In Memoriam: Peter Green 29 October 1946 – 25 July 2020

 Peter Green sang (and in the second instance also wrote) two of the most melancholy, touching deep modern blues with “I Need Your Love So Bad” and “Man of the World,” and for these alone he’ll always feature on my all-time favourite play list but there is so much more.

The version of Fleetwood Mac that Green founded and led will always be the one whose records I’ll listen to over and over again, as they are evidence that blues is not owned by rural black  sharecroppers and that it can be as universal an emotion as Black bluesmen have claimed. Having said that, many White musicians can play blues as a formal musical idiom, not to mention many modern Black musicians too,  but very few of them manage to capture the visceral emotional essence of it the way Pete Green could do.

Fleetwood Mac copies, if you will, and tried to emulate, the blues standards and in this was little different to their colleagues in the British blues boom with had the significant advantage that Green could writer contemporary blues that sounded like standards and yet spoke to his generation of blues afficionados.

Although Peter Green left a much larger legacy,  with Fleetwood Mac, as solo artist and with Splinter Group, his fall from stardom was much like that of Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd, both of them victims of excessive psychedelic drug use that impacted heavily on probably already fractured and fragile mental states. Barrett never recovered but fortunately Green had a second and third act and, if his success was more modest in the latter part of his life, it was still success and probably more on his terms.

I don’t care much for six albums released between 1979 and 1983 that announced Green’s return, kind of, as working musician and I also don’t care much for the records by the Splinter Group that sound more like a bunch of White guys performing blues as an academic exercise in musicology rather than as an emotionally cathartic creative expression the way Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac was capable of doing.  

Playing the Blues is not necessarily a young man’s game but it seems to me that pure bravura, trailblazing creativity often is. Musicians may become better at the technical craft of songwriting as they age in the  same way they become more adept at their instruments, but they can hardly ever replicate the insouciance and experimentalism of their youth and the longer their careers last, the less interesting their  new material is.  This is why I prefer the early Bob Dylan or Neil Young and why Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, for its instrumental prowess and deep blues feeling, is the music of his career that I will treasure above anything that came after.

All the Fleetwood Mac albums between the debut Fleetwood Mac (1867) and Then Play On (1970), including the Blues Jam in Chicago set and the various compilations of live tracks, at the BBC, the Boston Tea Party, and elsewhere, are worthwhile having and bear repeated listening.

I don’t know, and don’t care to explore, whether Eric Clapton or Peter Green is the better blues guitarist but these two, with Michael Bloomfield, represent my holy trinity of Sixties blues guitarists, each spectacular in his own way.

I won’t miss Peter Green as a person because I never met him and also because the Fleetwood Mac music I love is so old that he might as well have died long ago, and fortunately I won’t have to miss the music because I have it all and will continue to listen to it with great joy and immense satisfaction.

Peter Green’s blues lift me up.

Whither does Nomadic Orcherstra roam today?

I don’t research these things, so I don’t know whether Nomadic  Orchestra still exists as a going concern but if one can go by what’s available on Apple Music, they’ve released only two albums,  Move Your Things (2013) and Love at Last (2016) and nothing since then. Given the lack of imagination or creativity in these records, I’m not surprised.

Nomadic Orchestra followed in the footsteps of The Dynamics, Truly Fully Hey Shoo Wow Band and The Honeymoon Suites from the late Nineties (though The Dynamics originated in the Eighties), all of which were big, horn driven bands, probably composed of music. Specifically jazz, students, who wanted to put together a project band for some extra cash ad some on stage fun while they were studying. 

Apart from the horn sections, these bands shared a common misconception that they could bring the funk to  the music scene, but this misconceived ambition was let down by ponderous, creaky rhythm sections that couldn’t be funky if their lives depended on it.  Another common trait was that arrangements, often intricate and quirky, were intended to drive the groove yet failed miserably in that endeavour and only succeeded in showcasing the pro forma talents of the instrumentalists and the virtues of rigorous rehearsals. In live performances and on record the music was dire, plodding and excruciatingly dull after one song. So much sound and fury signifying so much nothing.

This material defect applies exactly to Nomadic Orchestra. There’s no denying, I suppose, the technical ability of the musicians and the ingenuity of their arrangements but they can’t seem to write the decent, catchy hooks or riffs that are required to sustain interest in an album of mostly instrumental doodles.

The production values are  top notch and there is a lot of energy on display but it all seems such a waste if one is simply running on the spot.

There are more vocals on the second album than on the debut but they are of the jokey, shouty variety and there are no real songs, nothing to engage the listener who isn’t going to be fascinated by and impressed the virtuosity on display. The latter should be the given and only the underpinning of the substance that is songcraft. Here the virtuosity is the main, and only,  element. Well played, energetic tedium is still tedium.

This type of music may be entertaining in a live setting with a well-juiced audience and that’s probably where it should stay. Recording these performances are a nice memento, I guess, but no more than a period piece on display. Neither album is a record I will listen to again willingly. Not because they’re bad, but because they are so much flavourless vapour. 

Neil Young's homegrown shuck 'n jive.

NEIL YOUNG                HOMEGROWN (1975) (released 2020)

In 1975 Neil Young ditched these recordings to release Tonight’s the Night instead and waited until 2020  before allowing them to see the light of day as part of his Archives series. Listening to Homegrown now, I can understand why Young banished these tracks to his vault. In their own right, and compared to Tonight’s the Night, these performances are pretty crappy and sound like demos rather than finished, release-ready works of art. They could be the product of stoned jam sessions, for all I know.

I’ve not listened to all the Archives releases  and if this set is any indication of the quality of  what’s been shelved in the vaults, I reckon I won’t seek out many more either. The live Crazy Horse  at the Fillmore set with the Danny Whitten era Crazy Horse is the best so far, and the acoustic concerts of Live at Massey Hall 1971  and Live at the Cellar Door (1970) are interesting as an insight into the young artist and the acoustic versions of songs that are better known as rock anthems, but the Homegrown tunes are a tad tedious, except for a few gems, like “Love is a Rose,” “Little Wing” and “Star of Bethlehem,” and in no way any kind of return to the brilliance of Harvest (1972) though there seems to be some echoes.  The closest parallel I can think of, amongst the Young albums I’ve heard, is Silver & Gold (2000), which is by far the worst and most disposable Neil Young album of all times.  Those recordings should’ve been shelved, if the stuff on Homegrown had been.

I’ve been a Neil Young fan for a long time. Following an artist over the  course of their career is not unreservedly rewarding because there are frequent lapses in quality and  whatever it was that attracted you to the music in the first place may get lost over time, given that you and the artist both grow up. Your tastes change and the artist wants to explore new ways of expressing themselves and often this leads to a divergence. You’ll never lose your love for the early records of the artist but may not want to follow on their artistic journey beyond those first, treasured albums.

This is how it’s for me with Neil Young and Bob Dylan, to name but two, and though I’ve continually invested in their contemporary releases (to this day), it’s hardly ever been an emotional investment and many’s the time when I was disappointed, whether it was an official release or an archival release.

I get that many fans want to hear just about everything an artist has ever recorded but I don’t, for example, get why Deadheads would endlessly want to revisit Grateful Dead shows of much the same material, and my belief is that, if the artist deemed something not worth releasing at the time it was recorded, it’s probably not worth shoving it into the spotlight 20, 30 or 40 years later.  The artistic judgement  must be trusted; let us have the canon of the best and greatest recordings and don’t sully the legacy with substandard outtakes and discards.

I can say I’ve taken the time to listen to Homegrown and I can also say I won’t be listening to it again.