PETER GREEN’S FLEETWOOD MAC
Before The Beginning 1968-1970 Rare Live & Demo Sessions SONY LEGACY 8/10
Hidden gems from the blues vault. By Nigel Williamson
“CAN blue men sing the whites?”, the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band sang in 1968, satirising the strange journey of the music of black sharecroppers from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to the heart of ’60s British pop culture.
By the late 1960s, British bands playing the music of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker et al were everywhere. Hendrix, Cream and Led Zeppelin all plundered the blues repertoire, yet their wider musical vision meant they stood outside the crusading zeal of the ‘British blues boom’, in which 12 bars was the only true gospel and music from the Deep South was revered as possessing a kind of spiritual purity.
The leading bands in this ‘crusade’ were namechecked by Adrian Henri in The Liverpool Scene’s 1969 parody, “I’ve Got Those Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, John Mayall Can’t Fail Blues” – and the first named, led by Peter Green, was the finest of them all. The most convincing of all the white British bluesmen, Green’s sensuous guitar playing, haunting voice and ability to write original blues songs that didn’t sound like pastiche elevated Fleetwood Mac above the competition. BB King called him the only British bluesman “ever to make me sweat”.
Unlike so many of his peers, Green was not a middle-class art student from the lace-curtained suburbs, but a workingclass Jewish boy who grew up in the bomb-scarred East End in the immediate post-war years and left school at 15 to become a butcher’s boy. Having played guitar since he was 10, by his mid-teens Green had graduated from The Shadows to venerating Muddy Waters and the other Chicago bluesmen who had moved north to escape Jim Crow and had electrified the Delta blues in the city’s Southside clubs.
By 1966 he’d succeeded Eric Clapton as lead guitarist in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, only to quit a year later because he felt the arrangements were becoming “too jazzy”.
His initial plan was to head stateside and check out the Chicago blues clubs, but when permit and visa hassles left him stranded in London, he put together Fleetwood Mac with fellow ex-mayall alumni Mick Fleetwood and John Mcvie and the unknown Jeremy Spencer, recruited as second guitarist for his ability to effect a near-perfect imitation of Elmore James’ slide licks on “Dust My Broom”.
The two live recordings that make up this previously unheard three-disc archive set date from 1968–70, when the ‘British blues boom’ was at its height. The tapes were recently discovered unlabelled in a US vault, so there is no verifiable information about where and when they were recorded. However, all the clues suggest that the first was recorded in mid1968, following the release of the band’s self-titled debut album, which reached No 4 during a nine-month stay in the UK charts, and before the release of the followup, Mr Wonderful, in August 1968.
The setlist further suggests it was almost certainly recorded during the band’s first US tour in June 1968, possibly during a nine-night residency at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom.
The performance itself is something of a curate’s egg. Spencer recycles his onedimensional slide trick on rather too many Elmore James covers, including a fast and furious “Shake Your Moneymaker”, on which he also indulges in the playground vulgarity that once got Fleetwood Mac banned from the Marquee. “I want to lick that little pussy of yours, baby… I want the juice running down your legs, little girl,” he leers, more than a year before Led Zep’s “The Lemon Song”.
The Green-led material is superb, though. The tone of sweet melancholia he coaxes from his guitar is intensely affecting, heard at its finest on covers of Freddie King’s “Have You Ever Loved A Woman” and Little Willie John’s “Need Your Love So Bad”. His singing is understated, but charged with poignancy and emotion. “Well I feel so bad, I wonder what’s wrong with me,” he laments so harrowingly on BB King’s “Worried Dream” that you fear for his well-being. By the time he sings, “You know life can be so sad sometimes you just sit right down and cry,” on “Trying So Hard To Forget”, you’re hoping someone is standing by to take care of him.
The second live set, recorded at one of his final gigs with Fleetwood Mac in May 1970, finds Green genuinely close to the end. The addition of third guitarist Danny Kirwan has lent the sound greater heft, while Green’s increasingly manic songwriting has added a unique brilliance to the material. An explosive 12-minute jam on “The Green Manalishi (With The Two-prong Crown)” is stunning, but the nightmarish lyric of what was the final song Green wrote for the band tells you he’s about to crash. There’s an elegiac “Albatross” and a frantic “Oh Well (Part One)”, which he sings like a man possessed, although no “Black Magic Woman”.
Four studio demos round off the release, the most interesting of which is a hypnotic swamp-rock take on Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love”. It’s intriguing to speculate whether Led Zeppelin would have channelled the song a year later for “Whole Lotta Love” had Fleetwood Mac released this version.
As the plaudits have been heaped upon Clapton, Beck and Page as the holy trinity of British guitar-playing, Green has become something of a forgotten man. Before The Beginning suggests that, on his night, he was capable of outplaying any of them.