FLEETWOOD MAC
Before The Beginning Vol Two: Live & Demo Sessions 1970
Peter Green shines on a thumping live show… but skip the demos.
For all the plaudits, Peter Green didn’t leave much of a thumbprint. Until recently, the only records that truly caught the guitarist’s spark were John Mayall And The Bluesbreakers’ ‘A Hard Road’ (1967) and Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled debut (’68) and ‘Then Play On’ (’69). So over the past decade it’s been a revelation to hear this most enigmatic of British Invaders fleshed out by diamonds from the vaults. From Dutch fan Tom Huissen’s arse-rough-but-atmospheric Bluesbreakers bootlegs to last year’s magnetic first volume of early Mac, Greeny is the gift that keeps on giving.
Available on triple-heavyweight vinyl, Volume Two once again finds the guitarist as the main event, and on ragingly good form. The title doesn’t compute. This box set isn’t a snapshot of the start, but the end, mostly chronicling a US show from 1970, shortly before Green’s LSD dose and resulting tailspin into oblivion. But if there’s a suspicion that, having used up the choice cuts, Sony are now blasting the catalogue’s carcass, it recedes with the quality of the concert.
Not many bands would have the balls to open with Before The Beginning, the lugubrious finale from ‘Then Play On’, but Green’s beautiful, ghostly, long-hanging notes are what the audience are here for. Always a team player, the bandleader then momentarily recedes, allowing Danny Kirwan a punky thrash through Only You and Jeremy Spencer a brace of Elmore James covers — all good fun, if throwaway. But the show achieves real substance — and shivers — with an extraordinary take on Green’s cry-for-help classic The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown), all stormy proto-metal guitars and an outro jam that nudges 12 minutes. Truer to the studio version is a swooshing Albatross, with Green draping spider-silk over Mick Fleetwood’s throbbing toms. Oh Well (Part One) kicks like a mule through even the smallest of sound systems, and you know a line-up are on form when they even make masturbation anthem Rattlesnake Shake cook.
Measured against the show the four demos here feel like an afterthought. All but one are covers, and Muddy’s You Need Love and T-Bone Walker’s Mean Old World do what you’d expect, no more. Overall, though, in the old pub argument that Green was the most natural British bluesman of the era, this box set is another welcome piece of evidence.