38 Years Ago: Fleetwood Mac Founder Peter Green Arrested for Pulling Shotgun on His A

[sharksfan2000]

This is yet another example of the shoddy writing that passes for "journalism" these days. Writers repeat lies enough times and people believe they're the truth.

Various parts of the story may be open to interpretation, but there is some misinformation in this article that has been repeated for years and is clearly not true. One commonly-repeated fiction is that Green worked as a gravedigger. He did work for a time at a cemetery, but a friend got him a job there as a gardener, not a gravedigger. Seems like a key distinction there...but I guess that "gravedigger" sounds so much better in a story like this than "gardener" does.

Most importantly, the central part of the whole article is untrue. Green never "pulled a shotgun on his accountant" - that's a complete fabrication according to every original source on the incident. He did threaten his agent, Clifford Davis, and threatened to shoot out the windows of the accountant's house - but all during a phone conversation with Davis, not in person. From what I've read, he did own a couple of guns but they were not even in his possession at that time and the one that he'd brought in from Canada had apparently never even been taken out of its box.

Even the old story about Green wanting to stop royalty checks is questionable too. According to several people interviewed about the incident, it's seems just as likely that he wanted to keep the checks coming - so he could continue to give his money away to charity. He couldn't very well have done that without the checks coming in!

Well-meaning people continue to circulate these misinformation-filled articles. But it's worth some fact-checking before doing that so the articles can at least be presented along with the proper critical comments rather than just taken at face value.