By Max Grieve

I was recently reminded of the passing of the late Peter Green, at age 73 in the summer of 2020, by that elusive device of the 21st century, the Spotify ‘recommended-for-you' algorithm. The album suggested was not in fact one of Green’s, but recorded by his mentee and friend (and another relatively obscure musician in popular circles), Gary Moore, entitled Blues for Greeny, a collection of covers of Green’s songs, themselves largely paying homage to the American blues tradition. Rushing to get an essay done in the Wee Small Hours, fueled by cheap dry coffee, I stuck it on in the background to try and remain calm; and once finished, I wrote on a post-it note, ‘listen to original of “Need Your Love So Bad”’, to be rediscovered the next day. I’m glad I did. Revisiting Peter Green’s work has reaffirmed – at least, to my mind - that he was one of the greatest guitar players, and indeed blues and soul vocalists, of all time, a true tour-de-force of the genre. So mighty was his musical prowess, that B.B. King – the ‘King’ of the blues – said of Green, ‘he has the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.’

Green’s life was a complex and volatile one. Born Peter Allen Greenbaum in 1946, he grew up in London’s Bethnal Green and started playing guitar as a child; he assumed the career of a professional musician at the tender age of fifteen, playing bass in Bobby Dennis and the Dominoes, a rock ‘n’ roll cover outfit. A quick succession of bands followed: the Muskrats, the Tridents, Peter B’s Looners and Shotgun Express. Green came under the UK-wide limelight, finally, whilst under the mentorship of John Mayall in John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, that stalwart of the British-blues movement (along with the likes of the Rolling Stones), after Mayall’s notoriously unreliable lead guitarist left for a jolly in Greece, in 1966; that guitarist was Eric Clapton. When Clapton left the Bluesbreakers for good in July of that same year – going on to form Cream, rock’s first ‘supergroup’ and the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s main rival – Peter Green got the gig, and Mayall was more than confident that he would fill the shoes of the world’s greatest guitarist: ‘He might not be better now,’ Mayall purportedly said to his producer of the time, Mike Vernon of Decca Records, ‘but you wait, in a couple of years he’s going to be the best.’

A Hard Road was recorded with Mayall in 1967, featuring bassist John McVie; after Green had split off from the Bluesbreakers and formed a new band with Mick Fleetwood – Fleetwood Mac – the two eventually convinced McVie to become the new outfit’s permanent bassist. 1968 saw Fleetwood Mac’s first attempts at an album – one which garnered enormous success, climbing to no. 4 on the British charts, and featuring Green-penned compositions such as “Long Grey Mare” and “I Loved Another Woman”. Thus did Fleetwood Mac become a staple of British blues-rock only months after its founding.

Fleetwood Mac was followed by the release of the single, “Need Your Love So Bad” (more on that later), and a second studio album, Mr. Wonderful, the record on which “Black Magic Woman” was originally released, later covered famously by Santana. Then Play On was unleashed in September to further acclaim and included the Spanish-influenced “Oh Well”, which plays like a compressed Baroque concerto. Versatile, gritty, subtle, and transcendent: the band seemed unstoppable.

That was until a certain ill, one depressingly familiar to successful musicians in the 60s and 70s – drugs – entered the equation, most notably in Green’s personal life. The explosion in the 1960s of the hippie’s tonic, LSD, saw even the kings of vanilla-music, The Beatles, consuming the drug and changing their music according to the psychedelic experiences it produced, Revolver being their first LSD-influenced album. Green started using heavily in 1969 and developed a collection of outlandish habits which confused his bandmates: he wore robes, started wearing a crucifix and preached to the band the necessity to abstain from the profits they made, suggesting that they instead gave them away. In 1970, disaster struck. Whilst at a party in a Munich commune during Fleetwood Mac’s 1970 tour, Green took an enormous dose of corrupted LSD, which Clifford Davis, the band’s manager at the time, said changed his mental state so much so that ‘he was never the same again.’ Green left Fleetwood Mac later that year; and whilst he spent the rest of his life as a musician’s musician, releasing albums sporadically, being treated for schizophrenia in the mid-70s and conducting a certain ascetic lifestyle, Fleetwood Mac gained a new member – Christine Perfect – and moved to a softer, more mainstream pop sound, sustaining the commercial success they had had under the leadership of Peter Green, and arguably superseding it.

Green’s finest, most prominent guitar work – the stuff which is so revered by guitarists today – can be found in his album with the Bluesbreakers, A Hard Road, and his earliest recordings with Fleetwood Mac. A Hard Road’s “The Stumble”, “So Many Roads”, and “Dust My Blues” showcase his extraordinary musical ear; his improvisations, fills and solos assume the position of second lead vocal, next to his own singing and that of Mayall, that distinctly-Peter-Green Les Paul wailing with desperation and comedy. “The Supernatural" - perhaps his most famous tune, an instrumental – features some of the most blistering tones to have been recorded by 1967, articulated yet rounded, firm yet warm in timbre. His guitar – the Les Paul Standard which was to be used on Moore’s later tribute album - had been toyed with by Green to make it ‘out-of-phase' at some point before working with Mayall full-time: the pickups were reversed, giving it a somewhat muffled tone. Peers and colleagues christened it the “magic” guitar.

This “magic” guitar continued to be used by Green in Fleetwood Mac, and his most famous song today with them, “Need Your Love So Bad”, is recorded with it, a clip of which has amassed more than six million views on YouTube. The introductory solo, a beautiful improvisation in A major, has the guitar quite literally singing: the sweet, bouncing tone, possibly enhanced by the light intrusion of a capacitor, and Green’s Django-like rest-stroke attack in the right hand, facilitates his acrobatic quarter, half, full and 150% stringbends. His sparing manipulation of the higher strings with such detail and attention to pitch makes him sound like a soul singer from the Deep South; then he starts singing with his voice. So masterful is Green’s rendition that many mistake “Need Your Love So Bad” to be a composition of his own, when it is in fact the work of blues singer Little Willie John.

There is no question that the abrupt and distressing end of Green’s leadership stint with Fleetwood Mac is one of the great tragedies of rock music; that his life was subsequently so devastatingly marred by mental illness further adds to it. More recent clips of him shyly shuffling around his extensive guitar collection are beyond poignant, and evocative of what could have been, had LSD not seeped into his life. But that is not to detract from the vast body of work Green executed and has left behind for us to enjoy. His legacy as a guitar player is monumental, one of the first in electric blues to make his guitar truly imitate a human voice - a voice from the soul and gospel tradition - and so unlike the shred players who came to dominate the guitar scene in 1980s and 1990s. Now that softer, more soulful sounds are returning to twenty-first century guitar-playing, one wonders where such musical ideas and concepts originated. I believe that they can be traced quite comfortably back - in part - to the original tortured soul of electric blues, Mr. Peter Greenbaum.

Thanks to James McLean for his time and expertise on Peter Green’s guitars and tonal settings.

ST.ART Magazine does not own the rights to any images used in this article.