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Twisted Tales: Fleetwood Mac Founder Peter Green Fails the Acid Test

Posted on Oct 2nd 2009 4:30PM by James Sullivan

With one of the biggest-selling albums of all time ('Rumours') to their name, the members of Fleetwood Mac have long been able to pad their personal problems with large cushions of money. But the man who formed the band -- neither Fleetwood nor Mac -- once tried to give it all away.

Guitarist Peter Green was an emerging prince of British rock when he became one of the rock world's earliest and most significant acid casualties, years before Fleetwood Mac hit superstardom. First recognized in 1966 in a London band with the eerily prescient name Peter B's Looners, the blues prodigy convinced starmaker John Mayall to let him replace his hero, Eric Clapton, in Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Quickly earning the grudging respect of Clapton's hard-core fans, Green became "the Green God" to Clapton's "God."

Within a year, Green left to form his own band. He took along Mayall's rhythm section, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, and they named themselves Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. After recording 'Black Magic Woman,' a cover of which would soon become a huge hit for Santana, the original Fleetwood Mac scored a No. 1 ('Albatross') and two No. 2s on the British charts in 1969.

Like Clapton, Green built his reputation on his ability to interpret the blues. He had "the sweetest tone I ever heard," the great B.B. King once said. But by the time King and Fleetwood Mac headlined a huge festival in New York's Central Park with Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys and others, Green was having a hard time coping with stardom.

By all accounts, he'd been taking prodigious amounts of LSD. He started wearing robes and religious pendants onstage. Claiming he'd had a vision of an angel holding a starving refugee child, he urged his bandmates to give almost all of their earnings to charity.

Green played his last gig with the band he'd founded in May 1970. After recording a solo album called 'The End of the Game,' he briefly reunited with Fleetwood Mac on the road when guitarist Jeremy Spencer dropped out in California to join the Children of God religious cult. Green's return hinged on one request: that the band play nothing but one long jam on 'Black Magic Woman,' 90 minutes' worth, each night.

While Fleetwood Mac went through the extensive lineup changes that eventually resulted in the band that would record 'Rumours,' Green inspired rumors of his own as he dropped out of the music business. Various reports claimed he was working as a gravedigger, a bartender, on an Israeli kibbutz. He was institutionalized after confronting his accountant with an unloaded gun, insisting he didn't want his royalty checks. (The same manager was the man behind an impostor version of Fleetwood Mac, cobbled together while the real members struggled with their internal affairs.)

Green surfaced quietly in 1979, contributing to one track on the band's album 'Tusk.' For the past three decades, he has strung together a series of low-key solo albums, with long breaks in between. "I took one too many LSD trips, and that puts me in the Care and Attention category," he once admitted.

He was well enough, however, to join Carlos Santana onstage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebration in 1998, and he returned to performing this year billed as Peter Green and Friends. Still, his former colleagues recall his departure as a great loss. "I'd give anything for a millionth of his talent," John McVie once said. Money, we presume, would be no object.