“Hell of a good song”: The track that made Elvis Costello pick up a guitar
Before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac had the blues guitar maestro Peter Green at the helm. Through his very singular stylings, they established themselves as Britain’s premier blues-rock outfit of the late 1960s in a hurry. That was no easy feat at a time when the genre was flying, but with the only guitarist who made BB King “sweat” in their midst, their status was justified.
However, his time in the band was fated to be tempestuous. LSD and illness would bring about Green’s early exit as the band’s prominence began to wane, but through gilded guitar riffs, he ensured that his legacy would endure. As Mick Fleetwood said himself, without Peter Green, there would be no Fleetwood Mac. Christine McVie even likened him to “Jesus”.
Green laid the foundations for what was to come by embodying the group’s ethos that the heights of musicianship are to be juiced down to their pith in search of an emotive sentiment. This central tenet of Fleetwood Mac is typified by Green’s guitar work, which is unbelievably skilled but only ventures into the extremes if it fits the feeling of the song. In fact, it is his mastery of this that might just make him the most overlooked guitarist of the age.
His playing was typified by tone and feeling, strengths that were typified by his masterpiece, ‘Man of the World’. Green wrote this song about how he achieved everything he wanted to with a set of his good old pals, but despite loving his bandmates and all the good times he was having, he still felt incomplete. In this sense, the guitar work is his own literal version of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. It might not be the height of his technicality, but it proves he was also an astounding songwriter, having crafted one of the finest songs of the entire era with ‘Man of the World’.
This was something that a young, soppy Elvis Costello firmly identified with. “There was something about the moody, romantic idea of this song that I absolutely identified with, as ludicrous as that notion is when you read the lyrics: ‘I need a good woman’ sounds like very wishful thinking for a teenager,” he told Pitchfork. “I was the youngest in my class at school, and I didn’t have a girlfriend at that age. ‘Man of the World’ is a dream that I had of what I might be if I ever plucked up the courage to talk to a girl,”.
By Green’s usual blistering 12-bar standards, the song is tender and mellowed, and his rare spaced-out strumming lends it a heart-wrenching sincerity. Despite the melancholy overture, the track is still equal parts an ode to his friends and good times, and his ability to reflect that in his playing is second to none. So, Costello – a happy kid nevertheless craving deeper connections – thought he might be able to offer something similar despite his tender age.
“This is the song that specifically made me pick up a guitar,“ he said of the Fleetwood Mac masterpiece. “It was a weird song to learn because it’s very complicated, but it fascinated me. I had a guitar that just sat in the corner of my room. It was a Spanish guitar bought in Spain on a holiday that my folks and I had taken, and I must have had it for five years by that point.“
Suddenly, thanks to this gem from 1969, that old guitar came calling. “It was just gathering dust with old toys, and then I picked it up and learned how to tune it,“ Costello recalls. “Somebody gave me pictures of what the chords looked like in diagrams, and I very painstakingly taught myself to play just that one song. That’s all I could play. I had a one-song repertoire, but it was a hell of a good song.“
