Sometimes when Peter Green took a solo he would turn his volume DOWN that’s how cool that dude was. | | | | The original Fleetwood Mac in London, 1969. From left: John McVie, Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer.
(George Wilkes/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | “Sometimes when Peter Green took a solo he would turn his volume DOWN that’s how cool that dude was.”
| | | | | | rantnrave:// When the man who replaced GOD in JOHN MAYALL & THE BLUESBREAKERS left a year later to form a blues-rock band of his own, he named it after his drummer and the guy he was hoping would become his bass player, even though the latter was still employed by Mayall and had no particular interest in jumping ship, and even though the only reason anyone was interested in the band was because it was led by the man who replaced God. The man, who died Saturday at 73, was PETER GREEN, one of the unlikeliest guitar heroes in the annals of classic rock, possessor of a luxuriously slow, deeply emotional playing style ("he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats," one of his own heroes, B.B. KING, said) and a strange and endearing mix of rock-star confidence and almost militant humility. STAN WEBB, guitarist of another British band of the era, CHICKEN SHACK, remembered chatting with Green before a gig: "Peter was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and ERIC CLAPTON came over to us wearing a bedspread, rings on every finger, his frizzy hair sticking out six inches, and said to Peter: 'You’ll never be a star if you dress like that.' Peter just smiled. And that sums it up." Eric Clapton is the aforementioned God. He and his replacement were opposites in 10 million ways and superhuman talents in 10 million other ways. "On a personal level," John Mayall said, "Peter was a much easier guy to work with than Eric. Very easy going and fun loving, great to be around." Read into that as you wish. The band Green went on to form, of course, was FLEETWOOD MAC. There are a number of vague stories about how the name came about. I've always liked to think Green understood that the rhythm section is the most important part of any band and that he was blessed with a particularly great, and musically sympathetic, one: drummer MICK FLEETWOOD and bassist JOHN MCVIE, who would agree to come on board a few months later. In time, they'd anchor a number of radically different versions of the same band, the name becoming a little more perfect with each change. In the documentary PETER GREEN: MAN OF THE WORLD (serviceable but endearing, very much worth your time if you're a fan, on AMAZON PRIME), the original band's other member, guitarist JEREMY SPENCER, recalls asking Green about the name. "We haven't even started and he's talking about leaving," Spencer says. "He said, 'You're gonna form another band and I'm gonna form another band. And they're my friends, what are they gonna have? I'm gonna leave them with a name.'" Over the course of four albums, he also left them "BLACK MAGIC WOMAN," "ALBATROSS," "OH WELL" and a handful of other classic singles; stardom in the UK (and the seeds of much bigger stardom to come in the US); the not unimportant idea that three singer/songwriters could co-exist in the same band (if not always happily); and the beginning of a tradition of guitarists who would leave under dark, mysterious circumstances. The first album was released in the UK under the name Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, to capitalize on the band's most famous member. Green, who didn't want to be that guy, was livid. The most celebrated album, released a year and a half later, was THEN PLAY ON, which consists mostly of songs by two of those singer/songwriters, Green and DANNY KIRWAN, and features the first appearance of the future CHRISTINE MCVIE (but that's another singer/songwriter for another Fleetwood Mac story for another day). "Then Play On" opened up the band's palette like a rainbow appearing *before* a coming storm. Green was never comfortable with his stardom. Before he left, he tried to persuade his bandmates to give most of their money to charities; in later years he bought a gun and threatened to kill his accountant, who he believed hadn't followed his orders to give most of his own money away. The exact circumstances of his leaving Fleetwood Mac are as well chronicled as they are murky—LSD, schizophrenia, musical differences and personal demons all figure in—as are the years of hospitalization and musical silence that followed. There were also, eventually, fruitful years of solo recording and touring. History and his ex-bandmates have recorded his story, not unfairly, as tragedy. But Green, who made art, fished and played music to the end, wasn't a man of regrets. He liked those LSD trips. He liked the strange music he made with a mysterious crew of Germans who pulled him away from his Fleetwood Mac bandmates toward the end. He knew how good he was, not for any specific technical reason, but simply because he felt the music, and the music felt him... ANDREW YANG has a question about musicians' income... Remember that Japanese rapper who sold his possessions and flew 6,000 miles on a one-way ticket to try to meet BONE THUGS-N-HARMONY in Cleveland, not knowing a word of English and now knowing none of the Bone Thugs lived there anymore?... RIP DAN MARTIN.
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