Peter Green’s inside take on Fleetwood Mac: “I had a vision”
Although there’s no denying Peter Green as a crucial part of what first drew attention to them, Fleetwood Mac had a much better ring to it than ‘Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac featuring Jeremy Spencer’. But that was almost what it was all about back then; not so much the flashiness of a name that fit, but something that said exactly what they were all about. A group of musical aficionados just figuring it out as they went.
When thinking about the legacy of Fleetwood Mac, it’s almost always condensed to the tumultuous chemistry between a certain Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. And while this part of the story is just as important, it’s crucial to remember how they ever got anywhere in the first place, as nothing more than a humble slice of quintessential 1960s blues-rock helmed by their fearless leader, Green.
Sidestepping the parts of Green’s legacy that tainted his earlier milestones, Green was to Fleetwood Mac what a flint kit would be to a desert island captive – the means to flare the whole thing up with an energy that pushed them forward, laying the groundwork for everything the band would ever be built upon, the seeds for the start of something truly revolutionary. As Mick Fleetwood once said, there would be no Fleetwood Mac without Green. Or, as Christine McVie once put it, he was like “Jesus”.
Even with accomplishments like their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1998, celebrating full lineup, including Fleetwood, Nicks, Buckingham, Christine McVie, John McVie, Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer, Green’s position as their unsung hero remained clear, dusted with the kind of aura Cat Stevens once described as a pioneer of “musical integrity, innovation and spirit” who became “something of a model”. But did he share the same glowing reviews of a band that effectively made his name?
When he was once asked the question in 1996, he seemed to have mixed reviews. “They were sort of secretive,” he said. “Mick Fleetwood, for instance, I had a vision that he was a stilts man in a circus, a carnival, a mardi gras. I had a vision that he was one of the blokes who walked around on stilts and that that was his main thing. And little Jeremy Spencer… I don’t want to say anything about Jeremy.”
He added, “Danny Kirwan was a lovely geezer. I’ve seen him since on television. They do other things. If they’d have told me about them I could have broadened my mind a bit and enjoyed something a bit more. They seemed worried about me, so I thought. It was just all just whatever it was. Just… weird.”
Granted, the details of Green’s mentality around this time seemed resigned to the shadows, not to mention the lingering tensions he probably held about a band that moved on without him, all while engulfed in the depths of LSD and reformed spirituality. The ‘Munich LSD Party Incident’, for instance, remains one of the most mythologised (and probably misconstrued) recollections in rock history, painting Green out to be a willing participant in a cult-like commune that only seemed concerned with money, even though he remembers the entire thing differently.
But perhaps if you had asked Green for his opinions on the Mac at any other given time, his answer would have been different. But for him, being a part of those seminal moments didn’t mean worrying himself with surface-level artifice or pretence. He didn’t care about meeting Fleetwood and noticing the absurdity of his clothes (even if it was one of the first things he said). All it was about was the music, so withholding views was likely more a result of focus than any lingering bitterness.
