Mac daddy

Peter Green comes back to the blues

by Jonathan Perry

"Oh yay," says Fleetwood Mac singer/guitarist Peter Green, enunciating his words so precisely it sounds as if he were making fun of himself. "The blues has got me." It's April 28, 1968, and Green -- who's back performing and will be playing this Wednesday at the Roxy with John Mayall -- is inside the confines of the CBS studio at New Bond Street in London, directing the band in a recording session for "Need Your Love So Bad," a classic Little Willie John blues number that the Mac had first taken a crack at a couple of weeks before. The line-up that day -- Green, bassist John McVie, drummer Mick Fleetwood, and guest keyboardist Christine Perfect (who would eventually marry the bass player, take his surname, and join the band) -- had already tried a few different approaches to the song. This time, however, they would nail the keeper, the version that would appear months later on The Pious Bird of Good Omen (Blue Horizon, 1969), a compilation of assorted singles and various other tracks released after the band had jumped ship for Reprise.

Although more a leftovers compilation than a proper album, Pious Bird did include a pair of Green-penned classics -- an idyllic, meditative instrumental called "Albatross" and "Black Magic Woman," a tune that Carlos Santana would later make his signature and a staple of classic-rock radio. And the album cover of what appears to be an extremely pregnant nun carrying a stuffed albatross did cause a bit of a stir.

Now, thanks to the new six-disc box set The Complete Blue Horizon Sessions 1967-1969 (Blue Horizon/Sire), we get to hear not only the extended, unexpurgated take of "Need Your Love So Bad," complete with studio chatter, but five other versions. Originally intended to be a four-disc set documenting Fleetwood Mac's years recording for the CBS-distributed Blue Horizon label, Sessions quickly ballooned to six as more and more material feared gone forever -- outtakes, false starts, alternate versions -- was unearthed and catalogued.

"The blues has got me" -- the snatch of tape that picks up Green's offhand comment about being possessed by the music could very well be the mantra for Sessions, an endlessly fascinating, fastidiously annotated 99-track collection that presents the group's seminal early work in breathtakingly pristine sound (credit goes to original producer Mike Vernon's use, whenever possible, of original multi-track tapes discovered in the Sony vaults and elsewhere). For anyone under the impression that Fleetwood Mac were mainly -- or only -- about Rumours and the dysfunctional soap opera/coke snortfest that was the Buckingham-Nicks-led line-up of the mid '70s, the set will be a revelation. For anyone already familiar with Peter Green's work (and that of fellow guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan) with the group he founded, Sessions is a vivid reminder of the still-startling greatness of the Mac's earliest incarnation.

Before the rehab country clubs and VH1 tell-alls, before the witchy-woman solo projects and lucrative comeback tours, Fleetwood Mac were a gritty, fiercely orthodox British blues outfit. And though his name is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the usual Brit-blues subjects of the day -- Clapton, Beck, Page -- Peter Green could, as the material here attests, hold his own with any of them. And he could sing better. In fact, it was Green who had the unenviable task of succeeding Clapton in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers around the time Eric was being compared with God and splitting to form Cream. Both McVie and Fleetwood had also briefly been Bluesbreakers, and when Green quit, in 1967, he persuaded Fleetwood and then McVie to follow him in starting a new band (second guitarist and Elmore James devotee Jeremy Spencer would soon be added to the line-up).

The fruits of that decision can be heard to best effect on the band's Fleetwood Mac debut, which they released in January 1968, and Mr. Wonderful, which followed a mere eight months later. Included here with numerous outtakes and lots of funny, fly-on-the-wall studio banter (plus a few hissy fits thrown by various band members), the two discs contain some of the finest moments that British blues had to offer. They also showcase two precociously talented songwriters in Green and Spencer, each of whom infuses the fairly straightforward, 12-bar blues form with restless imagination, purist spirit, and no small measure of musical prowess. Spencer's scarred vocal and ripping slide work on Fleetwood Mac's "My Heart Beat like a Hammer" sets the tone for much of what would follow from him. And Green's stark and stabbing "Love That Burns," from Mr. Wonderful, seems to hold midnight in the palm of its hand. It's a haunted, fleeting moment from an era that in a few short years would be gone forever.

Peter Green and the Splinter Group and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers perform this Tuesday, September 5, at the Garde Arts Center in New London, Connecticut. Call (888) ON-GARDE.