How Kirk Hammett ended up with Peter Green’s guitar
It’s one of the most legendary guitars of all time: the Gibson Les Paul. If you’re a true fan (with some deep pockets), there’s only one version of the instrument to go for, and that’s a 1959 model. 1958-1960 is generally considered the golden age for the Les Paul, with 1959 being a particularly revered year. Everyone from Jeff Beck to Jimmy Page and Joe Walsh has wielded those axes, but one of the first stars who used the guitar in the British rock scene was original Fleetwood Mac leader Peter Green.
Green’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard was his go-to guitar for all of his most legendary licks, showing up in concert with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and classic recordings like ‘Albatross’, ‘Oh Well’ and ‘Black Magic Woman’. Green was able to coax out beauty and aggression from the axe, but when Green himself fell into a dark spiral, the Les Paul ended up in the hands of future Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore.
Moore claims that Green called him up and offered him his number one instrument personally. Moore attempted to offer Green a healthy sum of money for the guitar, but Green only ended up selling the Les Paul for around £100. Moore then offered to keep it on hold for Green and give it back whenever he asked, but Green refused that as well. “Greeny” was now Moore’s, and he would use it extensively throughout his career, including on the albums Black Rose: A Rock Legend and the Green tribute LP Blues for Greeny.
Before his death in 2011, Moore sold the guitar to square up some of his financial debts. “Greeny” traded hands over the next decade, with its price skyrocketing up to $2million. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett got a call about possibly buying the guitar, but he was unwilling to pay the expected price. After he was informed that the price had gone down, Hammett agreed to give the guitar a test run.
“I plugged it into the vintage Marshall amp, turned it up and played it,” Hammett recalled. “After about 30 seconds, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is not your standard Les Paul…’ and I went to the middle position because, you know, that’s the revered sound, and I started ripping out, and I thought to myself, ‘Holy shit, this is a total contradiction.'”
“It sounded like an incredible Les Paul in the bridge position and in the neck position, but when you put it in the middle position, it kind of sounded like a Strat through a 100‑watt Marshall stack!” Hammett observed. “And then I got it. I got it. I understood completely what Greeny was all about. And you know the history side, the fact that it’s been on all these albums and all this great music, but aside from all that, the bare fact of the matter is that it’s just an amazing-sounding guitar. It just blew me away, and everything just kind of made sense.”
After testing it out with Thin Lizzy’s take on ‘Whisky in the Jar’ (which Metallica themselves covered in 1998), Hammett began playing some classic Fleetwood Mac tracks. “When you pick up Greeny, and you start playing ‘Oh Well’ or ‘Albatross’, it sounds like the recording. It’s amazing. You play ‘Oh Well’ unplugged, just acoustically, and it sounds like Greeny. It’s the most amazing thing. And the resonance is pretty outrageous. It’s pretty loud acoustically, it has a lot of body to it, and the tone rings through even without an amp.”
“Once I got the guitar into my possession, I handed the guitar to John Marshall – he was my guitar tech forever, and he actually played with Metallica for a short period of time – I said, ‘Play ‘Oh Well’ and he started playing it, and he goes, ‘Ah wow! It sounds just like it!’ and I said, ‘Exactly! Isn’t that incredible?’ And so there you have it, man. It truly is breathtaking.”
Although he’s best known as a metal musician, Hammett always had a fondness for Green’s bluesy licks. “I just love Peter Green. I love his playing. If there wasn’t a Peter Green, there might not have been a Carlos Santana. I see a direct correlation – there’s a direct influence there,” Hammett told MusicRadar in 2021. “I really love his playing on the John Mayall albums as well as those Fleetwood Mac albums. I really, really love the track ‘The Supernatural’. I love it because when he hits those notes, it says it all.”
“And from time to time, I’ll pick up Greeny, and I’ll play ‘Black Magic Woman’, or I’ll play ‘Coming Home’ or something, and it feels there, the feel is just so there. I just can’t believe it.” For Hammett, the pair of former owners make “Greeny” a one-of-a-kind prize. “Another thing that really is amazing for me is the guitar was also played on Thin Lizzy’s Black Rose, which is one of my favourite Thin Lizzy albums.”
Watch Hammet talk to Gibson about the guitar, plus watch him play Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Green Manalishi’, down below.
