C.Hjort new book

[doodyhead]

Originally Posted by mzero

i appreciate the respect! however much a heretic i might be around here. i do think pete was good at the long improvisations, but i prefer his more structured playing and i think he was even better at that. a personal preference i guess.

especially for the time, pete was a economical guitartist (in the early mac and with mayall) before he developed the extended approach. when i hear 'love that burns', 'jumping at shadows', 'watch out', 'albatross', 'hard road', 'the supernatural' those are examples that i go back to when i want to hear peter. the extended soloing, for example the live extension of green mananalishi with the bass solo, coincided with the decline of his health. maybe because of that coincidence i kind of see them as a reflection of the decline. and to me they aren't consistent with his previous 'less is more, more is less' approach.

'end of the game' is even farther removed. for whatever reason i perfer it to the late live mac extended versions (fighting/searching for madge, gm, etc) which sound more like bad live cream than good fleetwood mac to me. maybe i like it because it so purely improvisational and it is so different to anything else pete did? i should also say that when i want to hear post-fleetwood mac pete rather than end of the game i usually listen to 'in the skies' where i hear him finding his bearings again.

and it is true, i'm the anti-dansven (in the way doodyhead said that the gass recordings with pete were the antithesis of end of the game) - i could completely do without all live entended solos involving jerry and duane too.

ok. now you can let me have it!

zero

Now why would anyone do that?
I straddle both camps. i must confess that as a kid and learning musician I was weaned on those "masturbatory" self indulgent jams. When I saw the dead live in 69 and 70 It took what cream did and stood it on its head. All these things are in context. I was also in awe of the depth of emotion revealed by the lack of notes in "Love That Burns" There may be a reason why Rattlesnake Shake was so named. Peter is both of those things and was a master at both. It does not take away from either side. It just makes his life that much more inegmatic. I will say however that of all the things he has done, The Gass stuff is not on my top ten list. I like the Memphis Slim stuff more. In this he was replacing Matt Murphy and chose to be different and play with a wah wah. Memphis Slim was also a control freak and The suite is like his autobiography or something. a concept record. This is peter doing what was suggested that he be good at. "A session Man". I guess this did not hold his interst for long in the early 70s.

doodyhead