The Times
Influential blues rock guitarist who co-founded Fleetwood Mac but quit the band as he struggled with drugs and mental illness
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One night in 1970 after taking LSD, Peter Green had a demonic dream in which he was visited by a green hellhound that barked menacingly at him.
“It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time,” he recalled later. “It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body.”
When he awoke Green concluded that the beast was the Devil and the dream had been telling him that money was the root of all evil. His first reaction was to write a song about his demons. The result was The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown) in which he described a satanic creature “Sneakin’ around,trying to drive me mad/ Bustin’ in on my dreams/ Making me see things I don’t want to see.”
The song was both brilliant and harrowing; its sinister riff, eerie howling and tormented lyrics made it one of the most disturbing hit singles to infiltrate the generally sunny terrain of the Top Ten. It was also the last song Green recorded with his band Fleetwood Mac, for his second reaction to his dream was to leave the group and give all his money away. He allegedly threatened to shoot his accountant unless he stopped sending him royalty cheques.
“It was a freedom thing,” he told The Times in 1997, when after long years away from music he was attempting a comeback. “I wanted to go and live on a commune. In the end I never did but I had to get away from the group. Acid had a lot to do with it.”
Having given his money to the anti-poverty charity War on Want, his guitars were donated to the local Oxfam shop. Green was once assertive and ambitious, but his self-confidence had evaporated and he was sleeping for up to 20 hours a day.
Instead of joining a commune he was eventually committed to an institution. “I was throwing things around and smashing things up,” he told The Times. “I smashed a car windscreen and the police took me to the station. They asked me if I wanted to go to hospital. I said ‘yes’ because I didn’t feel safe going back anywhere else.”
After electroconvulsive therapy he made a brief recovery and, in 1978, married Jane Samuels, an American fiddle player and “Jews for Jesus” Christian, with whom he had a daughter, Rosebud. There was also a return to music with a series of solo albums that contained flashes of his former virtuosity.
However, the twilight was soon to descend again. His marriage ended in divorce after little more than a year and his ex-wife returned to North America with their daughter. He also had a son, Liam Firlej, from another relationship.
By the mid-1980s he had reverted to his birth name, Greenbaum, and adopted a hermit-like existence. Fans and journalists who sought him out invariably came back with bizarre tales. He was living as a tramp and was called “the Werewolf” by local children. He had grown his fingernails until they were eight inches long. At various times he was said to be working as a gravedigger in London, then living quietly with his mother and brother in Essex or Great Yarmouth. All seem to have been true at different points in his life, but as the rumours swirled they became harder to verify. Seldom can any influential rock star have disappeared from view so completely.
From time to time it was said that he was about to stage a comeback. After years of such reports, he finally made an appearance at the Guildford Festival in 1996. It was evident that he had not played a guitar in a long time and he appeared a shadow of his former self. “It hurt my fingers at first and I am still re-learning,” he told The Times a year later. “I’ve gone back to basics. I used to worry and make things very complicated. Now I keep it simple.”
The music world welcomed his return though he never recaptured the greatness of his early years in the 1960s, when he was one of several British guitarists who revitalised the blues, which had fallen out of fashion as black America embraced the younger, more pop- orientated sounds of soul music. BB King, the doyen of American blues guitarists, rated Green as the best of the talented exponents who emerged during the 1960s British blues boom. “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats,” King said. Given that the competition included Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, it was some compliment.
By the time of his breakdown, Fleetwood Mac were one of the biggest British bands of the era, with a string of hits written by Green including Black Magic Woman (later covered by Santana); the chart-topping instrumental Albatross; Man of the World, which was only kept from the No 1 slot by the Beatles’ Get Back; and Oh Well, which made No 2 in the British charts. It was claimed that in 1969 Fleetwood Mac sold more records than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones put together.
However, Green’s erratic behaviour was increasingly destabilising the group. He had embraced a mix of religions including Buddhism and Christianity, appearing on Top of the Pops wearing white robes and a crucifix. “He was taking a lot of acid and mescaline around the same time his illness began manifesting itself,” Mick Fleetwood, the group’s drummer and co-founder, said in 2015. “We were oblivious as to what schizophrenia was back in those days but we knew something was amiss.” Nor was Green the only member of the band with mental health issues. Jeremy Spencer, his fellow guitarist, disappeared while on tour in 1971 after saying he was going out to buy some groceries. It transpired that he had left to join the Children of God cult. A year later, the guitarist Danny Kirwan (obituary June 15, 2018) had a breakdown and was asked to leave after smashing up the band’s dressing room and refusing to go on stage.
Somehow Fleetwood Mac not only soldiered on but found even greater success by abandoning the blues for a radio-friendly soft-rock style and embracing a new line-up. Green never played with the later incarnation of the group and talk of a reunion of the original line-up came to nothing, but Fleetwood organised a tribute concert for Green at the London Palladium in February this year. Pete Townshend, John Mayall and Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour were among those who performed his songs but Green himself did not attend.
He was born Peter Allen Greenbaum in Bethnal Green, east London, in October 1946, the youngest of four. Unlike many of his peers on the British music scene of the 1960s, he was not a middle-class art student from the lace-curtained suburbs, but came from a working-class Jewish family and grew up in the East End. His father, Joe, was a tailor turned postman and his mother, Ann, was of Polish extraction. On leaving school at 15 he became a butcher’s boy.
His brother Michael had taught him to play the guitar and he had swiftly graduated from playing copies of the Shadows’ hits to venerating Muddy Waters and the other Chicago bluesmen who had moved north from the Mississippi Delta to escape Jim Crow and had electrified the blues in the city’s South Side clubs. By 1965, after cutting his teeth playing bass in semi-pro groups, he was playing lead guitar in Peter B’s Looners, where he met Fleetwood.
That same year he enjoyed a brief spell playing in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers as a stand-in for Eric Clapton, who had taken a two-month holiday in Greece. He got the role by “turning up at gigs and shouting from the audience that he was much better than whoever was playing”, Clapton reported. Mayall was the godfather of the British blues scene and most of its best players passed through his band but when Clapton returned, Green was ousted.
“He was a real Turk — a strong, confident person who knew exactly what he wanted and where he was going,” Clapton wrote in his autobiography. “More importantly he was a phenomenal player with a great tone. He was not happy to see me, as it meant rather a sudden end to what had obviously been a good gig for him.”
He did not have long to wait for a recall. Nine months later, in the summer of 1966, Clapton left for good and Green became his permanent replacement. His predecessor had built up a following that had resulted in the graffiti “Clapton Is God” appearing on the streets of London, but Green filled his shoes admirably. After making his recording debut with Mayall on the innovative Hard Road album, his powerful, clean and spare blues style led to him being dubbed “the Green God”.
However, he quit Mayall’s band a year later, complaining that the arrangements were becoming “too jazzy”. His initial plan was to head for America. When permit and visa hassles left him stranded in London, he put together his own group with Fleetwood and Mayall’s bass player, John McVie, plus Spencer as a second guitarist.
Billed as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, the band played their first gig at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival in the summer of 1967. At the time white British blues bands were ten a penny, memorably parodied by the Bonzo Dog Band in Can Blue Men Sing the Whites? and satirised by Adrian Henri and the Liverpool Scene in I’ve Got These Fleetwood Mac Chicken Shack John Mayall Can’t Fail Blues. However, Green’s sensuous guitar-playing, haunting voice and ability to write original blues songs elevated Fleetwood Mac above the competition.
Sadly his imperial phase was all too brief. His 1970 solo debut, The End of the Game, was much anticipated but lacked focus. His return a decade later was similarly disappointing and when he resurfaced in the late 1990s fronting the Peter Green Splinter Group, much of the more intricate guitar work was left to his friend Nigel Watson, who had helped to coax him back from obscurity. The group ceased playing in 2004 when Green reported that the medication he was on made it difficult for him to concentrate. Having lived on anti-psychotic drugs for so many years, he was prone to nodding off. The Public Guardianship Office stepped in to protect his interests.
His glory years may have been fleeting, yet his legacy was profound. “As the plaudits have been heaped upon Clapton, Beck and Page as the holy trinity of British guitar-playing, Green has become something of a forgotten man,” Uncut magazine wrote in 2019 in a review of some previously unheard live Fleetwood Mac recordings. “But on his night, he was capable of out-playing all of them.”
Peter Green, guitarist and songwriter, was born on October 29, 1946. He died in his sleep on July 25, 2020, aged 73