The greatest Fleetwood Mac song, according to Mick Fleetwood
The father of Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood, has seen it all come and go from his position on the drum stool. The highs and lows of his once humble blues band are unique even in the turbulent world of rock ‘n’ roll music. The lore of the band is one of comic tragedy, trials and triumphs that not even William Shakespeare would find plausible in fiction.
“Fleetwood Mac has been pretty truthful,” the overseeing drummer once said. “Open about what we do. We’ve always done it from the inside out. Versus being pressured from the outside and changing the inside. And that’s our story.” That open book of mishaps and magic is one that has thrown up many masterpieces. However, there is one song that the legendary drummer holds above any other.
His premiere spot comes from the Peter Green era of the band with a song taken from their sophomore effort, Mr Wonderful, which was released back in 1968. The song, ‘Love That Burns’ is a world away from the type of music that would appear on their seminal Rumours record, with a sound more akin to the blues than the rock pop that followed. With horns and a crooning hard-luck cry, the track is a swaggering epic that could easily be found in Al Green’s back catalogue.
Alas, it was a different Green behind the ballad—though his skills on the guitar are not dissimilar to Al’s vocals. “Peter Green. Fleetwood Mac. This is probably, almost, my favourite song,” he said of the emotional epic. “It kills me. Peter kills me. He was my friend, remains a friend, and he started Fleetwood Mac with me in 1967.” Albeit the song wasn’t a hit, it beautifully exhibits the origins of the outfit. It’s a gorgeous entreaty to anyone’s ear, however, for the drummer, it has a personal edge that emotively elevates it.
“This is me in my full-on training ground,” he continued. “This is the essence of playing ‘Oh Daddy’, the essence of what I was able to get out of playing a form of music that allowed me, as a young chap, to express myself so thoroughly, not only vicariously through Peter – because I loved his playing so much – but when I was privileged to be playing behind somebody so talented.”
This humble decree typifies how Mick became the father figure in the band; how he looked to foster talent and give it a steady beat. As he continues: “When I hear this, it’s all about a young chap, me, knowing why Peter was so overjoyed to be playing the music that he loved so much.” His talent was allowed to flow in Fleetwood Mac, and this anthem is one of the finest exhibits of that. However, perhaps it also hints at the liberated approach beyond composition within the group that proved troublesome.
Sadly, in the end, after their first three albums had amassed a huge fanbase in Europe, the band travelled to Germany and things went awfully awry in a problematic portent of how counterculture stepped one toke over the line. As his bandmates have since explained, one night in Munich, the esteemed Peter Green went to a mysterious party in the forest, took some acid, and apparently, he was never the same person ever again.
“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. It would be too much of a coincidence for it to be anything other than taking drugs, as of that day.”
Thankfully, through the transcendence of music, beautiful tracks like ‘Love That Burns’ remain an edifice of his musical past. It’s a song that shows his skill, spirit, and an encapsulation of an era-defining atmosphere. As Christien McVie would put it, Green “was like Jesus, playing out-of-this-world guitar”.
