“He keeps playing the same thing”: The musician Mick Fleetwood thought wasn’t good enough
There can be a certain hierarchy when it comes to certain rock and roll bands. Even though a ton of people have tried their best to earn themselves a spot in their favourite groups, there’s a good chance that none of them are able to capture the magic as a bunch of musicians who have the same musical heartbeat half the time. Although Mick Fleetwood could gladly perform with any musician in Fleetwood Mac, he was initially hesitant to take on one particular guitar hero.
But talking about Fleetwood Mac in their hallowed terms today would be underselling their time as a brilliant blues rock outfit. Despite Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham helping turn the group into a hit-making institution in their prime, some of their best moments had come from hearing tracks like ‘Oh Well’ on the radio and their heavy tunes like ‘The Green Manalishi’ and ‘Black Magic Woman’.
Even though most of their biggest hits have been etched into rock and roll history, Fleetwood was more interested in having a great band rather than massive hits. He had born and bred in the same traditional style that suited bands like The Yardbirds, and when John McVie first came up with the idea of putting a band together, all roads led back to someone like Peter Green.
Outside of being an inventive songwriter, Green’s music was soaked in the blues before he had even joined ‘The Mac’. Despite McVie hanging on with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers after Eric Clapton left, having Green replace the guitar legend and still be able to hold his own is still one of the greatest feats in blues rock. But how was he going to sound like when working off of Fleetwood’s backbeat?
Once Clapton came back to the Bluesbreakers asking for his job back, Fleetwood had some doubts before bringing Green into the group. And thanks to one unfortunate rehearsal with him for the first time, Fleetwood admitted that he might have missed out on a piece of rock and roll history by nearly rejecting him.
During a break in the session, Fleetwood remembered saying that Green didn’t have what it took to be in a group with him and McVie, saying, “This is where I have my instant confession, which is the first mistake I ever made. We’d already tried a couple of guitar players. But we’d heard about Greeny. He walked in with his Les Paul in a little brown case, almost like a cello case. He plugged in, and I remember saying to [keyboardist] Peter Bardens: ‘I don’t think he’s good enough. He keeps playing the same thing.’ And, of course, what I was hearing was the simplicity of Peter’s playing. But I got flustered.”
While Fleetwood did have a point about Green keeping things fairly simple, that was the magic behind some of the group’s initial hits. It’s already hard enough trying to get an instrumental on the radio, but a song like ‘Albatross’ only works because of the massive amount of space that Green leaves in the mix, often fluctuating between playing standard chord voicings and the odd guitar lick to offset the rest of the group.
Things were bound to get more complicated once Buckingham entered the picture, but were it not for Green, Fleetwood Mac would have remained far more obscure back in their prime. He may not have been with the band for too long, but no band is able to work without that kind of foundation first.
