The Continuing Mystery of 1974’s ‘Fake’ Fleetwood Mac Tour

In 1974, an all-new lineup of Fleetwood Mac hit the road because the old band had split up – except they hadn’t. Co-founding drummer Mick Fleetwood was going to join the band at an early stage of the road trip – except he didn’t. And the manager who pulled the strings was just trying to preserve the main group’s rising profile – except he wasn’t.

Scandal seemed to hound Fleetwood Mac from their earliest days as a British blues-rock outfit. In 1970 they’d lost guitarist Peter Green to an LSD-fueled change in attitude. In 1971 they’d lost guitarist-pianist Jeremy Spencer to a religious movement. In 1973 the marriage between bassist John McVie and vocalist-keyboardist Christine McVie had broken down, while recently-added guitarist Bob Weston was involved in an affair with Fleetwood’s wife.

Unsurprisingly, Fleetwood took the decision to cancel the band’s planned U.S. tour. But that didn’t suit manager Clifford Davis, who decided to reshape plans to include an alternative lineup.

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Elmer Gantry was already an established British musician when Clifford approached him. In 2017 he told Classic Rock that Fleetwood had been involved too. “Clifford suggested to Mick that [bandmate] Kirby Gregory and I would be ideal figures to be part of a new formation of Fleetwood Mac,” the frontman asserted.

A number of meetings took place, with the drummer seemingly providing approval to the new blood. “Mick later asked to be excused rehearsals as he was going through heavy personal issues,” Gantry said, “but he knew the songs inside out and would join at the start of the tour.”

In a separate interview Gantry told the BBC in 2017: “Mick Fleetwood came to our house and we talked through the new band, and it all seemed fine. Mick said, ‘Well, I can’t actually come and rehearse with you.’ It was fairly imminent going to America to tour, but if you get a [temporary] drummer, I’ll join you for the tour.”

Fleetwood Mac – ‘Believe Me’ (1973)

The first show took place on Jan. 16, 1974, in Pittsburgh, with the new lineup told to expect Fleetwood’s arrival imminently; but he didn’t appear, leaving stand-in Craig Collinge to complete the group. “I’d done other Fleetwood Mac shows… and I knew Mick fairly well,” promoter Rich Engler told TribLive in 2022. “Then the stage door opens, and a group walks in that I figured was the roadies. And then they went into the dressing room.” Davis introduced himself as their manager, to which Engler asked when the band would arrive. “He said, ‘They’re here.’ Well, no, they weren’t.”

The situation quickly turned nasty, with Engler refusing to let the band go on stage, and Davis insisting that’s exactly what was going to happen. “He started to take a swing at me,” Engler said. “I was ready to do the same, and then security got between us. The next thing I know, all of those guys ran out onstage and the show started.”

It actually went rather well. “[T]here’s no MTV, no social media, no internet,” Engler said. “Unless you were a big fan of Fleetwood Mac, and if you only knew them from the radio, you might not know that this wasn’t them… [T]he audience was going wild and loving it. They weren’t Fleetwood Mac, but they were actually really good.”

Manager Insisted Fleetwood Mac Was His Band

But Bob Welch – who’d joined Mac in 1971 in Spencer’s place – stated clearly to Rolling Stone at the time: “It is a rip-off. The manager put together a group real fast using the name Fleetwood Mac before we had a chance to do anything about it.”

The tour continued on to its seventh stop in New York on Jan. 26, where the new band were supported by Kiss and Silverhead. Those opening sets had taken place by the time Gantry claimed he’d lost his voice and couldn’t perform. The upshot was that the rest of the lineup had to fulfill their contract by playing a set of instrumental jams – which didn’t go down well.

Fleetwood Mac – ‘Miles Away‘ (1973)

Amid the accusations of having put a fake band on the road, Davis told Rolling Stone: “I want to get this out of the public’s mind as far as the band being Mick Fleetwood’s band. This band is my band. This band has always been my band.”

As word spread of the “fake Mac tour,” the court of public – and band member – opinion won out and the road trip was called off. “For a while we believed that Mick would show,” Gantry said. “However, when he never appeared and we were… branded in the press as imposters, I felt a rage towards him that has taken decades to subside – even slightly. We desperately wanted out, but we were convinced that we had to do the gigs or end up in court in the States, so we carried on.

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“We were receiving encores and ovations, but it felt bad. I thought: ‘What’s the point? This has no future.’ Kirby and I were getting really depressed and stoned all the time. We even sacked the pianist on stage one night as he was too drunk to play. Two gigs later, mercifully, Cliff pulled the plug.”

Gantry refuted Fleetwood’s position as stated in the drummer’s memoir, where he said: “To this day, I don’t know the names of the musicians involved and I don’t wanna know.” The guitarist said: “[H]e wrote that he didn’t even know our names, but that I contacted him years later to apologize. Total bollocks! … If Mick had at any point said to us that he had changed his mind, or simply didn’t want to do it, we would never have gone to the States.”

Bassist Paul Martinez reflected: “The U.S. live dates were great because we were a tight band; and against all the odds we still managed to play some really good shows. Joe Walsh told me at one gig in Florida that despite Mick Fleetwood not being there, he thought we were rockin’ with the best of ’em. I don’t recall any major hostility towards us either.”

Fleetwood Mac Lawsuits Led to Late ‘70s Superstardom

They went on to form the band Stretch, and recorded a track titled “Why Did You Do It.” “The line that says: ‘The only ones who know the truth / Man that’s him, me and you,’ was about the fact that me, Elmer and Mick sat in our Tooting flat and discussed the new Fleetwood Mac,” Martinez said.

It took two years for the complex legal fallout to subside. During the distractions Welch persuaded the band to form a company to look after their own affairs, and to move the organization to the States, the better to focus on the court cases there. Those steps were to set Fleetwood, the McVies, and then Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham on course for late ‘70s superstardom.

“I can say, despite all the lurid claims, we never were required to go to court,” Gantry said. “Davis split with the original band, of course, and I believe an ‘accommodation’ was reached. Cliff certainly didn’t seem to be any poorer for the experience.”

Davis has never spoken at length in public about the drama.

Stretch – ‘Why Did You Do It’