Peter Green

Caught up in a spiritual crisis, guitarist Peter Green (born Greenbaum) left Fleetwood Mac in May 1970. He went on to record a solo album (released at the end of the year), but soon after he disappeared from the scene, giving rise to one of the most unique cases in rock music. He donated all of the profits made from his records to charity, spent time wandering between England and Israel, and found work as an undertaker, a bartender and a nurse. Having lost track of the legendary guitarist, the rock world envisaged him as a historical myth of intransigence against the establishment. In reality, he had ended up in a psychiatric hospital, doped up on drugs. After being released, he moved to the USA, got married and started to play again. In 1979 he returned to recording, disappointing the great expectations of those who thought he was a misunderstood genius.

This however does not detract from the fact that The End Of The Game (Reprise, 1970) is a masterpiece. A purely instrumental album which was likely the natural continuation of a record that had remained unfinished after the track Supernatural from Hard Road. Endless echoes chasing each other through equatorial forests, hallucinated guitar deliriums, primordial music that exhales from the bowels of the world, a soliloquy that slowly erupts and an expansion of consciousness that passes softly from madness to ecstasy make up this track. The atmosphere, more than in a jazz session, is like a magical propitiatory ritual.
The guitar dominates from one side of the record to the other, sometimes fierce, sometimes sleepy. In Bottom’s Up there is a conceited babble over a very strong, obsessive, almost tribal rhythm, which builds an atmosphere of dread. This then subsides into dissonant phrases, like groans of agony, and slowly begins to rise to a stormy crescendo. The most tribal dance of the record is however Burnt Food. One of the most exhilarating rhythmic progressions in the history of blues, it literally takes your breath away.
In the meditative tracks, Green’s guitar is more measured, but no less suggestive. In Timeless Times you are suspended in a sort of expanded mantra, accompanied only by cymbals. Meanwhile, Green took advantage of the contribution from Zoot Money and came up with one of the most amazing jazz-rock tracks ever, maintaining the “modal” improvisations of acid-rock. In Descending Scale, an exercise in which the piano (Zoot Money) and the guitar have fun pulverising the musical scale, a duet of yells and groans, atrocious spasms of dissonances alternating with flashes of psychedelic ecstasy, and crazy orgasmic runs up and down those (metaphysical) scales. In Hidden Depth, the atmosphere is scattered and expanded like in acid-rock.
The final track is The End Of The Game, which includes the mad, drunk, lustful shrieking of the guitar, the supreme chant of fear, despair and loneliness, and the last breath before nothingness and eternity.
Every track is the evocation of the threatening and oppressive climate of the jungle and the occult rituals of primitive populations. At the same time, it is an oriental prayer, or a lysergic journey. However, at any metaphorical level, his experiments on guitar remain as absolute values: these tracks are also mini concerts of dissonances, atmospheric touches and piercing wah-wahs. Green took the blues concept of the guitar as a “second voice” to the extreme. These tracks are lyrical and hypnotic fragments that trace the course of his existential crisis and his spiritual conversion to an arcane religion of infinity.

After a couple of singles (another two in 1972) and a legendary 90-minute version of Black Magic Woman that was improvised live, the world once again lost track of him.

After a long hiatus, Peter Green returned to the scene with In The Skies (PVC, 1979). Although it wasn’t terrible, it also didn’t have any of the genius of End Of The Game. More mediocre albums followed, which for marketing reasons belonged to him, but were actually largely composed by his brother, Michael. In 1985 his mental health once again worsened, and his name disappeared again for years (the three discs of this period are anthologies). In 1995 he formed the Splinter Group and two years later they released their first album which was a sort of return to his blues origins. The fact that the group continued to release at least one album a year proves that Green was finally free of his inner ghosts.

Green died in 2020 at the age of 73.