Chapter 1: What is the story behind Elmer Gantry's experience with Fleetwood Mac?
Snap Studios. Snappers, I have a confession to make. The truth is, the truth is that 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 asked me, hey, can you act, write, dance, draft, direct, run, draw, compose, swim? I've almost always said, yeah, yeah, I can do that.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it absolutely did not work. 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 can 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 going to soft rock out this piece.
My name is Gunn Washington. You're going to want to turn up the volume a little bit. Because you're listening to Snap Judgment. Our story comes from the golden age of classic rock. Tour buses, stadium, concert hall, mullets, shimmying 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.
Producer John Fasile grabs the mic and goes in search of the real Fleetwood Mac. Step judgment.
I'm all good. I'm gunned up and ready to fire. Here we go. Three, two, one.
Rich Engler is a concert promoter in Pittsburgh.
Been doing this for 54 years, over 6,000 concerts.
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 U.S. tour.
I said, oh, you mean the first on the whole tour? This would be fantastic.
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Chapter 2: How did Mick Fleetwood's personal struggles affect the band?
Maybe not as big as they eventually became, but they had hits like Black Magic Woman.
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. So day of the show comes.
Minutes before Fleetwood Mac's set, Rich peers out from backstage at thousands of rock fans. He takes a deep, dank whiff.
The whole place was smoked up. It was like an atomic bomb went off.
But there's a problem.
There was no appearance yet of the band. I don't see any Fleetwood Mac.
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.
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 or five guys walk in and straight back into the dressing room.
Rich doesn't recognize any of these dudes, but they are definitely not Fleetwood Mac.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Elmer and his band face during the tour?
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 again. He rears back his arm to slug me. He starts to swing, and as he swings, I lunge forward. My natural instinct was to dive at him.
Rich wraps his arms around the manager's chest, and the two topple backward into a wall. A security guard comes rushing over.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You guys break it up. What's going on? Next thing I know, the band runs on stage, and they start playing. What has just happened? I'm in the twilight zone. I'm like pacing around. I didn't know what to do. I know that people were going to be so, so upset. And this is total BS.
What Rich doesn't know is that the guys in the band are feeling pretty much the same way he is.
You know, going on stage, 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.
The frontman 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.
A lot of people say, oh, Elmer, you were in the bogus Fleetwood Mac. I mean, it was easier to go, yeah, that's right.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How did the audience react to the 'new' Fleetwood Mac?
I was coming unglued emotionally. It was heartbreak heaped on heartache for me.
He just split up with his wife. She was a singer. He said he really needed a rest, needed to get his head together.
So Mick was headed to Africa for some R&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.
And I thought, well, this makes perfect sense, actually. We've got the kind of 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. It wasn't like, oh, my God, why did you think of us? I mean, that never occurred to me.
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.
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.
That was definitely known. I mean, it may not have been famous, but I was notorious.
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.
and he had a kind of guitar, and yet he did wonderful things with it.
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Chapter 5: What led to the infamous Pine Tar Game involving George Brett?
But then, it's time to get on the plane and go.
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.
January 1974. Elmer first steps foot in America, a place he'd never been.
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. I want to tour America.
And their first stop is that show booked by promoter Rich Angler.
How are you, my friend?
At a theater in Pittsburgh.
It's 3,500 seats. So I go on sale, boom, the thing sells out like right away.
It was rammed. Absolutely rammed.
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Chapter 6: How did George Brett's bat controversy unfold during the game?
I couldn't believe it. I was in the middle of a bogus Fleetwood, Fleetwood Foe Mac.
As Elmer grabs the mic, he's feeling loose, ready. He'd already thoroughly prepared with what he called his gig kit.
some speed, a quarter bottle of rum, and some weed. Getting the balance between being disinhibited enough but being functional enough.
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.
It was just about, let's get on, show them what we can do, this is going to be good. And there were some numbers you'd go, this is going to blow them away.
And the band went straight into rattlesnake shape. To my astonishment and amazement, the band was actually good. They learned all the songs and they were pulling off this to the audience. They're like going nuts, loving it. The crowd was going crazy.
Not many seem to notice that this Fleetwood Mac ain't exactly Fleetwood Mac.
We either gave three or five refunds out of 3,500 people.
Went down a f***ing storm, did two encores. It was fantastic. It just went down a bomb. We played really well. It was amazing.
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Chapter 7: What were the consequences of the Pine Tar incident for Brett?
And we thought, this is really bad.
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.
Because of the publicity in the media and the press, that kind of stuff, the worry was going on stage and were you going to get hit by a bottle before you even started playing?
Half an hour before going on stage at the Academy of Music in New York City, for the first time ever, Elmer loses his voice.
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.
Cliff insists that the band go on and play anyway without Elmer.
You know, an instrumental set, no matter how good it was, was not really what the audience had come to see. And I felt bad for the other boys because I just figured, you know, we need to do this together.
After limbering up with some karate moves, Cliff goes on stage to address the increasingly hostile crowd. He takes the microphone and calls for silence.
He said, I am Fleetwood Mac. We took that with a pinch of salt and went nuts.
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Chapter 8: What ultimately happened to Elmer Gantry after the tour?
They're now the new Fleetwood Mac.
And it's our job to go on stage and prove how good we are.
But the bad press continues to follow them wherever they go. Articles calling the band members phony, faceless, masquerading unknowns.
These unknowns, all this cobblers.
As the band moves west, gigs start to get canceled left and right. People call in complaining, asking for refunds. The Deputy Attorney General of Idaho even files a lawsuit after their show.
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 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.
At one show, they lose power.
The back line all went down. Everything went down apart from the PA 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 eruption of applause. You know, you get that kind of feel when it's all going well. You know you've got the audience.
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