Released - February 1968
Genre - Blues
Producer - Mike Vernon
Selected Personnel - Peter Green (Vocals/Guitar/Harmonica); Jeremy Spencer (Vocals/Slide Guitar/Piano); John McVie (Bass); Mick Fleetwood (Drums)
Standout Track - My Heart Beat Like A Hammer
First things first - this album isn't actually called Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, but I'm calling it that for simplicity. Though it's subsequently been reissued under that title, it was initially just a self-titled record called Fleetwood Mac, but when the band's classic lineup, led by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, debuted in 1975 they decided to do so by releasing another self-titled album, presumably as an attempt to relaunch themselves as a brand new band, which in some ways they were. This album subsequently became known as Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac to differentiate it.
It's easy to assume, given the statospheric success of Fleetwood Mac's later incarnation as one of the great soft-rock bands of all time, that their early years as a blues group must have seen them toiling away in obscurity for years until they finally found a successful formula after Buckingham and Nicks joined, but it's not the case. Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac was actually a hugely successful and influential album, and the band was one of the most successful British blues bands at the time (accepting, of course, that there wasn't a huge market or demand for British blues bands at the time - it remained, by and large, an American obsession, and the success of early Fleetwood Mac, alongside a few other early pioneers, contributed hugely to the rise of more blues bands from the UK, and probably paved the way for more blues-influenced rock bands like Free in the late 60s).
The relative absence of British blues music in the mid-60s is in fact a key element of what makes early Fleetwood Mac, under Green's leadership, so interesting. In his book Listening To Van Morrison, rock critic Greil Marcus dedicates a chapter to discussion of Peter Green and what he describes his "belief in the blues as a kind of curse one puts on oneself," a theory mirrored elsewhere in Van Morrison's music, hence Marcus's discussion of it. In his early years as a musician, Green was deeply paranoid and self-conscious about what he perceived as his inability to be a truly great blues musician. He was hugely inspired by American legends like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, but well aware that their music had been drawn from the wellspring of generations of history and heritage. Blues had emerged from the melding of traditional African spirituals with European folk songs, from work songs and the vocal and oral chants of slaves. It was a genre of music that emerged from such origins and took on greater significance for marginalised and destitute people, being used as a creative means of expressing hardship and pain. As a fairly well-to-do white English guy, Green understandably felt like he had no reason to be able to contribute anything to the genre or be seen as one of its icons. From there, though, he developed his theory in this "curse one puts on oneself," of the blues being a sort of personal albatross you inflict upon yourself as a way of working through your demons. In a roundabout way, Green's paranoia and doubts over whether or not he could be a great blues musician made him a great blues musician, giving him the pain and heartache and longing he needed to be able to play with the same sort of world-weary passion as blues greats like Howlin' Wolf - or so goes the theory. It's noticeable, anyway, that the majority of Green's compositions on the album take the form of slow, introspective, soul-searching numbers in contrast to Jeremy Spencer's more fiery, upbeat blues rock songs.
Virtually all of the original lineup of Fleetwood Mac had previously been part of one of the very first British blues bands, John Mayall's Blues Breakers. Green had been recruited as guitarist for the band after Eric Clapton departed to form Cream, and he soon also recruited drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. When they eventually decided to split and form their own band, Green and Fleetwood teamed up with co-guitarist and vocalist Jeremy Spencer and bassist Bob Brunning. McVie initially refused to join the band, preferring the more stable income he earned as part of Mayall's band. However, after Fleetwood Mac (named in tribute to its original rhythm section, Fleetwood and McVie) started making waves from their live concerts, McVie agreed to join and Brunning was dismissed. It's a huge credit to Green as a bandleader that, despite the deeply personal voyage he was on to try and prove to himself that he could be a great blues musician, it very much comes across as a band album, not a vanity project. For a start, his sheer insistence that the band continue to be named after its rhythm section rather than impose his name on it (as mentioned before, the "Peter Green's" prefix that's often applied to the band's early incarnation was only retroactively applied later), and he also shares lead guitar and lead vocal duties with Spencer.
Spencer's guitar playing is more raucous and unpredictable (his opening riff to "Shake Your Moneymaker" grabs you by the neck and never lets go), where Green's is leaner and more economic and tonal, and Spencer's voice more incendiary and raspy, where Green's is smoky, soulful and expressive. Neither emerges as clearly superior, but the two opposing styles really come together to make a compelling whole, which is a great sign of a truly collaborative band. Fleetwood and McVie, meanwhile, make for a great rhythm section worthy of their titular billing - "Looking For Somebody" is perhaps their finest showcase, with McVie metronomic, pulsing bass underpinned by the distant clatter of Fleetwood's drums and the quiet, pulse-like pinging of his cymbals. What's also remarkable about this album is how many different moods and tones it manages to squeeze out of what has always been perceived as fairly meagre ingredients. The blues is a famously limited compositional form, being bound by repetition and very specific structural requirements, and yet here Green & co. manage to bring menacing, insistent quiet songs like "Looking For Somebody," blissed out romantic songs like "Merry Go Round" and upbeat rockers like "My Heart Beat Like A Hammer." Only in a couple of places does it begin to feel a little by-the-numbers, surprisingly in its covers rather than its originals. The cover of Howlin' Wolf's "No Place To Go" adds very little to the original, and it'd odd to hear that Green gets less satisfying results from reinterpreting the work of the blues legends he idolised as he did from working up his and Spencer's own material. The cover of Robert Johnson's "Hellhound On My Trail," though, is wonderful, its plodding, world-weary piano part getting increasingly weary and wayward before the whole thing collapses into Green's dismissive confession "I don't know the words to that, though."
On its release, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac proved hugely successful, providing blues music in a similar vein to that already catered for by John Mayall's Blues Breakers but feeling somehow more authentic and more organic. Green continued to lead the band for another few years, and wrote a number of truly brilliant songs that easily stand tall against anything the band later did in its Buckingham-Nicks incarnation. "Oh Well," "Rattlesnake Shake," the immortal instrumental "Albatross" and the superior early version of "Black Magic Woman," later covered to greater chart success by Santana, are all superb. The band struggled to make more great albums in this early incarnation, though, with most of these songs released as singles. The direct follow-up to this debut, Mr Wonderful, features Green's most intense soul-searching moment in the heartache of "Love That Burns," but also features four songs that use an identical Elmore James riff, and the whole thing begins to feel a bit repetitive.
By 1970, Green's experimenting with LSD had led to the onset of schizophrenia and he was increasingly unreliable and unstable and came into conflict with the rest of the band when he wanted to donate all the band's money to charity and they objected. They recorded one last song together entitled "The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Prong Crown)," easily the best thing any incarnation of Fleetwood Mac ever recorded, a menacing, terrifying prog song clearly born out of Green's paranoia and mental instability, replete with howls and crashing, cacophanous guitar riffs. It's a tantalising insight into just how great a prog rock band Fleetwood Mac could have been if Green had been able to regain some stability but continue mining similar musical ground, but sadly it wasn't to be and he departed the band. Five years later, they would achieve superstar status with the arrival of Buckingham and Nicks and the release of 1975's Fleetwood Mac. I've little burning desire to hear the music they made in between - while everybody knows their stuff from '75 onwards is great, and plenty of people talk about how underrated their early blues stuff with Green is, I've never once heard anybody say that their transitional material is worthy of more attention, so it remains unexplored to me. It would admittedly be interesting to see how Christine McVie (who joined the band on keyboards later in 1968 and later married bassist John McVie and came to be one of the band's principal vocalists and songwriters by the Buckingham-Nicks era) gradually came to have more prominence within the band. For now, though, this is probably the finest complete studio album documenting the band's early days, though the excellent early era compilation The Best Of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac is also well worth a listen for its inclusion of non-album tracks like "Black Magic Woman" and "The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Prong Crown)."
Track Listing:
1. My Heart Beat Like A Hammer (Jeremy Spencer)
2. Merry Go Round (Peter Green)
3. Long Grey Mare (Peter Green)
4. Hellhound On My Trail (Robert Johnson)
5. Shake Your Moneymaker (Elmore James)
6. Looking For Somebody (Peter Green)
7. No Place To Go (Chester Burnett)
8. My Baby's Good To Me (Jeremy Spencer)
9. I Loved Another Woman (Peter Green)
10. Cold Black Night (Jeremy Spencer)
11. The World Keep On Turning (Peter Green)
12. Got To Move (Elmore James & Marshall Seahorn)
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