The Real Fleetwood Mac - Snap Classic

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. STORIES 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 Join Snap+ https://snap.supercast.com/if you aren't already a member! Get bonus eps, an ad-free stream and more. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 1:21Speaker 01

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• 1:54Glynn Washington?

  Snappers, I have a confession to make.

• 1:59Glynn Washington?

  The truth is, the truth is that

• 2:04Glynn 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."

• 2:34Glynn Washington?

  Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it absolutely did not work.

• 2:42Glynn 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.

• 3:21Glynn 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.

• 3:49Glynn Washington?

  Snap Judgment.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I'm all good. I'm gunned up and ready to fire. Here we go, three, two, one.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Rich Engler is a concert promoter in Pittsburgh.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Been doing this for 54 years, over 6,000 concerts.

• 4:07Speaker 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.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  I said, "Oh, you mean the first on the whole tour? This would be fantastic."

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Fleetwood Mac.

• 4:29Speaker 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."

• 4:47Speaker 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.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  So, day of the show comes.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Minutes before Fleetwood Mac's set, Rich peers out from backstage at thousands of rock fans. He takes a deep, dank whiff.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  The whole place was smoked up. It was like an atomic bomb went off.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  But there's a problem.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  There was no appearance yet of the band. I don't see any Fleetwood Mac.

• 5:25Speaker 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.

• 5:45Speaker 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.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Rich doesn't recognize any of these dudes, but they are definitely not Fleetwood Mac.

• 6:04Speaker 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.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  This guy introduces himself as Fleetwood Mac's manager.

• 6:17Speaker 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.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  My natural instinct was to, you know, dive at him.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Rich wraps his arms around the manager's chest and the two topple backward into a wall. A security guard comes rushing over.

• 7:12Speaker 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.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  What Rich doesn't know is that the guys in the band are feeling pretty much the same way he is.

• 7:44Speaker 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.

• 7:53Speaker 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.

• 8:03Speaker 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.

• 8:09Speaker 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.

• 8:19Speaker 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.

• 8:27Speaker 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.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  He said, "Okay, well, Mick'll call you." So Mick did call, and then he came over to where we were living.

• 8:53Speaker 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.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  But he seemed, he seemed damaged, actually, very depressed.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Here's what Mick Fleetwood said in his autobiography.

• 9:14Speaker 06

  "I couldn't take it anymore. I was coming unglued emotionally. It was heartbreak heaped on heartache for me."

• 9:22Speaker 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.

• 9:30Speaker 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.

• 9:42Speaker 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?

• 10:14Speaker 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.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  I was definitely known. I mean, I may not have been famous, but I was notorious.

• 10:34Speaker 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.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  And he had a kind of **** guitar, and yet he did wonderful things with it.

• 10:49Speaker 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.

• 10:56Speaker 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?

• 11:13Speaker 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.

• 11:25Speaker 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.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Plus, they were fans of Fleetwood Mac, and they were excited to take the band into a new era.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Would you like to join Fleetwood Mac? Yeah, obviously. Who wouldn't, you know?

• 11:48Speaker 03

  So, that afternoon in their flat with Mick Fleetwood, they talked about what they would play on their upcoming tour of America.

• 11:56Speaker 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.

• 12:02Speaker 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?

• 12:17Speaker 05

  Ah, well, there'd been something like 12 lineups of Fleetwood Mac up until that point.

• 12:22Speaker 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.

• 12:31Speaker 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.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Elmer and Kirby start phoning up musicians to join the band. Some are friends, like the bassist.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  We've just been offered this. It's fantastic, you know, do you want to get involved?

• 12:52Speaker 03

  A keyboard player signs on.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  He was a great pianist when he was sober, but he was rarely sober.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  And finally, a temporary drummer to play with them until Mick Fleetwood has had time to get over his heartbreak or whatever.

• 13:07Speaker 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.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Weeks go by, and they don't hear from Mick Fleetwood. But then it's time to get on the plane and go.

• 13:25Speaker 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?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  January 1974. Elmer first steps foot in America, a place he'd never been.

• 13:50Speaker 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.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  And their first stop is that show booked by promoter Rich Angler.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  How are you, my friend?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  At a theater in Pittsburgh.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  It's 3,500 seats. So I go on sale, boom, the thing sells out like right away.

• 14:18Speaker 05

  It was rammed, absolutely rammed.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  The band is ready to rock, but their star drummer Mick Fleetwood.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  Right, where's Mick?

• 14:27Speaker 03

  MIA.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  We said, well, where is he?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Feeding Elmer and the boys information is Fleetwood Mac's manager, Cliff Davis.

• 14:37Speaker 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.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  But Cliff is not one to take no for an answer.

• 14:48Speaker 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?

• 15:13Speaker 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.

• 15:29Speaker 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.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Did you know that he was a big karate enthusiast?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Did you just make that up?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Rich Angler, the promoter, who got into that awkward man tussle with Cliff Davis.

• 15:51Speaker 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.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  He had to watch helplessly as a band featuring none of the original Fleetwood Mac members took the stage.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  I couldn't believe it. I was in the middle of a bogus Fleetwood, Fleetwood faux Mac.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  As Elmer grabs the mic, he's feeling loose, ready. He'd already thoroughly prepared with what he called his gig kit.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  Some speed, a quarter bottle of rum and some weed. Getting the balance between like being disinhibited enough, but being functional enough.

• 16:34Speaker 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.

• 16:42Speaker 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.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  And the band went straight into rattlesnake shape.

• 16:55Speaker 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.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Not many seem to notice that this Fleetwood Mac ain't exactly Fleetwood Mac.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  We either gave three or five refunds out of 3,500 people.

• 17:25Speaker 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.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  When Elmer gets offstage, though, that's when reality hits. There's no way this tour can go on without Mick Fleetwood.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Our hearts sunk. You know, what are we gonna do?

• 17:45Speaker 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."

• 17:59Speaker 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?

• 18:16Speaker 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.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  We weren't given any phone numbers for him. So, yeah, we were kind of hanging on.

• 18:31Speaker 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?"

• 18:43Speaker 05

  That was kind of nasty, nasty stuff. And we thought, this is really bad.

• 18:49Speaker 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.

• 19:00Speaker 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?

• 19:10Speaker 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.

• 19:18Speaker 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.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Cliff insists that the band go on and play anyway, without Elmer.

• 19:33Speaker 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.

• 19:45Speaker 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.

• 19:56Speaker 05

  He said, "I am Fleetwood Mac."

• 20:03Speaker 05

  We took that with a pinch of salt and went, "They're [bleep] nuts."

• 20:08Speaker 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.

• 20:19Speaker 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.

• 20:31Speaker 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.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  That we got caught in the crossfire between the Mac and Cliff.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Across the pond, Mick Fleetwood has started giving statements to the press, saying things like,

• 20:55Speaker 02

  "We're the real Fleetwood Mac, yeah, for sure."

• 20:58Speaker 05

  That they'd been wronged and we were, you know, a bogus band trying to trade on their success.

• 21:04Speaker 06

  "I couldn't allow other musicians to tour under our name, whoever they were."

• 21:10Speaker 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.

• 21:25Speaker 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.

• 21:34Speaker 05

  I felt, I don't know, more devastated than angry, I think. Felt kind of betrayed and let down.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  Mick Fleetwood practically signed them up to do this tour. And now, they're stuck.

• 21:47Speaker 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.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Cliff is already forging ahead after the NYC show. To keep the band out of legal trouble, he renamed them.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  You know, Cliff's gonna change it to The New Fleetwood Mac.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  They're now The New Fleetwood Mac.

• 22:16Speaker 05

  And it's our job to go on stage and prove how good we are.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  But the bad press continues to follow them wherever they go. Articles calling the band members phony, faceless, masquerading unknowns.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  These unknowns, all this cobblers.

• 22:33Speaker 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.

• 22:46Speaker 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.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  At one show, they lose power.

• 23:16Speaker 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.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  The New Fleetwood Mac shares stages and holds their own against rock legends like Kiss, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe Walsh.

• 23:55Speaker 05

  And Joe Walsh said, "I don't know who you are, man," he said, "but you're a [bleep] great band."

• 24:00Speaker 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.

• 24:14Speaker 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.

• 24:21Speaker 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.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  We were saying to Cliff, "We want this to stop. We want to go home. We've had enough."

• 24:38Speaker 03

  When they cross the border into Canada for a show in Calgary, Cliff finally agrees.

• 24:44Speaker 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.

• 25:16Speaker 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.

• 25:27Speaker 05

  When we get back to England, they were suing all of us, including Cliff, Kirby, myself, everybody involved.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  The old Fleetwood Mac takes the new Fleetwood Mac to court.

• 25:45Glynn Washington?

  Oh, don't go anywhere. After the break, the Don't Stop Won't Stop music continues. Snap Judgment.

• 26:00Speaker 07

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• 26:10Speaker 07

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• 27:04Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, where our almost-not-quite-maybe-Fleetwood-Mac story continues.

• 27:16Speaker 05

  They were suing all of us, including Cliff, Kirby, myself, everybody involved.

• 27:22Speaker 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.

• 27:32Speaker 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.

• 27:40Speaker 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.

• 27:49Speaker 05

  The last time I heard anything from the Mac was when Mick Fleetwood was sitting in my living room.

• 27:55Speaker 05

  I'm still really angry about it. It's amazing how it all comes back with the feelings around it.

• 28:02Speaker 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?

• 28:10Speaker 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.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  The real Fleetwood Mac relocated to Los Angeles in order to deal with the continuing legal fallout from the tour.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  There, they met Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham and set about becoming the biggest band in the world.

• 28:40Speaker 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.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Back in London, nobody wanted to work with Elmer and his guitar-playing flatmate Kirby. The calls just stopped coming.

• 29:05Speaker 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.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Kirby was so down, he swore off the music business entirely and moved to the country.

• 29:19Speaker 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.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  What are you doing?

• 29:27Speaker 05

  Uh, nothing really at that time. Smoking quite a lot of dope, laying around.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  I can't really remember, actually, to tell you the truth.

• 29:40Speaker 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?

• 29:54Speaker 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.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  Cliff decided we should form a band and he would finance us putting a band together. That's how Stretch happened.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  From the ashes of the new Fleetwood Mac, Rose, Stretch. A group fronted by Elmer, featuring the bass player from the tour and...

• 30:20Speaker 05

  Kirby came back from the deep low that he'd been in.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Kirby, Elmer's musical partner.

• 30:27Speaker 05

  We auditioned for guitarists and we auditioned for drummers.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  A lot of musicians who came in weren't actually interested in joining the band.

• 30:37Speaker 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.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Finally, they had a lineup and they went into the studio.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  And we were recording down there and Kirby turned up with this track.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  A song he'd written during his hiatus from music.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  I didn't like the style of it much.

• 31:06Speaker 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."

• 31:22Speaker 03

  Was it a very conscious comment on the Fleetwood Mac disaster?

• 31:26Speaker 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.

• 31:51Speaker 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.

• 31:59Speaker 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.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  For two and a half minutes, Elmer is at a simmer. And then, he explodes.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  To my ears now, it's a pretty scorching track. Like, you guys sound pissed.

• 32:58Speaker 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.

• 33:12Speaker 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.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  You finish a track sometimes, and everybody just looks at one, and they're like, "F***ing hell, we got that."

• 33:39Glynn 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.

• 33:57Speaker 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.

• 34:11Glynn Washington?

  Elmer and Kirby still make music together. Learn more about their tunes, past and present, on our website, snapjudgment.org.

• 34:25Glynn 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.

• 35:00Glynn Washington?

  Now, after the break, one lucky young man gets the best job in the world. In just a moment. Stay tuned.

• 35:30Glynn 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?

• 35:54Glynn 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.

• 36:10Glynn Washington?

  It was always extra special to be at a game.

• 36:13Speaker 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?

• 36:28Speaker 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.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  And he did, pretty quickly, from a bat boy named Joe.

• 36:41Speaker 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.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Bat boy Joe wrote back and said, in order to join the bat boy club.

• 36:54Speaker 07

  You had to have good grade, athletic ability, be 16 years old.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  Merritt only met one of these requirements. He was a smarty pants.

• 37:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 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.

• 37:15Speaker 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.

• 37:38Speaker 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.

• 37:54Speaker 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.

• 38:04Speaker 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.

• 38:18Speaker 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.

• 38:23Speaker 07

  During the game, the Yankees were very, very strict about not being part of the game, you know, being invisible, really.

• 38:31Speaker 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.

• 38:50Speaker 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.

• 39:02Speaker 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.

• 39:10Speaker 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?

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Spalding Smales, not the coolest nickname. Spalding from the movie Caddyshack is a spoiled brat infamous for picking his nose and eating it.

• 39:37Speaker 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.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Yankee fan listeners, don't worry about it, his allegiance is still with you.

• 39:52Speaker 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.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  All right, so back to the game.

• 40:07Speaker 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.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  And it's a very close game with the Royals at bat with two outs and a runner on base.

• 40:20Speaker 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.

• 40:43Speaker 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.

• 40:53Speaker 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.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Uh-oh, uh-oh.

• 41:15Speaker 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.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  And now the Royals have the one-run lead.

• 41:29Speaker 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.

• 42:11Speaker 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...

• 42:43Speaker 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.

• 43:15Speaker 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.

• 43:22Speaker 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.

• 43:42Speaker 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.

• 43:50Speaker 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.

• 43:57Speaker 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.

• 44:26Speaker 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.

• 44:35Speaker 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.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Forcibly restrained from hitting plate umpire Tim McClellan.

• 44:51Speaker 07

  Oh, it was crazy. It was crazy.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  And the Yankees have won the ballgame, four to three. Brett is called out for using an illegal bat.

• 44:59Speaker 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.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  At this point, all hell breaks loose.

• 45:26Speaker 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.

• 45:49Speaker 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.

• 46:00Speaker 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.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  The game ends. Yankee fans celebrate as they leave the stadium while the Royals fans are still stunned.

• 46:12Speaker 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."

• 46:26Speaker 04

  So Merritt begins his post-game duties, knocking the mud out of spikes, cleaning up the Yankee locker room.

• 46:32Speaker 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.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  And guess who's in the center of this swarm? You guessed it, superstar George Brett.

• 47:09Speaker 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?"

• 47:55Speaker 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.

• 48:06Speaker 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."

• 48:15Speaker 07

  And then he said, "But you do owe me."

• 48:19Speaker 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."

• 48:35Speaker 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.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  After the pine tar game, people called George Brett a cheater for using a special bat. But George, he got the last laugh.

• 48:52Speaker 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.

• 49:03Speaker 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.

• 49:30Speaker 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.

• 49:43Glynn 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.

• 50:19Glynn 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."

• 50:54Glynn 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.

• 51:15Glynn 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.