Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography

by Mick Fleetwood

  None of that mattered, of course, because Peter Green was meant to play the guitar. In the Peter B’s, Greenie came into his own. The first time he played with us, I was impressed but not awestruck. Honestly, I wasn’t sure that he’d be of much use to our sound. He was capable of playing the expected blues but I didn’t see him creating much beyond that. I told Bardens what I thought but he told me to be patient, to wait and see. He believed that this guy had a talent that he was too inexperienced to understand. There was a player in there and I’d see him too, if I stood by and supported him properly.

  ‘I’m not so sure Peter,’ I said. ‘How long do you want to wait?’

  ‘Won’t be long. You’ll see.’

  Well, Bardens was right. In no time Peter Green found his tone–and what a tone it was. Once he’d settled in and trusted us backing him, Peter Green’s playing became the voice no one could ignore. He could be running through a blues progression we all knew, one that we’d heard a million times, but after he’d emerged from his shell, when Peter played it, those same old notes sounded brand new. Peter’s guitar tone was wailing, high and lingering. It gave me shivers every single night. It still does today.

  I can say without hesitation that Peter Green was the most brilliant musician I have ever played with. When he was well, he was on a par with a genius like Miles Davis. Like Miles, Peter said things about music that as a young man I didn’t understand but never forgot and now, after a lifetime of playing, make complete sense. He was my mentor, he was my teacher, my captain and for a time, my best friend.

  Peter is a hero to so many guitarists, from heavy-metal bands like Metallica to blues connoisseurs like Aerosmith. He wrote ‘Black Magic Woman’ in 1968, the song that made the band Santana famous two years later, which is why Carlos Santana asked Peter and me to play that song with him at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1998, as Fleetwood Mac were being inducted the same year. Since the last time he’d even played that song, probably ten to fifteen years earlier, the complicated mental illness that seized Peter in 1970 had transformed him from the friend and co-pilot I’d loved so dearly, to a mystery I still can’t fathom.

  His desire to perform publicly had been erratic; his career full of short tours here and the odd contribution to my records and others’ there, often not credited by demand. All of it had been random, dictated by whatever his mood at the time happened to be. Since the onset of his condition, Peter had struggled morally with the fact that his gift–his beautiful, singular guitar playing–was something that could be commodified. At times, no matter how it was put to him, he refused to acknowledge that his playing should be celebrated, let alone rewarded. Rather than let that happen, he would refuse to play.

  I explained this to Carlos Santana, promising him that I’d talk to Peter but I couldn’t guarantee anything. When I put it to Peter, I gave it my all, because no one wanted to see him play that song more than I did.

  Somehow I got Peter to agree to play with Carlos at the ceremony. I was shocked, because getting Peter to join us at the induction at all had been a feat in itself. Picking up an award at a formal ceremony seemed to me to be exactly the type of thing I expected Peter to reject without question. He was generally in good spirits about the whole thing but I knew that could turn at any second, so I just went with it, and when it seemed like the right moment I asked him if he’d like to play with Carlos and Pete said yes. He even agreed to do a rehearsal with Santana.

  I don’t think Carlos realised just how much of a miracle this was and frankly how could he? At the rehearsal, Carlos played us a beautiful recording of Peter soloing on ‘Black Magic Woman’ sometime in the late 1960s, a perfect specimen, one that captured all the highs and lows and profound beauty in Peter’s playing. Carlos then told us how much that song and Peter’s playing had influenced him and that he’d not be the player he is today if he’d never heard Peter Green play guitar.

  You could have heard a pin drop. Peter stared at Carlos blankly for a very long and awkward minute or two. Then we did a run through of the song and when it came time for Pete to solo, he laid down one, maybe two sustained notes and nothing more.

  Carlos was understandably concerned about the performance to come and asked me to talk to Peter.

  ‘Carlos,’ I said. ‘I promise you. I’ll do all that I can. But it may make no difference.’

  I asked Peter if he liked what he’d played.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe if you played something like you used to when you played that song, you might like it again. Things might be better if you do it the way you used to,’ I said. ‘Do you want to hear that? I have tapes of us doing it live back when the record came out.’

  ‘Play me what he wants me to play,’ he said.

  I cued up the tape and watched Peter Green regard the speakers as if they were sputtering gibberish in a foreign language.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s you, Peter. That’s your playing and that’s what they want you to do. Or something like it.’

  ‘But why?’ He was truly perplexed. ‘Why do they want that? Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Well, that’s you. You’re the one that wrote the song and did it that way and it was great. That’s what made Carlos become the player he is. He wants to celebrate that.’

  ‘Yeah, but why would I want to do that? Why, when I’ve already done it?’

  I had no answer for him there. He silenced me. He was right and he’d cut through all the shit, straight to the heart of the matter.

  Until that moment, I’d never quite understood Miles Davis and his deliberate dissection of form; his insistence on playing one long note or turning his back to the audience. In the same way I’d had a hard time appreciating contemporary artists like Mondrian, who painted one perfect black line across a canvas and called it a day. But, sitting there with my old friend Peter Green, all of it made sense to me, and it has ever since. It was almost too much to bear. Peter had been so far ahead, he’d done all of what the rest of us considered the only thing to do. He’d done all that could be done within the confines of structure so expertly that the only thing that made sense to him anymore was one bold black line on a blank page.

  Still, he agreed to perform with Carlos, but when he did, Peter kept turning his guitar down. Every time he did that, Carlos turned it up. It was a civil, respectful tug-of-war.

  Peter Green didn’t give Carlos Santana what he wanted, but the Green God was present. No one heard him live on stage that night, but he was in the house, he just didn’t want anyone to know it. Believe me. I went to the control room after the show, because I wasn’t going to leave before I heard what Peter had actually played. The engineer turned the feed way up, and when he did, there it was. Peter had laid down a stark, melodic solo that was as beautiful as it was a huge ‘Fuck you’. It was a broadcast from the fringe of purely individual thought, something precious for no one else to enjoy but the man who played it. It was the hardest line to paint. It was a lone, bold, black mark down the middle of a canvas.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE BLUESBREAKERS

  The Peter B’s really were something there for a moment and I’ve got no reason to err on the side of hyperbole. We were one of the two or three acts chosen to support the best of the best, because Bardens was a visionary musician. Under his guidance, the Peter B’s later became the Shotgun Express, which featured me and amongst others, a very talented, impossible to ignore, raspy vocalist named Rod Stewart. After Bardens was done playing that manner of blues and rock with all of us, in the 1970s he broke new ground as a solo artist, experimenting in the type of synth-based music that laid the groundwork for the electronic music of today. Peter was great and he was taken from us far too soon in 2002, at the age of fifty-six, by lung cancer.

  But back then, once he’d put together the Peter B’s, we were booked solid. We filled support slots at every prestigious gig there was, which is how we got invited to pl
ay at Tara Browne’s birthday party. I’ve mentioned Tara already in passing, but I’ve not taken the chance to say that he was, truly, a wonderfully warm Irish lad. He was one of the heirs to the Guinness brewing fortune but you’d never know it unless someone told you. His wealth and influence had nothing to do with his charm; Tara was who he was and it came through.

  He was a sprite, a dashing patron of all manner of culture to be sure. He was always there, always in the moment. He made the rounds with the Beatles and the Stones and he always did it right, he was never a nagging tag-a-long. So when Tara was set to turn twenty-one, every single person in our little bubble world was up for it, because we knew he would do it right. He chose one of the most gorgeous properties I’d ever seen, one that had been in his family for nearly a century. It was a castle in County Wicklow, Ireland, set in a wide green valley, complete with a staff, chauffeurs, stables, everything but a legion of hunters on horseback awaiting the release of the red fox. Tara flew up the two hundred or so guests in two private jets, including John Paul Getty, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and his girlfriend at the time, Anita Pallenberg. This party was special and those invited knew it too; all of us arrived in decadent, splendid costumes, whether they’d been kitted out at thrift stores or bought from a posh boutique. There was a glamour to it all that befit the setting.

  I spent hours that seemed endless with Brian Jones at that party, because as soon as I walked into a hall as grand as a cathedral, he was the first person I saw. He beckoned to me to follow him upstairs before I had time to register the scope of the place.

  ‘Come on, Mick, let me show you something.’

  I followed Brian upstairs. He led me down a hall, looking back to make sure I was with him, smirking in that knowing way of his. He opened a door and there, in the middle of the room, was the biggest block of opiated Moroccan hashish I’d ever seen in my entire life. There was nothing else in the room but that hash, a beautiful glass hookah and a bed.

  ‘Is this yours Brian?’ I asked, ogling that massive block of drugs.

  ‘Sure it is, Mick. It’s mine. It’s all of ours. It’s here for everyone. So let’s have some.’

  This was the birthday party to end all birthday parties. For one thing the music was stellar, full of various bands playing everything from blues to all manner of Eastern excursions; in short, every musical genre the English rock-and-roll scene was currently into. The environment was indulgently magical, with jugglers and people dressed up as goblins and other mythological figures.

  Tara being Tara, he even had a surprise for those who thought they knew everything. He’d arranged to have the Lovin’ Spoonful flown over from America to play during the height of the weekend. He’d told no one. At the time the Spoonful had a huge Top 10 hit in the States with ‘Do You Believe in Magic’, which we all knew, whether we liked it or not. What mattered was that Tara had flown in the hottest new group in the American charts that week–because he wanted them to play their hit song at his birthday.

  That moment was beyond words. Just to be able to do that, so nonchalantly, as a surprise to your guests, was amazing. The Spoonful impressed me, for what it’s worth. I had thought they were bubblegum crap, but seeing them live, right there on the stairs of Tara’s house, I changed my mind. They could play; they weren’t just a piece of candy, they were the real deal. They blew everyone’s mind, because all of us who’d doubted them saw first-hand that John Sebastian had the goods.

  Tara was quite the host, as he always was. Sadly, he left us about seven months after that party. He was killed in a car crash in December 1966, while speeding in his Lotus Elan through South Kensington. He failed to see a traffic light and smashed into a parked lorry. His passing touched us all.

  There was some debate about it–on record even Paul McCartney and John Lennon couldn’t agree–but I’ve come to accept as truth that the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’ was inspired by the newspaper headline that Tara Browne had died and I couldn’t imagine a more beautifully appropriate song to be his eulogy.

  In the spring of 1966, months before Tara passed and all that happened, the Peter B’s cut a single called ‘Do You Wanna Be Happy?’ and we added two additional singers to our roster, one male, one female. It made a huge difference, so much so that our name no longer made sense, so we changed it to the Shotgun Express. Our two new singers were the best anyone could hope to have. They were Beryl Marsden, one of the most powerfully beautiful R&B singers I’ve ever known and as I mentioned earlier, Rod Stewart, a North London chap who needs no introduction.

  Can you imagine how great that band was? Those two singing, the bassist Dave Ambrose and me holding it down, laying back in the groove and letting them loose with Peter Green beside them–it was fucking gorgeous. In those days, Rod was the embodiment of the recently-deceased Sam Cooke and with Beryl up there with him, they could melt iron. Peter Green was coming into his own and it was powerful every night. Greenie was becoming known as ‘the Green God’, up there with Eric Clapton, who some people had begun to equate with God in graffiti all over London.

  The Shotgun Express was a shooting star, too full of talent not to break apart. We were a powerhouse live, each of us doing our bit, but not always together. Although Rod Stewart was an equal band member, he was already a star because he behaved like one. It was my first experience of working with a prima donna, yet it made complete sense. Rod the Mod and his fantastic full head of hair, which if I remember correctly stood up on the strength of a mixture of sugar and lemon, could not be counted on to unload the van if it was raining.

  ‘Lads, I don’t think I’ll be doing that,’ he’d say.

  ‘Well, why the fuck not?’

  ‘Because the hair will get fucked up. And someone’s got to look good out there.’

  It was hard to argue with him because it made sense, and he did look so damn good out there and sang so well that no one wanted to mess with that. After a while we never asked for his help again and let Rod the Mod sit there. No one minded because he did his magic on stage. Rod also taught me about clothes and was the first person to make me realise that being my size, shopping in stores was a waste of time. What I needed was a tailor, something I knew nothing about. Rod and I nearly worked together again, when Jeff Beck called me up to tell me he was forming a band with Ron Wood and wanted me to be their drummer. Peter Green and I had already formed Fleetwood Mac, so I turned Jeff down, but if I hadn’t, I might have become one of the Faces.

  Shotgun Express was a group of talented individuals playing our hearts out, but missing the glue that turns a collective of musicians into a living, breathing band. Peter Green was the first to leave Shotgun Express, after which the rest of it fell apart. Rod went on to join the Jeff Beck Group, while Peter went back to playing for John Mayall, because after a year in the band Eric Clapton had set out on his own. I was the only one left jobless.

  Back in the Bluesbreakers, Peter really took flight. He became the Peter Green, the stuff of legend. But fans of the Bluesbreakers were not receptive to him at first, because he was now the guy stepping into Eric’s shoes, and Eric had become the high priest of the blues. Doubt be damned, Peter showed them a thing or two. He became living proof that John Mayall was a true patron of British blues. He was a forward thinker too, a master of spotting young talent, as he still is today. He was like a father-figure, very businesslike. When you worked for him, you showed up on time and when he said he was going to pay you, you’d be paid. You knew where you stood with John Mayall, so playing in his band was a very secure place to be. John also gave his players all the credit and took care of his flock.

  I was unemployed for the first time in four years when the Shotgun went bust. Lord knows I’d saved nothing, I’d been living week to week which was fine, but once that was gone I had to sort something out. The best idea I came up with was starting a business with a friend of mine named Dave DaSilva to clean windows and also to decorate them for the various shops and boutiques around London. My father ca
me to our rescue by loaning us the money to buy what we’d need–ladders, buckets and brushes. We got ourselves properly kitted out and spent the next few months advertising our services, but we were all dressed up with nowhere to go. We tried, we really did, but Dave and I landed precisely zero jobs.

  I tried to keep this from the family; I’d make up stories of how Dave and I had just cleaned some windows and how we’d been hired to install a few mannequins. My sister Sally didn’t buy it for a second, so she came round and saw how Dave and I were living. We were starving, eating the least expensive canned goods we could afford. Sally, my angel, out of the goodness of her heart, hired us to paint her new home off Kensington Church Street, across from a gallery space that her husband had bought.

  That put more cans in the cupboard for a while, until Peter Green came calling, thank God, and asked me to join him in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. I was overjoyed but also shocked actually, because that band had one hell of a drummer. His name was Aynsley Dunbar and he was a fucking powerhouse, far superior to me. I don’t know exactly what happened there, but from what I heard it sounded like Aynsley was a bit too good for his designated role in Mayall’s outfit. He was such a massively-skilled drummer that he wasn’t content playing straightforward blues and couldn’t contain himself. He felt held back and had started to express himself through solos that became somewhat of a problem within the context of the band.