Peter Green, the English guitarist and singer who founded Fleetwood Mac, died Saturday. He was 73 years old.
He died in his sleep, according to a statement from his family’s attorneys, Swan Turton. The statement did not say where he died or what the cause was.
Mr. Green drew heavily on American blues to create a style that could be menacingly propelling or dark melancholic. His voice and the songs he wrote often spoke of troublesome thoughts, and his guitar solos were based on a long, expressive melody rather than speed. “I like to play slowly and feel every note,” he once said.
Green led Fleetwood Mac for less than three years, from 1967 to 1970, and left the group before becoming one of the world’s best-selling pop hit makers in the late 1970s. But during the band’s early years. it became very popular in Britain; it had a simple number 1 in 1968 with the instrumental “Albatros”, written by Mr. Green.
Mr. Green wrote most of the early Fleetwood Mac songs, including “Black Magic Woman,” which later became an American hit for Santana.
BB King, one of Mr. Green’s main influences, said: “It has the sweetest tone I’ve ever heard,” adding, “It was the only one that gave me the cold sweat.”
Peter Green was born Peter Allen Greenbaum on October 29, 1946 in London, the son of Joe and Anne Greenbaum, and grew up in the Whitechapel neighborhood. He started playing the guitar in elementary school.
In his teens, he was in bands like Shotgun Express, a Motown-style soul band with a young Rod Stewart. Mr. Green joined John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers as Eric Clapton’s successor on the lead guitar, appearing on the band’s 1967 album “A Hard Road”.
Mr. Mayall gave Mr. Green studio recording time as a birthday present in 1966, and Mr. Green arranged a session with the Bluesbreakers’ rhythm section: Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on drums. low. The recordings included an instrumental called “Fleetwood Mac”.
Mr. Green left the Bluesbreakers to start his own blues band in 1967, with Mr. Fleetwood, guitarist Jeremy Spencer and, joining soon after, Mr. McVie. The group’s debut album in 1968, titled “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac” in Britain and “Fleetwood Mac” in the United States, vigorously emulated American blues.
In January 1969, the band visited the famous Chess Records studios in Chicago to record with blues musicians Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and others for an album released under the titles “Fleetwood Mac in Chicago” and “Blues Jam at Chess. ” “They also made a full album with Mr. Spann,” The Biggest Thing Since Colossus, “in New York City.
But Mr. Green was driving the band away from narrowly defined blues in instrumental ballads like “Albatross” and “Oh Well (Part 2)”, introspective pop like “Man of the World” and hard rock from “The Green Manalishi” . He built much of “Then Play On”, his latest album with Fleetwood Mac, only instead of cooperating with the band.
“A blues doesn’t have to be a 12-bar progression,” he said in 1968. “It can cover any musical chord sequence. For me, blues is an emotional thing. If a song has the right emotion and feeling, I accept it as a blues. “
On tour in the United States, Fleetwood Mac shared bills with the Grateful Dead and tested the LSD of the Dead’s sound engineer and psychedelic chemist Owsley Stanley. Mr. Green continued to take LSD and mescaline, and became increasingly erratic. On a tour in Munich in the early 1970s, he visited a hippie commune and disappeared for three days when, he later said, “he went on a trip and never came back.”
In his last concerts with Fleetwood Mac, he sometimes acted in a monk’s robe with a large crucifix around his neck; He also urged the other members of the gang to donate the Fleetwood Mac proceeds to charity. Their last song with the group, “The Green Manalishi”, denounced the nightmare power of money.
In 1970, he left Fleetwood Mac. “I really want to change my whole life, because I don’t want to be part of the conditioned world and, as much as possible, I’m going to get out of it,” he told New Musical Express. In 1970 he released a solo album, “The End of the Game”, released from free form jazz-rock sessions. “I was trying to achieve things that I couldn’t before but had experienced through LSD and mescaline,” he told Mojo magazine.
In 1971, when Jeremy Spencer suddenly left Fleetwood Mac to join a religious cult, Green briefly joined the band to meet the remaining dates of their American tour. But then he withdrew from acting.
Mr. Green’s main instrument on Fleetwood Mac was a 1959 Les Paul Standard, known as Greeny, which had one pickup installed backwards, creating a distinctive tone because it put the instrument’s two pickups magnetically out of phase. After leaving Fleetwood Mac, he sold the guitar to Irish rocker Gary Moore; In 1995, Mr. Moore made an album of Mr. Green’s songs called “Blues for Greeny”. The guitar is now owned by Kirk Hammett of Metallica.
Mr. Green was discovered to have schizophrenia in the 1970s. He underwent electroconvulsive therapy and entered and left psychiatric hospitals.
In 1978 he married a Canadian violinist, Jane Samuels; they divorced in 1979. He is survived by his daughter, Rosebud Samuels-Greenbaum.
He sat down with Fleetwood Mac during studio sessions for the band’s 1979 album, “Tusk,” which appears on the song “Brown Eyes.” He returned to making music in public in 1979 with the solo album “In the Skies”, followed by a one-year album in the mid-1980s, often working with his brother Michael Greenbaum, also known as Mike Green, who wrote songs for him. .
But his medications left him slower and unable to make music until he got rid of prescription tranquilizers in the 1990s.
He reappeared in 1996 with Peter Green Splinter Group, who mostly played old blues and songs written by his other guitarist, Nigel Watson; The group released eight albums before dissolving in 2004. In 2009, Mr. Green toured Europe with a band called Peter Green and Friends.
In 1998, Mr. Green was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Fleetwood Mac. Santana was also inducted in 1998, and Mr. Green interfered with the group in “Black Magic Woman”.
On February 25, 2020, Mick Fleetwood hosted a tribute concert for Mr. Green at the London Palladium that brought together some of Mr. Green’s admirers, including Pete Townshend, Billy Gibbons, Steven Tyler, David Gilmour, Bill Wyman, Noel Gallagher and Mr. Hammett, who was playing Mr. Green’s famous guitar, Greeny.
