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Originally Posted by Tom
It seems strange to blame the "music business" completely. When I read in an above post that Fleetwood Mac did him harm it seemed a little weird to me to be honest.
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As dansven said, he wasn't talking about the band. Just the people around the band. Many people have used Peter Green's amazing talents as their bread-and-butter throughout the years. I wouldn't include Fleetwood, McVie, or Spencer in that group, as they were all recruited by Peter himself.
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Originally Posted by Tom
If Peter head never entered the music buiness at any point in his life would be have been better off? I'm just asking.
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Yes and no. I think Peter loved playing music and making music. I think he could have lived without being a guitar hero. The biggest reason for adding Jeremy, and agreeing to have Danny in the band, was to minimize his guitar hero status. It didn't work, but that was the intention.
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Originally Posted by Tom
If whatever mental issues that surfaced came along anyway, and he was driving a truck for a living, what kind of help would he have gotten?
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It wouldn't have been any worse than the help he DID get. Some of the treatments Peter received in the late '70s were absolutely horrid. And, if he had been a truck driver, there wouldn't have been the added pressure of being this modern day folk hero. Men are most apt to develop mental illness in their late-teens to mid-twenties. The drugs didn't cause his mental illness, but they did add to the various factors/symptoms (i.e. the stress caused by the pressure of being a rock star and uncertainty about his religious ideology) that made him become mentally ill. Really, a lot of the same is true of Danny Kirwan, who had issues related to not knowing much about his father, dealing with pressures of being a rock star, and dealing with being a new husband and father. Add drugs and alcohol, and we have yet another fallen hero.
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Originally Posted by Tom
I got the feeling in reading Mick Fleetwood's autobiography that he is someone who truly feels for Pete. What if Peter had gone ahead with the deal that Mick tried to work out for him a number of years ago?
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It was too late by then. He had already developed schizophrenia. He might have been able to do an album or two, but with schizophrenia, the bottom would have fallen out. Lots of peaks and valleys with schizophrenia. I will say that the treatments for mental illness today are light years ahead of where they were back in 1978. If Peter had had the types of treatments available to him back then, and had somebody who could protect him from the many bad elements in the music industry, then it might have worked.
As for the rest of your post, I agree on some level. I think music could be very comforting for Peter, it was on his terms and only for his own enjoyment. I think it's something that would have to be done outside of the typical music industry.