The guitarist Eddie Van Halen called “more Clapton than Clapton”
Every generation in rock and roll usually has that one set of musicians who don’t seem to be truly human. They may breathe air, eat food, and put their pants on just like the rest of us, but their ability to squeeze life out of their instrument has never really been equalled in the world of rock and roll. Eddie Van Halen was that person for a lot of guitar heroes in the 1980s, but he thought that his guitar hero Eric Clapton almost got outdone by Peter Green back in the 1960s.
If you were to have played any type of classic rock blues guitar in the 1960s, you were going to go back to Clapton. While he always stuck with the blues before anything else, Clapton was the definition of a guitar hero for most people, only being slightly behind Jimi Hendrix as one of the greatest to ever touch a fretboard. Of course, that legacy is now in tatters amid his problematic personal viewpoint.
Once he started working on some of his biggest songs with Cream, though, Peter Green seemed to be one of the few people who could have matched him. He had a completely different playing style than Clapton, but his understanding of the blues went deeper than anyone could have imagined.
Considering Clapton was off playing with technicians like Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, Green’s time playing with John Mayall led to him forming the basis for Fleetwood Mac. While that band is known more today for Stevie Nicks’s impressive vocal chops and their rootsy rock sound, Green helped kick down the door for them with some of the tastiest blues licks imaginable.
Even when he wasn’t looking to play the same 12 bars for hours on end, Green figured that it was best to stretch out, giving the world new takes on blues formulas on tracks like ‘Albatross’ while also making the biggest hits for other artists in the process. Even though Santana gets a lot of the credit for ‘Black Magic Woman’, the Green original is actually a lot closer to that macabre style of song that he had in his head.
While Clapton was still God to most people, Eddie felt that Green may have topped him in some areas, telling Rolling Stone, “When I did dig back to the John Mayall Bluesbreakers days, I found Peter Green, who’s actually more Clapton than Clapton himself. He was a little smoother and more tasty, you know? I don’t know what ever happened to him.”
Despite flaming out in a ball of confusion reminiscent of Syd Barrett’s final days in Pink Floyd, Green is still responsible for some of the greatest blues rock of the 1960s and early 1970s. His playing might not have been the easiest to play, but there was no other guitar player on the scene who had a distinct blues thumbprint as Green did.
And given his track record as one of the greatest guitarists in the world, you practically needed someone like Lindsey Buckingham to come in later to do something completely different. If you were trying to hire someone who could copy what Green did note for note, you would be bound to be chasing your own tail for the rest of your career.
