The greatest musician Mick Fleetwood ever worked with: “Most brilliant”
Mick Fleetwood never took his status in Fleetwood Mac for granted.
He had a completely charmed band in every sense of the word, and even when they went through some of the most elaborate lineup changes in the world, having someone like Stevie Nicks and Buckingham appear out of the blue and become some of the biggest stars in the band was proof that he knew talent when he saw it out there. But he knew that every member of the band paled in comparison to the true giants that he had played with over the years.
But Fleetwood had a lot of learning to do before he was even ready to become the taskmaster of ‘The Mac’. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers was no picnic for him, and even though he was willing to put in the work and do whatever he could to make the songs sound better, it was never going to work out if he kept getting wild behind the scenes… He could still play the blues, though, so it was only a matter of time before he had an outfit of his own.
And Peter Green seemed like his musical guardian angel when he first started jamming with him and John McVie. The rhythm section already had some of the best chops at the time, and it was going to take a while before anyone could play better blues music than they could, but Green’s touch on his Les Paul guitar was unlike anything that anyone had ever heard before. There was no reference point for where he was going, but everything that he came up with seemed to sound absolutely beautiful.
He was a maverick whenever it came to making the best kinds of guitar fills, but a lot of what he was doing was on the spur of the moment half the time. Carlos Santana was already in love with ‘Black Magic Woman’ years before he ended up covering it with his own band, but Green’s entire operation centred around him not playing the same thing all the time. He needed to keep improving, and that meant constantly switching things up.
Anyone else would have found their lane and stayed in it, but Fleetwood was more knocked out by what Green was coming up with on the fly a lot of the time. Such brilliance doesn’t just fall out of someone every single time they make a record, and Fleetwood felt that Green could have gone down with the greatest musicians that the world had ever seen had he not lost his way halfway through their career.
Because aside from the jazz legends, Fleetwood knew Green was the kind of talent that no one could replace, saying, “I can say without hesitation that Peter Green was the most brilliant musician I’ve ever played with. When he was well, he was on par with a genius like Miles Davis. Like Miles, Peter said things about music as a young man I didn’t understand but never forgot, and now, after a lifetime of playing, it makes complete sense.“
In fact, probably the only downside to Green’s playing was knowing how short a timespan he had with the rest of the group. The effects of LSD had clearly done a number on him over the years, and even if he was being treated like the greatest guitarist that the blues scene had ever heard at the time, the fact that he didn’t have any confidence in himself for the last years of his life was the real tragedy.
He deserved to be celebrated for his talents, but while his absence did leave the door open for Buckingham and Nicks to eventually join, it’s hard not to think of what could have been. The band were on the brink of being something far beyond what traditional blues was supposed to be, and with Fleetwood holding down the foundation of everything, the original version of ‘The Mac’ could have done no wrong.
