Jesus Never Came Back: A German castle, a forest and the acid trip that destroyed Fleetwood Mac’s founders
Peace and love’s days were numbered from the start; there weren’t enough syllables in that epithet to sustain it, especially when it was in dalliance with a bedevilling three-letter initialism: LSD.
The drug sent the era wayward. Ultimately, it brought about its demise when Charles Manson’s addled followers exposed the dark underbelly of the sunny ‘Summer of Love’. It all began as a psychedelic swirl of tie-dye, universal epiphanies, and sonic exploration. When the patent for LSD mysteriously expired in 1963, there was a three-year period during which the drug was legal.
This snippet of time had an irrevocable impact on what was to come. And might not be too ‘hip’ to admit, but tales soon came to the fore that made criminalising the drug seem like an imperative as opposed to party pooping.
Albert Hofmann might have said, “LSD is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be,” and Paul McCartney said it opened his eyes, but the drug wasn’t always administered sensibly once the high-wire ways of rock ‘n’ roll were mingled with it. This resulted in some sorry tumbles down dark rabbit holes that stand to show the dark side of counterculture and the acid trips that troubled it.
Peter Green was the iconic guitarist who trailblazed rock ‘n’ roll riffs into the scintillating early Fleetwood Mac records. For a while, he was reinventing the blues at a rate that prompted BB King to concede that he was the only guitarist to ever make him break out in “cold sweats”. He also elucidated that he had the songwriting skills to go along with his rattling guitar playing in lilting ditties like the beauteous ‘Man of the World’.
However, he only lasted three albums with the band. Nevertheless, those first three albums had enamoured a European fanbase, and when the British blues band embarked on a huge tour of the continent, a tragedy awaited them in Munich.
Green was greeted at the airport by suspicious-looking fans. Some of the band were wary from the off. The strange German fanatics seemed to dote on Green in a manner that seemed mildly perturbing. Their suspicions would later prove justified. “John McVie would certainly blame an evening in Germany where Peter took some more drugs and for sure never really came back from that, to our recollection,” Mick Fleetwood once opined.
Guitarist Jeremy Spencer – who one day a few years later wandered from the tour bus to a petrol station to pick up a magazine and wound up never returning, having suddenly enlisted as a member of the The Children of God, a cult guilty of countless child abuse offenses – also commented on the strange incident, describing the woman who greeted Green as a “model/actress looking girl dressed in black velvet, Woah!”
He added that she was with “this John Lennon-looking guy in wire glasses”. They accompanied Green to the Munich gig and watched the rest of the band with disdain, largely just staring at their chosen hero, before inviting everyone back to “a party at this huge mansion place in the forest”.
The tale that follows sounds almost mystic. Driven into the darkened woods by two handsome Svengalis who stared at Green throughout the gig and threw the rest of the band the sort of look you might reserve for a YouTube advert, things began to get creepy. They weaved further into the forest, noticing strange things, before arriving at an old castle-esque abode. Therein, other mystic hippie figures seemed to be mulling around.
Amid a manic psychedelic party in the commune-like mansion, Green was drawn down into the basement and arrived out of the other side “in tears”. In the band’s eyes, he was distraught, despite Green claiming to have had an extraordinary experience and stating that he played the best guitar of his life down there; something didn’t feel quite right. Christine McVie would recall him looking like “Jesus” in the early days of the band; that Christ-like figure would never front Fleetwood Mac again.
Another member of the band present that day was Danny Kirwan. Fate also besieged him that night. “Peter Green and Danny Kirwan both went together to that house in Munich,” their one-time manager Clifford Davis recalls…
“Both of them took acid, as I understand. Both of them, as of that day, became seriously mentally ill.”
Clifford Davis
Davis connected the rather simple dots of their demise and concluded, “It would be too much of a coincidence for it to be anything other than taking drugs, as of that day.” The rest of the band felt an intense sense of dread in that murky forest castle and managed to scurry away with the two heavily intoxicated members as dawn was approaching.
While Green would recover and enjoy a creative life away from the spotlight despite persistent problems, things fared differently for Kirwan. “Danny had been a nervous and sensitive lad from the start. He was never really suited to the rigours of the business,” Mick Fleetwood once opined.
“Touring is hard, and the routine wears us all down … Our manager kept us touring non-stop, and we were being stretched to our limits … and the pressure was obviously taking its toll. He simply withdrew into his own world,” the drummer conceded.
One night, while backstage, this regression came to the fore. “Danny was being odd about tuning his guitar,” Mick Fleetwood remembers. “He got up suddenly … and bashed his head into the wall, splattering blood everywhere. I’d never seen him do anything that violent in all the years I’d known him. The rest of us were paralysed, in complete shock. He grabbed his precious Les Paul guitar and smashed it to bits.”
While the perils of the road in a wider sense may well have played their part, there were plenty of witnesses who trace his withdrawal right back to the same eerie night in Germany that caused Green to lose his footing on the climb to be counterculture’s greatest guitarist.
The blood-splattered Kirwan was promptly sacked from the band, and in the callous world of showbiz in those days, very little was done to provide a parachute for the former star. His mental well-being was largely disregarded upon his dismissal. As Mick Fleetwood bluntly told Men’s Journal, “He was wonderful, but couldn’t handle the life,” eventually ending up homeless on the streets of London.
When Bob Brunning tried to track Kirwan down for a memoir, he found him holed up at St Mungo’s Community Hostel for the Homeless in Covent Garden. The derelict man that Brunning recalls merely looked at him and said in an incoherent mumble, “Can’t help you, Bob. Too much stress.”
Four years later, he was located once more. This time, he was in a Los Angeles hostel for the homeless, where he had been for four years. He was apparently living on social security and a small trickle of royalties. As he told The Independent: “I’ve been through a bit of a rough patch, but I’m not too bad. I get by. I suppose I am homeless, but then I’ve never really had a home since our early days on tour.”
What happened in Munich’s murky forest was never put to him and largely remains a mystery. The rest of the band never descended into the depths of the basement where the rumbling hedonistic height of the party was taking place, and all they can recall is the fear they felt upon finding their re-emerged friends, frazzled by some unknown force.
This dark tale of a night with near-mystic overtones is not only a portent to the problems of counterculture’s glamourising of drug taking, but also one that exposes the callous nature of showbiz. The stresses were self-evident on these stars, and more should have been done to prevent things from unfolding as tragically as they did. That must serve as a warning for how we look at celebrity in the current climate and be more empathetic for those who fall from grace.
