Peter Green has left us, and the loss is great. In a way, though, it’s a loss and a sadness with built-in delay. For me as a guitarist, he meant pretty much everything when I started playing. He had the tone, the delicate vibrato, the exquisite phrasing, the singing, the songwriting, and he was also an extremely skilled harmonica player. You could have worse role models.
I first heard Peter when Mayall’s Bluesbreakers had just released the album A Hard Road, where he succeeded the “God” Eric Slowhand Clapton. Green had played in several bands before this, including a constellation of Shotgun Express where a young Rod Stewart was responsible for the vocals. The group also included Mick Fleetwood on drums.
Clapton had gone to Greece for a holiday gig, and Mayall was suddenly without a guitarist. Green managed to nab a spot for a few gigs, but then had to gracefully step aside when Slowhand was pleased to return. A few months later, Clapton left the Bluesbreakers for good to form Cream, and Green was given the position as regular string player. With Mayall, Green and the Bluesbreakers recorded the album A Hard Road, a few singles, an EP with Paul Butterfield on harmonica, an album with Eddie Boyd, and a few other scattered tracks.
Pretty soon it was also time for Green to move on. John Mayall had gifted a few studio hours where Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood from the then Bluesbreakers were allowed to record some of their own songs. Green was so fired up by the idea that he tried to recruit McVie and Fleetwood into his own band. The drummer who had more or less already been fired from Mayall’s Bluesbreakers jumped at the idea immediately, but John McVie was hesitant to give up a steady job to venture into completely uncertain waters. Bassist Bob Brunning had to jump in instead. He played at their first concerts, and he also plays on “Long Gray Mare” on the first record. But then, of course, John McVie realized that the new group would become really big, and jumped on the Fleetwood Mac bandwagon.
At the time I myself played in a blues band, which played a lot of cover material from American black musicians, but of course we also listened a lot to the contemporary English bands, and there we found material that both us and the audience loved. It wasn’t until many years later that it dawned on me that I had played in a Peter Green Tribute band. We had lots of his works in the repertoire. Of course we played our own version of “Albatross” – on trio. It wasn’t so easy to do all the guitar parts on your own, but you were young and stubborn…
Early songs like “The Same Way” and “Another Kinda Love” from A Hard Road were mixed with songs from the first Fleetwood Mac album like “Looking For Somebody”, “I Loved Another Woman”, “Merry Go Round”, “Long Grey Mare”. However, we only had one song, “Stop Messing Around”, from the, perhaps somewhat weaker, second album, Mister Wonderful. There, it was noticeable, despite fine brass and keyboard contributions from other musicians, that Green needed a more equal musician by his side, someone who could contribute to the songwriting in a more positive way than Spencer. It was time to let in the young guitarist Danny Kirwan. With Kirwan, Green got the songwriting partner he needed, and together – especially live – they were an unbeatable pair, exchanging ideas in the most imaginative guitar duels imaginable. And Green never had any problem sharing the spotlight with the younger, and extremely promising Kirwan. It was just not for him. Already on the first two Fleetwood Mac albums, Green showed what a generous and magnanimous person he was. The young Jeremy Spencer was really allowed to spread himself with his Elmore James pastiches, especially on the second album, where almost every other song begins with the same slide riff. And even the group name Fleetwood Mac was Green’s idea – others added Peter Green’s in front of the name, because he was such a strong poster name. Green said in an interview that he thought Fleetwood Mac was a good name that John and Mick could use if/when he himself left the group.
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Green’s guitar playing was extremely mature from the start. The instrumental song “The Supernatural” from A Hard Road in particular shows an unusually lyrical and melodic playing. Where Clapton’s style was rather raw and powerful, Green’s was more sensitive and reserved – and what a tone he had! Much of that tone was of course in his fingers – he already had an exquisite, sensitive finger vibrato – but part of his special tone also came from his ’59 Les Paul, which, according to legend, had been in a guitar repair shop and had one of its pickups reversed in terms of the polarity of the magnet. This made the middle position of the pickup switch sound very special: a little weaker than on a regular Les Paul.
Peter Green’s tone and finger vibrato were very reminiscent of what you hear on B.B. King records. King himself said that the only white blues guitarist he was really afraid of was Peter Green – “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”.
An exceptionally good assessment from a musician who knew what he was talking about. And Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin is said to have said “Peter was the best of us all – the best guitarist, the best singer and the best songwriter”.
If you want all this confirmed, listen to the album Then Play On, the last one that Green recorded before he left Fleetwood Mac, in the middle of a tour, after taking too much LSD, among other things.
That album will be released in a remastered version in September this year – and there we find wonderful works such as “Closing My Eyes”, “Oh, Well”, “Like Crying” and the incredibly sad “Before The Beginning”. On the singles side we have fantastic songs such as “Black Magic Woman”, Little Willy John’s “Need Your Love so Bad”, the instrumental song and chart-topper “Albatross”, and perhaps the best of all Green’s works “Man Of The World”.
After the LSD party in Germany in 1970, Green was never the same. He sold his Les Paul to Gary Moore for 100 pounds, and refused to accept any more “dirty” royalty checks from his manager. However, that same year Green released his first solo album, The End of The Game, which consisted of endlessly long jams in the studio. Even then we also understood that we had lost him. He had set off on a journey without a return ticket, and he would never return to his former self.
After that record, it was eight years before anything new appeared. Unfortunately, at that time, only the name was recognized. Green had a handful of studio musicians to assist him, and the guitar solos that were heard were not played by himself, but by Snowy White. In the Skies, as the record is called, was followed by another handful of records, which are worthless to Peter Green fans, since none of Green’s classic guitar playing is heard on these recordings. The songs are not of any higher quality either. In recent years, Green played in a band again, but after years of electroshock therapy, he was no longer anywhere near his former greatness as a guitarist.
We have to make do with the recordings that remain from the 60s and early 70s. For me (and many others) he was the best of all blues guitarists. Regardless of what genre he played, he always managed to color his playing with the bluest of blues-notes.
”I could tell you about my life, and keep you amused I’m sure. About all the times I cried, and how I don’t want to be sad anymore.”
Rest in peace, Peter Allen Greenbaum! We miss you tremendously!
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