The Fleetwood Mac song about the evils of money: “I’m going to die with it”
From 1967 onwards, Fleetwood Mac dominated the music industry. Like other giants of the era—Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones—the band became a pop hit machine, releasing song after song that left a mark.
From ‘Dreams’ to ‘Go Your Own Way’, their music not only defined the sound of 1970s rock but has shaped how we now view the decade itself. Their success, as expected, brought immense wealth to the band. But for Fleetwood Mac’s founding guitarist, Peter Green, that same wealth became a burden that haunted him.
‘Green Manalishi’ is the final song Green ever wrote for Fleetwood Mac, and like so many classic songs from the 1970s, it was inspired by a particularly disturbing LSD trip. The track was written after Green experienced a series of terrifying nightmares about the evils of money. Contrary to popular belief, the titular ‘Green Manalishi’ was not a type of acid – rather, it is the devilish personification of a wad of cash.
‘Green Manalishi’ isn’t your typical Fleetwood Mac track—there’s no Stevie Nicks mysticism or Lindsey Buckingham polish here. This is pre-Rumours Mac, back when the band was led by an enigmatic and tormented guitar wizard and the music was steeped in blues, psychedelia, and the creeping shadows of a mind unravelling.
As Green, the wizard himself, explained to Mojo in 1996: “I had a dream where I woke up and I couldn’t move, literally immobile on the bed. I had to fight to get back into my body. I had this message that came to me while I was like this, saying that I was separate from people like shop assistants, and I saw a picture of a female shop assistant and a wad of pound notes, and there was this other message saying, ‘You’re not what you used to be. You think you’re better than them. You used to be an everyday person like a shop assistant, just a regular working person’. I had been separated from it because I had too much money. So I thought, How can I change that?”
While it is undeniably hard to sympathise with a man whose main problem was having too much money, Green did, in fact, end up donating most of his earnings from Fleetwood Mac to charitable causes. He gave much of his savings to War on Want, a London-based charity that provided aid to developing nations, with an emphasis on famine in the African continent.
As Green went on to recall: “Last thing at night, they used to put pictures on telly of starving people and I used to sit there eating a doughnut and thinking, Why have I got this big stash that I don’t need when probably I’m going to die with it and all this is going on?”
At the time, Green was slipping deeper into mental illness, amplified by heavy LSD use and spiritual turmoil, and ‘Green Manalishi’ became his swan song with the band. Shortly after its release, he left Fleetwood Mac, walking away from fame and fortune. The song stands as a haunting relic of that chaotic moment—a dark, powerful snapshot of genius on the edge. It’s not just a song; it’s a warning, a cry from the abyss.
Green died in 2020, having left behind the world of fame to become a hospital porter on $50 a week. He became an inspiration to so many; not only for his innovations in music but his authenticity, integrity, and commitment to helping those less fortunate than himself.
