Peter Green

Peter Allen Greenbaum, (29th October 1946-25th July 2020), commonly known as Peter Green, was an English singer, songwriter and guitarist who first founded the group Fleetwood Mac in 1967 and composed the majority of their early hit singles. He remained with the group until 1970 and returned briefly to help finish a tour in 1971.

Early life[]

Green grew up in the East End of London in poverty and suffering constant bullying from other children for his Jewish racial origins, one reason why the family shortened the surname from Greenbaum to the less blatantly Jewish Green.

Green started off as a bass player firstly with Bobby Dennis and the Dominoes and then with the Muskrats and the Tridents. His switch to six-string guitar came in 1966 when he joined Peter B's Looners. This band, led by organist Peter Bardens featured a drummer called Mick Fleetwood.

It was later that year that Green found himself in the unenviable position of replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. The bass player in the band was John McVie. It was this line-up of Mayall (organ/vocals), Green, McVie and drummer Aynsley Dunbar that recorded A Hard Road, released in 1967. This featured two Peter Green originals, one of which, an instrumental called The Supernatural, became one of his signature pieces.

Aynsley Dunbar was replaced with Mick Fleetwood at Green's insistence. This lineup cut one single, Double Trouble b/w It Hurts Me Too, but soon afterwards Green left to form his own band. Fleetwood was also free, having been fired by Mayall for excessive drinking and John McVie was intended to be involved, hence Green taking the unusual step of naming the band Fleetwood Mac after its rhythm section rather than himself. McVie was initially reluctant and a stand-in bassist, Bob Brunning, appeared at the early gigs and on the first single. The lineup also included another singer/guitarist in Jeremy Spencer as Green did not want to carry this responsibility alone.

Fleetwood Mac[]

Fleetwood Mac quickly became commercially successful with the albums Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac and Mr. Wonderful going top ten and the singles Black Magic Woman and Need Your Love So Bad reaching 37 and 24 respectively in the UK charts.

It was after the addition of third guitarist Danny Kirwan who provided a foil that Green's playing had previously lacked owing to Spencer's reluctance to play on songs where he wasn't singing that the band encountered much greater success. Their single Albatross went to No 1 in early 1969 and the next two singles, Man of the World and Oh Well both reached No 2. This lineup made a highly acclaimed album in Then Play On and enjoyed one more hit in The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Prong Crown) (No 10 in 1970) but Green by now was deeply uncomfortable with his level of success. He had never been the same after taking some spiked LSD at a party in Munich, West Germany and in the spring of 1970, announced he was leaving the group.

After Fleetwood Mac[]

Peter Green released one solo album The End of the Game in 1970 but kept his musical activities minimal for most of the 1970s. He visited the group at their communal home in Hampshire but later member Bob Welch was disturbed that for the entirety of his stay, Green had a piece of cheese in his hair.

Further signs of disturbed behaviour showed when he apparently turned up in his managers office with a gun he later claimed was a toy and threatened to shoot him if he continued to receive royalties from his work with Fleetwood Mac. Green was arrested as a result.

First return to music[]

Green recorded an album called In the Skies in 1979 but was doing less in terms of songwriting than before and four further albums saw him write practically nothing while live gigs in pubs saw other musicians carrying the bulk of the guitar work. By the late 1980s Green's mental illness saw him wandering around Richmond with a straggly beard and long fingernails and being nicknamed The Wolf Man by local youths. A television interview in 1988 revealed he no longer owned a guitar.

Second return to music[]

It was in the mid-1990s at the advice of blues expert Martin Celmins, whose biography of Green was published in 1995, that Green dropped the medication he had been on. This saw the negative side effects disappear and by 1996, Green was performing again with The Splinter Group.

Peter Green and the Splinter Group released a series of albums together between 1997 and 2003 but guitar and vocal duties were shared by Nigel Watson and Green was no longer writing songs although other members of the group contributed material later on.

Green left the Splinter Group in 2003 and moved to Sweden. Again medication he was taking sapped his desire to play guitar but by 2009 he was performing again with Peter Green and friends.

Peter Green effectively retired after that but by 2020 was said to have been in a studio and to be working on an autobiography and former Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden was a regular visitor to his home in Oxfordshire.

Peter Green died in his sleep on July 25th 2020.