PETER GREEN
IN HIS HEARTFELT TRIBUTE TO PETER GREEN, METALLICA’S KIRK HAMMETT EXPLAINS HOW THE FORMER BLUESBREAKER AND FLEETWOOD MAC GUITARIST'S VIRTUOSO PLAYING, EAR FOR DARKNESS, AND LEGENDARY ’59 LES PAUL – AKA GREENY – CHANGED HIS LIFE, AND WHY IT WAS SO IMPORTANT THAT HE TOOK IT ALONG FOR A SPECIAL REUNION
Kirk Hammett knew that paying visit to Peter Green was the right thing to do, and yet the Metallica guitarist couldn’t shake the feeling that it could all go wrong. As “the caretaker” of Peter Green’s stage-weathered 1959 Gibson Les Paul, aka Greeny, the famous ’Burst with a magical tone secret that Green sold to the late Gary Moore in 1970 for $300, Hammett felt it in his bones. He would visit the former Bluesbreaker and Fleetwood Mac guitarist at Green’s home in the Isle of Dogs, London. He would take Greeny, pay his dues, and talk shop with the player whose preternaturally gifted feel and tone gave BB King “the cold sweats” and set the benchmark for British blues. And yet the whole idea was giving him the heebie geebies.
“To be honest I was a little bit nervous and... Scared!” Hammett laughs. “It’s hard to gauge how someone with a reputation like that was going to react to meeting someone like me. On my way over there, the unpredictability of the situation was driving me crazy the whole time.” The psychic weight of this encounter is written all over the excitable cadence in Hammett’s voice some six months on.
“When we first got there and we walked in, it was kind of, like, he was looking at me, I was looking at him,” Hammett continues. “We were just kinda checking each other out, seeing what the energy level was, what the emotional state of mind was. After about 10 minutes or so I started bringing up the fishing in Hawaii, and poles, fishing reels, y’know... Fish! [Laughs] That really broke the ice with him, and after that he was much more conversable and the mood in the room was much, much better.”
The pair had a lot to talk about. There was Greeny. That guitar is but mahogany and maple, metal and hide glue, and yet it has assumed a mythological importance pop culture, the connective tissue joining three evolutionary strides in the blues-rock continuum. Peter Green’s dynamic, trailblazing style; Gary Moore’s muscular chops and molten sustain; Kirk Hammett’s hyper-kinetic leads and the spectacle of stadium metal: Greeny has been on a journey.
“It was really important for me to come in, meet Peter, and let him know that I had this instrument that he had 50 years ago that he wrote all these amazing songs on,” says Hammett. “It was important to let him know that the guitar was in safe hands and that I was a huge fan of his.”
They shared a moment. Hammett laid it all out. “I sat down and I looked him straight into the eye,” says Hammett. “I said, ‘Peter, y’know, I just need to tell you this on behalf of myself and guitar players all over the world, your influence is still felt everywhere, and it is just as huge, if not bigger, than it has ever been, and you continue to inspire generations of guitar players.’ [Pauses] And he just looked at me, shook his head, and changed the subject!”
The Green Manalishi And the Hellhound That Barks Still...
Hammett is laughing at the memory, at underestimating the stolid reserve of a septuagenarian Englishman. “It made me feel really weird, but I could tell it touched something in him,” he protests. “It was really, really cool, and it ended up being a really nice visit.” Green might not have been visibly moved by his tribute but Hammett is 100 per cent correct. Green’s influence is profound. In recent years, perhaps accelerated by online discoveries, or brought into focus by the coming 50th anniversary of Green’s departure from Fleetwood Mac, there has been a growing interest in Green’s life.
Sifting his discography for inspiration, you can hear what is being done, but how? That’s the question. Green’s writing would see-saw between light and darkness, between the briny calm of Albatross and the urgent fury of Oh Well, the invigorating electric slide on the Elmore James cover Shake Your Moneymaker, the crestfallen Man Of The World. Towards Green’s final days in Fleetwood Mac, the darkness was winning. That’s when fame, among other things, was warping everyone’s perspective. LSD enters the picture, ultimately overwhelming Green, but not before he had written The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown).
Apparently inspired by a lysergic nightmare about an undead dog that kept barking and written the immediate darkness after waking up is quite
“THERE WASN’T MUCH OF A PRECEDENT FOR A SONG LIKE GREEN MANALISHI ”
a story, but it barely fathoms the darkness in the arrangements, the haunted poetry and a riff that teaches us many lessons, chief among them that heaviness is not contingent on a Peavey 6505 head and tuning down to C. That it is about atmosphere and feel, a morbid sensibility.
“You’re so spot on with that song,” says Hammett. “To me, that song is so incredibly heavy. High-gain amps, high-output pickups, none of that stuff existed. That song sounds so incredibly dark, and so incredibly heavy, and it is atmospheric and it gets straight to the darkest parts of one’s psyche. That’s what happened to me. It just goes so deep in me. And that song has so much voodoo in it. It sounded like it was written under a full moon, in a circle with candles, with him and the candles lit all around him, just him and the guitar...”
Blues To Metal...
Hammett discovered the song as many metalheads did, through Judas Priest. The Melvins covered it, too, lacing it with a knowing venom. That it can sit on a set next to blues standards and not be out of place just demonstrates how short the distance between blues and metal. “That song should have been the soundtrack to Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil,” says Hammett. “Green Manalishi reminds me of the darkest Robert Johnson songs. It is right up there with Hellhounds On My Trail, Me And The Devil Blues. It’s just right there and it is so heavy and it contributed to the blueprint that so many people jumped on. There wasn’t really much of a precedent for a song like Green Manalishi. There was dark stuff that Jimi Hendrix was writing. For sure, Sabbath. But nothing quite like Green Manalishi. Green Manalishi, Oh Well, Black Magic Woman – all blues-rock that later on contributed to hard rock and heavy metal.”
That is where Hammett really jives with Peter Green, the player. Hammett is a horror movie obsessive, can’t get enough darkness, and that is what he hears between the notes in Green’s playing style – a virtuoso who knew the value in economy, in letting the audience fill in the gaps. “You think about those three songs, the subject matter, the content, the arrangements, the atmosphere, how things just switch on a dime, the heaviness and the change of moods, it’s all there,”
says Hammett. “It’s all there for heavy metal to eat up and turn into a completely different plate of jello, and thank god, thank f*cking God for Peter Green, because, for me, his contribution to heavy metal, to the music I play, is so huge, so huge. It just took years and a couple of generations for it to filter into heavy metal as we know it today. But still, he put out the blueprint. I can only hope to compose a song like Green Manalishi. I can only hope to. I aspire to do that.”
Greeny – The Supernatural
Peter Green bought Greeny from Selmer Musical Instrument Showrooms on London’s Charing Cross Road for £110. Having aced his Bluesbreakers audition on a Harmony Meteor he wanted more power. While Clapton’s ‘Burst had a skinny neck, Greeny was a little more substantive. Crucially, it had a hidden talent, a factory fault (alternative explanations say it was accidentally modded) that reversed the magnetic polarity of the neck pickup, offering a middle position out-of-phase tone. Joe Bonamassa has a ‘Burst with a similar ‘defect’. When Hammett was doing due diligence on the pickups, he said it was like a Strat going through a cranked Marshall. “Oh my God! It was like I got hit by a bolt of lightning,” he says. “Everyone knows they’re not supposed to sound like that but this one had that insanely wild option.”
Greeny has undergone few changes. Gary Moore applied Sperzel tuners and swapped the bottom two controls for 60s-style Gibson Reflector knobs; they were taller, easier to find. The neck was broken twice. When Hammett bought it in 2014 from vintage guitar dealer Richard Henry, he affixed strap locks, replacing – and archiving – a cracked switch cap. The pickguard remains in the case. The biggest change is road miles. Having been listed at $2 million (Hammett did not pay that), there was a risk that it’d end up embalmed in Perspex above the bar in a Hard Rock Cafe. Hammett didn’t buy Greeny; he rescued it. Now it’s onstage; in the studio. It’s where it belongs.
Kirk’s Got The Blues And It Ain’t Bad
Greeny is returning the favour. Hammett sounds reborn. Meeting Peter Green, playing The Green Manalishi with Billy Gibbons and Mick Fleetwood at the Green tribute show held at London’s Palladium on 25th February; these experiences are life-changing. “Having a guitar like Greeny, you just wanna be playing it,” he says. “Truthfully, I have reconnected with my blues playing.
When I first started playing guitar, I thought, ‘All right! I’ll play the blues. I’ll play the blues like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page, Buddy Guy or BB King.’ For the first couple of years, I played blues just as much as I played rock. In the 90s, I got into the blues again with Stevie Ray Vaughan. But I am listening a lot more to the electric players, guys from the 50s and 60s. The blues is creeping back into my playing. A lot of that has to do with Peter. Listening to him, in awe, it woke me up.”
At home, Hammett plays Greeny through all kinds of amps: a Fender Harvard, various Vox combos, a Mesa/ Boogie King Snake, an original Marshall Bluesbreaker, and more contemporary options like the Positive Grid Spark and Boss Katana. “I love the Boss Katana,” he says. “That is a really great amp. The best new modern amp is the amp that Mike Fortin built for me, the Randall Meathead. That amp, along with the Mesa/boogie Dual Rectifier, is my main sound, and my Fractal sound is a blend of those two amps modelled by the Fractal, and that is what I use in the studio.”
“GREENY IS A GIFT TO THE MUSIC WORLD AND I SHOULD JUST KEEP ON GIVING THAT GIFT”
Then there’s the Sundragon, the limited edition rebuild of Jimmy Page’s Supro Coronado. “It’s amazing,” says Hammett. “It’s am-a-zing! I could sit there for hours just turning knobs. ‘Oh! Now it sounds like something off Houses Of The Holy. I plug Greeny into that, I crank it up, and it sounds like Custard Pie from Physical Graffiti.”
The Last Will And Testament Of Kirk Lee Hammett
Peter Green passed away peacefully in his sleep, aged 73, on 25th July. He did not attend the tribute concert. He dodged Hammett’s flattery. But that’s okay. There’s still something fitting that these tributes were being paid while he was alive. Too often we never get the chance. There’s a romance in Greeny meeting Hammett, knowing that his guitar is being played in front of thousands. Peter Green, Gary Moore; two greats, both passed. Greeny lives on. It begs the question: to whom would Hammett bequeath Greeny when his time comes?
“I don’t know,” he says, pausing. “But I hope it is someone who can keep on playing it, and keep on recording with it, and keep on touring with it, so that people who love the guitar can go see it and hear it in real time. If I could find someone who was capable enough and qualified enough, sure, then by all means. This guitar needs to be out there. It’s a gift to the music world and I should just keep giving that gift.”