Fleetwood Mac

Revered by B.B. King and, according to legend, a better player than Eric Clapton, Peter Green was for years one of the most extraordinary guitarists on the English scene among the likes of Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Syd Barrett, John Lennon, George Harrison… But the career of this brilliant guitarist flew by like a meteorite and was greatly ignored by the greater public because Green quickly lost his mojo, stifled by over-consumption of narcotics. After three albums recorded with Fleetwood Mac, he all-but ceased singing and ditched his legendary solos for more impersonal rhythm sections. A backseat role, a long shot from his front man aura.

Peter Green (an abbreviation of his surname, Greenbaum) was born on the 20th of October 1946 in Bethnal Green, East London and grew up in the area. With a postman father and a housewife mother, Green was the youngest in a far-from-wealthy family of four. Early on a deft-handed Peter would help his mother in her work as a seamstress to make ends meet. Some say that his Jewish origins made him a victim of racism, pushing the child towards the guitar, a sole refuge for the young Peter from which arose a sort of innate talent for the instrument, spurred on by his vehement anger. But interviewed several times on this exact point, Peter Green maintains that he does not remember experiencing any form of ostracization. On the contrary, music played an important part in his life from a very young age, thanks to one of his older brothers, Lennie, who taught him his first guitar chords. Before he was 10-years-old, Peter could already reproduce the theme tunes to all his favorite television shows. From then on, music became his passion, and when he quit school at the age of 15 to become an assistant butcher, he dedicated his time to reproducing melodies that he heard on the radio by the band the Shadows. Hank Marvin was one of his role models, along with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, two bluesmen that were then being rediscovered by a generation of young British men with long hair, amongst whom one might find the future Yardbirds or Rolling Stones.

Peter Green’s first serious job was as a guitarist for John Mayall, then a master of English twelve-bar blues: Green replaced Eric Clapton (who left for the Yardbirds) at the heart of the Bluesbreakers (the band that accompanied John) and took part in the recording of the album A Hard Road, released in 1967. He even sang on two tracks beside John Mayall, a notable debut but unsatisfactory considering his talent. All the more so as the Bluesbreakers, also including John McVie on bass and Mick Fleetwood, were fast tiring of Mayall’s despotic attitude. Perhaps he should have reigned it in, as that was how Peter, John and Mick came to form the perfect alliance. The three were picked by Mike Vernon from the label Blue Horizon, who suggested the addition of a second guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, who played with a slide style à la Elmore James that provided a little relief to their bluesy sound.

The bands birth was cemented on the 31st of August 1967 at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival under the name Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac (the names of the associated musicians), an alias soon simply reduced to Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green disliked the emphasis on his name. At this time, John McVie still worked with John Mayall, but not for much longer. In this initial performance, Peter Green’s six string attracted much attention, not because it was the same model as Eric Clapton’s (a Gibson Les Paul), but for his somber and melancholic style that seemed to perfectly embody blues in the collective imagination, a song of woe adopted by slaves in the preceding century to express their pain. Green describes his playing in a very spiritual way: “I like to play slowly and feel each note, like an extension to my body that takes on a life of its own.”

After their first single, released in the first days of November, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac got down to their first album which was released on the 24th of February 1968. Entitled Fleetwood Mac, the sleeve shows a squalid alleyway full of rubbish bins and a sniffling dog. While not overly catchy, the record served as one of the foundations for what some call the British blues boom. The record marked a return to the roots of three-chord twelve-bar blues which had then been widely replaced by psychedelic pop that ruled the charts (like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle) where a desire for large sound was favored by the best musicians: Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Who…