New LA Times interview with Mick

[David]

Two musicians are conspicuously absent from the lineup. One is Fleetwood Mac bassist John McVie. Why wasn’t he there? “Because he’s a Scotsman,” Fleetwood answers with a laugh, “and they’re known to be very thrifty.” He hints that McVie wasn’t willing to perform for the amount of money he was offered.

This is surprising not because of what it says about John and money but because of what it says about John and Peter Green. John wasn’t willing to participate in a one-night-only tribute to the guy who insisted he join Fleetwood Mac in 1967? Rather odd, that. But now that I think about it, John’s comments over the years about Peter show substantially less admiration than Mick’s comments do. In fact, Christine, Mick, Rick Vito, and even Lindsey have been more vocal in their praise of Peter than John usually was. Could it be that John had no warm feelings for Peter in all these decades?

Green was born Peter Alan Greenbaum in 1946, shortly before anti-Jewish demonstrations and riots broke out across Britain. The guitarist had “a relatively unpleasant childhood, being Jewish in London,” Fleetwood notes. “He felt ostracized and abused as a young chap.” Green gravitated to the blues, the drummer hypothesizes, because it was music about being in pain.

This is the first I’ve really heard Mick or anyone else in Fleetwood Mac specifically discuss the Jewish Greenbaums and the postwar antisemitism in the UK. In the past, Mick just said Peter was Jewish, and that was that.

In the 2009 documentary “Man of the World: The Peter Green Story,” former manager Clifford Davis describes feeling heartbroken when he shared a meal with an unkempt Green . . . .

I’ve never seen this doc. Why have I never seen this doc?

“He had no regard for who and what he had been or could be musically anymore. At that point, I realized I needed to let go. It’s painful, but it pays no dividends to you or the person you’re trying to hang on to.”

I know Mick meant that figuratively, but he’s precisely the wrong guy to use that turn of phrase in anything but a literal context. That’s a howler, Mick.

“My English pipe dream, sitting on top of a mushroom, would be that everyone who’s ever played in Fleetwood Mac would be welcome.

Now here’s a Fleetwood Mac show I would go out of my way to attend — the chance to see Fleetwood and Nicks and the McVies and so on standing side by side with Green, Kirwan, Weston, Brunning, and Welch. Who could pass that up?