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.
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