I wrote a letter to Yankee Stadium. I didn't address it to anybody in particular, just hoping it would get a response.
36:38 Speaker 04 And he did, pretty quickly, from a bat boy named Joe.
36:41 Speaker 07 Being the kid I was, I got the letter and I was so excited. It was written on Yankee letterhead stationery. And I was like, wow, this is, you know, this is it. I showed my mom and dad.
36:50 Speaker 04 Bat boy Joe wrote back and said, in order to join the bat boy club.
36:54 Speaker 07 You had to have good grade, athletic ability, be 16 years old.
36:58 Speaker 04 Merritt only met one of these requirements. He was a smarty pants.
37:01 Speaker 07 Yeah.
37:02 Speaker 04 But over the next five years, Merritt set his little mind and body to it. And bada bing bada boom, Joe hooked him up and Merritt became a Yankee bat boy. And even before he did any bat boy things, it changed his life.
37:15 Speaker 07 I'm kind of making fun of myself here. When I was in high school, I was, I was like a little nerdy kid, you know? I wasn't really, you know, one of those popular kids, you know what I mean? All of a sudden, everybody wanted to be my friend. Kids that I thought would never talk to me because they were the cool kids, they were the jocks. You know, it's funny because a lot of those kids are friends still today.
37:38 Speaker 07 Best part of the job was being around players that, you know, a year or two before I was watching on TV and only dreaming that it would be like a dream to, you know, to meet these people, you know? And now I'm in the same locker room as them.
37:54 Speaker 04 Being a bat boy is no easy work. Merritt shined all the players' cleats, did the laundry, and during practices, he'd jack fly balls. But his most important job was during the game.
38:04 Speaker 07 During the game, you have one responsibility. Once that player that's at home plate hits the ball, whether it's a base hit or an out, your main and only responsibility is to get that bat and get it right back to the dugout.
38:18 Speaker 04 Once in the dugout, all Merritt had to do was... to do was return the bat to the bat container where the other bats hung out.
38:23 Speaker 07 During the game, the Yankees were very, very strict about not being part of the game, you know, being invisible, really.
38:31 Speaker 04 Now, Merritt was planning the rest of his life and career from his gig as a bat boy. If he did a good job, his plan was to become an umpire. Well, that was the hope, at least until July 24th, 1983, Yankee Stadium. Merritt's beloved Yankees were facing one of their biggest rivals, the Kansas City Royals.
38:50 Speaker 07 It was a Sunday afternoon in July, and back then, the Yanks and Kansas City, they saw each other a lot in the playoffs, and it was a packed house, you know, it was hot, it was a loud, you know, boisterous crowd.
39:02 Speaker 04 Now, this game was extra special to Merritt, not because the heated rivalry, but because of one player on the Royals, the superstar hitter, George Brett.
39:10 Speaker 07 For whatever reason, George Brett took a liking to me, even though he was a superstar, he was like a regular guy, you know, clown around everybody in the clubhouse, he'd always be breaking my traps about one thing or another, you know, kidding around, not, not, not mean. He had a nickname for me, and he, and it was Spalding from, um, Caddyshack?
39:28 Speaker 04 Spalding Smales, not the coolest nickname. Spalding from the movie Caddyshack is a spoiled brat infamous for picking his nose and eating it.
39:37 Speaker 07 You know what, it wasn't like I liked the nickname, I just liked that he noticed me enough to have a nickname for me, you know, he made you feel important, that made me like him, you know, he definitely became my favorite.
39:48 Speaker 04 Yankee fan listeners, don't worry about it, his allegiance is still with you.
39:52 Speaker 07 Yeah, yeah, I mean, George Brett was one of those guys that I would secretly root for, as long as the Yankees would win the game, I was rooting for George Brett to do well, there weren't other players I could say that about that were not on the Yankees.
40:05 Speaker 04 All right, so back to the game.
40:07 Speaker 07 First inning, second, third, fourth. The game didn't stand out for any reason. Seventh inning, eighth inning. All right, here we are on the top of the ninth inning, the Yanks are up 4-3.
40:15 Speaker 04 And it's a very close game with the Royals at bat with two outs and a runner on base.
40:20 Speaker 07 You know, you figured the, the Yanks are gonna win this game, you have the Yankee closer, Goose Gossage, who basically was lights out once they brought him in. But a player from Kansas City gets on base and none other than my favorite player in baseball, George Brett, the crowd's on its feet. George Brett is known as the Yankee killer, but also well-known as the hemorrhoid guy.
40:43 Speaker 04 Back in the 1980 World Series, George had to leave a game early because hemorrhoid pain. Since then, every time he came up to bat, he was the butt of all jokes and jeers.
40:53 Speaker 07 The crowd is going wild, jeering at George Brett because of a hemorrhoidal issue. I got a big conflict going on in my head. You know, I'm rooting for this guy, George Brett, to get the big hit, but at the same time, I want to see my favorite team win the game. So George Brett's at bat and Goose Gossage leans in and delivers a pitch.
41:13 Speaker 04 Uh-oh, uh-oh.
41:15 Speaker 07 I could tell just from the sound of the ball hitting the bat, this thing was going to leave the ballpark. There was a very quick moment of silence, and then all of a sudden, the place went crazy.
41:26 Speaker 04 And now the Royals have the one-run lead.
41:29 Speaker 07 So right away, I get up to home plate, I grab the bat. At the time, I know that I have to get that bat back to the dugout. But I said, you know what? I know I'll probably get in trouble, but I'm going to wait there. I'm going to wait there with the bat, and I want to high-five him when he comes around because he was such a good person to me. I wanted to show that I'm a Yankee fan, but I'm a George Brett fan. While I'm standing there at home plate, waiting for George Brett to round the bases, the manager of the Yankees, Billy Martin, is on the top step of the dugout, the veins of his neck, just like protruding from his neck because he was screaming for his catcher. Dude, check the bat, check the bat. Right after that, the catcher of the Yankees rips it out of my hand, and he begins to inspect the bat for cork.
42:11 Speaker 07 When players cork their bats, it makes the ball travel further. It's cheating. The catcher checked it for cork and then saw that there was no cork, and he just dropped it on the ground right next to me. Got to be honest, I didn't know what was going on. At this time, George Brett now crosses home plate and just went right to the dugout. I did not get to high-five him because now I was so caught up in what was going on. Right after that, the manager ends up at home plate screaming, I want that bat checked, I want it checked for pine tar. What we're talking about, Frank, is that he's got too much pine tar and, uh...
42:43 Speaker 04 The umpires are gonna get together. George Brett looking around wanting to know what's going on. And the umpires are gonna talk about this thing. Pine tar is a sticky substance that players put on their wooden bats. Basically, it helps them grip the bat, swing the bat, and hopefully hit a homerun. That pine tar up that far on the bat. First time in a long, long time I've seen the umpires huddle this long and have a meeting over it. Well, they're feeling it, see, as if there's some sticky stuff around there. But there is a limit to how much pine tar one can use. Eighteen inches from the tip of the handle, about the width of home plate.
43:15 Speaker 07 The umpires take the bat, they lay it down against home plate to determine if the pine tar was too far up the handle of the bat.
43:22 Speaker 04 It's right across home plate. I've never seen this. I never have either. The umpires struggle to make a call, and that's because the pine tar rule, it's one of those obscure rules that's rarely enforced. And here, the crafty Yankee manager was waiting until the perfect moment to bring this tiny rule down on George's head.
43:42 Speaker 07 I'm thinking, if I would've just picked up the bat and gotten it out of there instead of waiting at home plate for the high five, none of this would be happening.
43:50 Speaker 04 That's Nick Bremigan with the bat right there. This is gonna be an interesting call. Brett isn't sure whether he has a homerun yet or not.
43:57 Speaker 07 At that point, I stopped slinking away back towards the dugout, walking backwards. And the players were angry. And at one point, George Brett, who's now pacing up and down the dugout like a raging bull, he says, "All I know is that if they call me out, you're going to see four dead umpires." Four dead umpires. And almost right after that, almost immediately after that, the home plate umpire looks towards where the Kansas City Royals were and makes the out sign.
44:26 Speaker 04 They might be gonna call George Brett out. Well, he is, he's out. Yes, Brett is out. Look at this. Brett is out. And, damn it, Matt.
44:35 Speaker 07 George Brett just charges out of the dugout like a maniac. First couple buds on his shirt were like open, you know, his hair was a disaster.
44:45 Speaker 04 Forcibly restrained from hitting plate umpire Tim McClellan.
44:51 Speaker 07 Oh, it was crazy. It was crazy.
44:53 Speaker 04 And the Yankees have won the ballgame, four to three. Brett is called out for using an illegal bat.
44:59 Speaker 07 Now, I position myself inside the dugout, at which point the players from Kansas City are yelling at me, "Why the hell didn't you get the bat? I was... You could edit this?" I was **** my pants. Fifty thousand people and all these big baseball players and I was scared. I'm not afraid to say that I was scared.
45:22 Speaker 04 At this point, all hell breaks loose.
45:26 Speaker 07 Yankee Stadium security, the guys in suits and ties are out on the field. And one of them comes up behind the umpire and swipes the bat out of the umpire's hand and makes a beeline for the dugout. At which point, a pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, Gaylord Perry, sneaks up behind the Yankee Stadium security and swipes the bat out of his hand.
45:49 Speaker 04 Well, the Yankee security person and one of the umpires quickly are chasing whoever has the bat. Jose Martinez is holding Brett. Bobby, I've never seen this in my life.
46:00 Speaker 07 It was something out of a movie, really was. It kept getting worse for me. It was like a bad nightmare, it kept getting worse.
46:06 Speaker 04 The game ends. Yankee fans celebrate as they leave the stadium while the Royals fans are still stunned.
46:12 Speaker 07 The players are gone, the umpires are gone. The whole swarm of people is gone. I'm in the dugout by myself. One of the clubhouse managers comes down and says, "You don't want to go up into that locker room right now. The Kansas City Royals don't want to see you, they're pissed off at you."
46:26 Speaker 04 So Merritt begins his post-game duties, knocking the mud out of spikes, cleaning up the Yankee locker room.
46:32 Speaker 07 At that point, I thought it was the end of the world. This is the biggest thing ever that's happened to me. The manager of the clubhouse where the Royals were came down and said, "Look, it's safe to go back down to the locker room. The guys that were angry are gone, so come on down." All I could tell you was, I was real nervous. I entered the locker room very timidly and I opened the door to the locker room. On the left-hand side is a swarm of reporters.
47:02 Speaker 04 And guess who's in the center of this swarm? You guessed it, superstar George Brett.
47:09 Speaker 07 The one guy I don't want to see, and he's one of the only ones left. So, I try to make my way towards the back of the locker room. I figured he wouldn't see me because there were so many reporters around him. And I go walking through, and you know, you couldn't have planned it any better. The reporters move out of the way, and all of a sudden, he locks eyes with me. And I'm thinking, "Holy [bleep], you gotta be kidding." I thought I was dead. Yeah, yeah, I figured, uh, my heart was broken already. He's... So he's like, "Spalding." And I stopped dead in my tracks. And I didn't expect that, at all. That he would be in the mood where he's calling me by my nickname, you know? And I was like, "Yeah." And he looks at me, he says, "Why didn't you get the [bleep] bat?"
47:55 Speaker 07 And I'm like, "Holy Christ, what do I say? What do I say?" You know, I'm speaking to a Major League Baseball player, I'm seventeen, sixteen, seventeen years old.
48:06 Speaker 07 And before I could answer, he, he just started laughing, he said, "I'm only, I'm only kidding around with you." He goes, "Don't worry about it."
48:15 Speaker 07 And then he said, "But you do owe me."
48:19 Speaker 07 And I remember saying, as clear as day, "Whatever you want, whatever you need." So he says to me, "Do you want me to tell you what he says, though?" He says to me, "The next time I'm back here in New York City," he goes, "You're gonna get me laid."
48:35 Speaker 07 And I said to him, "You want me to get you laid?" And I started laughing. You know, and he laughed, and, and that was pretty much it.
48:43 Speaker 04 After the pine tar game, people called George Brett a cheater for using a special bat. But George, he got the last laugh.
48:52 Speaker 04 Eventually, the pine tar ruling was overturned, George got his home run back, and the Royals won the game. Oh, and remember the hemorrhoids nickname? That was now behind him.
49:03 Speaker 07 As a result of the pine tar game, that nickname was forever gone. People don't even know about it, really. I know this whole incident could be blamed on my hero worship of George Brett. You know, any other player, I went up and retrieved bats probably thousands of times. The one time I didn't do it, this, uh, baseball history was made.
49:30 Speaker 07 And Damon Mann. He is out. Bobby, I've never seen this in my life. And still to this day, I still have not gotten that high five I was looking for.
49:43 Glynn Washington? Thank you, Merritt Riley, for sharing that story with the Snap. Merritt still considers himself the Yankees' biggest fan. And a big shout out as well to Daniel Barbarisi from the Wall Street Journal for bringing us that story, or the link to his story on our website, snapjudgment.org. Original sound design by Renzo Goryo, and that piece was produced by Davey Kim.
50:19 Glynn Washington? Remember, don't stop the music. If you need more Snap in your life, and I know you need more Snap in your life, the Snap Judgment Podcast is available wherever podcasts are available. Let somebody know, they will be forever grateful. As well as Snap's evil twin podcast, Spooked. Snap is brought to you by the team that knows how to hide stuff on the tour bus, except for the Uber loser, Mr. Mark Wistich. He's always with the "It's in there, officer, it's over there, officer."
50:54 Glynn Washington? Well, there's Nancy Lopez, Pat McSeyd Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goryo, John Facil, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, Marissa Dodge, Bo Walsh, David Exmay, and Regina Berriaco.
51:15 Glynn Washington? And this, this is not the news. No, this isn't news. In fact, you could do like me, head out to the club, let it slip that you're part of the band, even though, of course, you're not part of the band. And you would still, still even then, not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is P-R-X.
Previous Silence Speaks Next Something Sacred Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated