Of course every fan would compile a different selection of tracks given his or her rein, and many would object vociferously to the some of the inclusions, omissions, or sequencing on the one I assembled. What follows is the track listing, with annotation, of mine, clocking in at just under the 80-minute limit of commercial single-disc CD releases.
With today’s technology, however, you can make your own ideal CD-length playlist of the best Peter Green. Wonderful, and some of the band’s many outtakes/live tapes. And some of the cuts with Green at the forefront aren’t that great, though these are largely confined to Fleetwood Mac’s second album, Mr. But all of them, even the compilations, mix Green-dominated tracks with ones, often notably inferior, on which other guitarists and singer-songwriters have the spotlight. All of the Fleetwood Mac discs on which he played are still in print (along with quite a few live concerts and BBC sessions). What’s the ideal disc, then, to get a concentrated dose of Green’s talents? There isn’t one, actually. Peter Green on a poster for a JanuFleetwood Mac concert. But we won’t know what might have happened, since Green quit Fleetwood Mac in early 1970, less than a year after Then Play On. Perhaps in time, Kirwan might have grown more into his responsibilities, and the gap might have narrowed Peter and Danny were already a formidable lead guitar team of sorts. Kirwan also had a fairly high percentage of original material on the releases in Green’s latter days with the band, which makes for imbalance and lack of consistent quality. But they’re not as close in distinction to the main act’s primary songwriter or songwriters as, say, George Harrison was in the Beatles, and Peter Tosh was in the Wailers. As they’re usually lighter in mood, they make for nice contrasts with Peter’s material. Kirwan’s songs were not so much comedowns in company with Green’s as slighter than the leader’s. Well, I wasn’t there (I was seven when They Play On was recorded), and maybe that’s my loss, but Jeremy’s rock’n’roll parodies can be a comedown when interspersed with Green’s penetrating blues-rock. Someone who was there at their early concerts once scolded me for offering that opinion, declaring that if you were in attendance, they were hilarious. The best of those tracks in that mold were good, but he was limited to that form of blues and early rock’n’roll satires that aren’t all that funny, at least on record. Even Jeremy himself conceded in an interview with me that by the time the group recorded their third album, 1969’s Then Play On, he’d run his Elmore James style of blues into the ground. This comment won’t endear me to some fans of the band, but some of Spencer’s tracks are quite mediocre and repetitious. Some of those are pretty good, but the distance between their abilities and Green’s is substantial. These are interspersed, however, with quite a few sides featuring Jeremy Spencer as lead singer/guitarist and/or writer, and some (after mid-1968) on which Danny Kirwan takes those roles.
The best early Fleetwood Mac tracks were those on which he sang (and, when they weren’t covering other people’s songs, wrote). Yet it’s also in part because Green’s 1967-1970 recordings with Fleetwood Mac were quite uneven. By that time, the main remaining similarity with the band’s early days was the Fleetwood Mac name.
In part that’s because memories of his time with the band have been superseded by the much more famous records they made after Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined. Peter Green was a major figure in late-‘60s rock, and one who still hasn’t achieved the recognition he deserves, even though a few of the songs he wrote and sang with Fleetwood Mac were big British hits. While his singing was on the rough and husky side, it excelled in projecting idiosyncratic character and personality as unvarnished and devoid of pretense as his songs. As a songwriter, he celebrated both joy and despair (if more often the low than the high) with a naked honesty rare in rock, and the equal of the African-American blues greats who’d inspired him to become a musician. Peter Green on the cover of the UK magazine Beat Instrumental.Īs a guitarist, Peter Green was the master of a biting, sustain-laden bittersweet tone.
0 kommentar(er)
