Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green Controversial Rifle Threat (A Top Story)
On Wednesday Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green Controversial Rifle Threat was a top story. Here is the recap: (Gibson) On this day in 1977, former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green threatened his accountant Clifford Adams with an air rifle when he was trying to deliver a £30,000 ($51,000) royalty check to him. Gibson takes a look back:
Funny thing is, when given the chance to talk about his version some of the great "Peter Green" stories, Green is remarkably down-to-earth, matter-of-fact and he explains how everything, invariably, gets blown up by the press.
The story goes that on this day in 1977, Green was arrested for possessing a gun without a license and using threatening behavior. He supposedly tried to shoot his ex-manager Clifford Davis when he delivered his royalty check. The police came and arrested Green and he was put in prison. But Green, while not denying the story's basic facts to Q magazine in 1997, does have a somewhat less dramatic memory of events 20 years previous. For one thing, he says, the gun in question was a .22 rifle, the kind you'll find at a fairground, and he didn't even own any bullets. As for actually threatening to shoot his ex-manager, Green explains that while a threat was made, it was made on the phone. But, as he told Q, the media always like a good story.
“The papers were saying these ridiculous things like, ‘He went to the accountant’s office with an air rifle trying to get him to hand over a £30,000 cheque.’ There was no £30,000 cheque. I did get on the phone and threaten to shoot the windows out of the accountant’s office, but it was only a threat,” Green said.
Even the police arrest and subsequent jail time seem more mundane in Green’s retrospective vision: “The police came to me and they said, ‘Did you make that phone call?’ I said, ‘Yeah. It was only a .22 fairground kind of rifle and I didn’t have any bullets anyway.’ They put me in a couple of different prisons – Brixton, Wandsworth. It was nice because I didn’t do nothing. It was alright, y’know, walking around the yard once a day.”
http://www.antimusic.com/news/11/jan...e_Threat.shtml