If there is one song that sums up the stoic genius of Peter Green’s guitar, it is “Jumping at Shadows”, recorded live in February 1970 at the Boston Tea Party. Green was on top of the world; A 23-year-old rock star who leads the London band he founded, Fleetwood Mac. They were Britain’s toast, mounting their number one hit “Albatros”. But “Jumping at Shadows” is a doomy blues ballad, his voice filled with melancholic dread, his guitar filled with delicate pain. “I’m going downhill and blame myself,” he sings. So much sadness in his fingers; so much tender fury Peter Green’s serene and unhysterical sense of calm only makes the song more terrifying. He never lets his voice or guitar rise above a whisper, but you can hear the hellhounds on his way.
Jumping at Shadows tells the entire Peter Green story in five minutes. He takes the British bluesman song Duster Bennett, but turns it into his own haunted autobiography. There is no other rock & roll sound like Peter Green’s guitar ache. That is why he will always be remembered, and that is why the music world is mourning his death at age 73. Fifty years after he left Fleetwood Mac, his classics: “Love That Burns”, “Before the Beginning”, “Black Magic Woman” – Still itchy. The Mac reached Number One with its instrumented “Albatross” space surfing instrumental, so great that the Beatles took it away Abbey Road, making him “Sun King”. He sang his 1969 ballad “The Man of the World”, muttering, “Shall I tell you about my life?”
But at its peak, he suddenly turned his back on music and disappeared. He became one of the all-time mysterious men of rock & roll. He had a tragic LSD-related mental breakdown, retired, ended up digging ditches or sleeping on the streets. By the time Mac became a ’70s superstar with RumorsHe was the forgotten man in her story, like Syd Barrett in Pink Floyd. When Stevie Nicks joined the band, I had never heard of him. “I cried myself to sleep many nights listening to Fleetwood Mac early and saying, ‘What happened to this guy?’ Mick Fleetwood said in 1997. “He always made people go up to the hotel room on tour and say, ‘Now I want you to listen to Peter Green.’ I put on a record and I always ended up crying. ”
Green eventually started playing again, on tour with his group Splinter. But there was always that fragility. “The guitar used to speak for me, but I can’t let it do that to me anymore,” he said in the documentary. Man of the world. “I can’t let it break my heart again.”
It had a unique tone: He accidentally put the pickup in his Gibson Les Paul backwards, after taking it off to clean it, but he kept it because he loved the sound. Like many other UK rockers, he was first inspired by the master of shadow sound, Hank Marvin. But he got hooked on blues and went down to the corner cafe to play Howlin ‘Wolf records on the jukebox and study Hubert Sumlin’s guitar. He replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1965, making his name with the dazzling vibrato, “The Supernatural”. Two years later, he went with Bluesbreakers drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie to start his own band, named for the rhythm section. The English blues scene was obsessed with technical prowess, but Green had a deep contempt for bragging. As he scoffed, “Good luck to the Snoggley Blues Band, which is becoming very popular now in the white blues world with a rhythm guitarist who can play 7,541 notes per minute.”
That was not his style: it was about emotion. “Sumlin and Wolf had it,” Green told Mojo in 1996. “The guitarists who copied them to the old black players were doing a performance, but they couldn’t feel what was behind it. It was too deep, too painful if you did it right. It got too deep for me anyway. It ended up hurting my soul, so I started making up stories instead. “
Their stories took many forms. He could write melancholic ballads alongside Nick Drake or Richard Thompson, but also heavy rockers like “Oh Well”, with his mockery: “Don’t ask me what I think of you / I might not give you the answer that you love me.” a. “(Haim does a great live version).” The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown) “was his proto-prog-metal epic. With his latest Mac album, Then play on in 1970, he explored the psychedelic dreams of “Before The Beginning” and “Underway”. There were still traces on her solo album. The end of the game. But they dosed it with a little bad acid and it disappeared.
I first heard his music one night when I was 23 years old and a friend came to visit me from Los Angeles; We drove around Boston all night listening to a mixed tape he made for the occasion. I was loaded with grumpy guitar songs, but “Man of the World” left me speechless: it sounded very gentle, but so intense. (At dawn, we tossed the tape out of the car window.) It is ironic that his best-known song, “Albatross,” is the most anomalously happy, not far from the proto-surf timbre of the Shadows. Robert Christgau perfectly described his “miraculous fluency”: “Peter Green, who filters BB King through Santo & Johnny with the saxophonist’s sense of line.” He was a cult hero with a disco record: If you were a green monster, you learned to take any record you saw with his name, no matter how grim it looked, because you may never see it again.
After leaving Fleetwood Mac, his shadow seemed to hover over the band. Jeremy Spencer disappeared one day in Los Angeles in 1971; he did not appear for a concert at the Whiskey a Go-Go, because he had just joined a religious sect. Danny Kirwan also suffered a sad collapse. As Lindsey Buckingham said in 2013, “Historically, the record has not been kind to the guitarists in this band.” Since then, that tradition has continued.
If you were a green monster, you learned to take any record you saw with its name.
But Stevie Nicks was related to Green. “There has always been something very mystical about Fleetwood Mac,” he said in 1980. “When I first joined Fleetwood Mac, I went out and bought all the albums – actually, I think I had asked Mick for them because I couldn’t possibly afford I bought them, and I sat in my room and listened to all of them to try to find out if I could capture any subject or something. What I came up with was the word ‘mystical’. “She answered that.” There is something mystical that came from Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, “he said.” And because I have a deep love for the mystical, this appealed to me. “Last year, on the band’s 50th anniversary tour, Stevie paid tribute to Green: he sang” Black Magic Woman “As if he had written it for her, which he somehow did.
Like Syd Barrett, Green found some kind of peace in old age, keeping his distance from the outside world. When Mick Fleetwood paid tribute to the stars in London in February, Green was not there. “He is not the Peter that I knew, clearly. But he plays the acoustic guitar, “said Fleetwood. Rolling Stone in January. “She loves to paint, and fishing is her hobby. It’s no secret that she turned left and never came back, but it’s okay. She also has little or no ego, which is incredible. You want to go, ‘Do you realize what you did?’ ‘Nerd. Yes, I guess so. She has no ego about what she did. “
But the music left by Peter Green is full of love that still burns.
