Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac

Any good guitar player knows the name Peter Green. This is my story as to how I discovered him and his music.

My first brush with Fleetwood Mac came in my tween years. I had just gotten my own portable AM/FM radio, and I discovered the local rock radio stations (much to my parents’ dismay). I lived in San Jose, so the two dominant local stations were KSJO and KOME¹.

Sometime in this era (circa 1975) one of these stations had what we would call a “deep cut” program that happened to land when I was listening. Tons of great songs, but one that really caught my attention was this slow jam with eerie, chilling sounds. I didn’t know anything more than that “Manalishi” was one of the words I heard on the track, and that it was “Fleetwood Mac”.

When I started buying music a few years later, I remembered “Fleetwood Mac” and I think I even bought one of their albums, but it was a later one, polished, pop-ish, and not inspiring to a young teen.

Fast forward to the early 1980’s and I had begun taking guitar lessons, and I searched for “Manalishi” and my guitar teacher pointed me to the Judas Priest cover.

I knew that wasn’t what I remembered, even though it was a thoroughly devastating jam, I wanted the original.

Crawling through my favorite used music store in Santa Cruz (there were two of them in the Pacific Garden Mall, an open-air shopping strip in Santa Cruz) and I found a worker who could point me at the precise version.

Turns out in the late 1960’s the band Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, a British invasion era band, built around Peter Green’s guitar work. The drummer was Mick Fleetwood.

On this album was indeed the “Green Manalishi” that I was seeking, but also a studio recording of another period classic, “Oh Well”.

And I jammed back over the hill, laid down the “Green Manalishi” onto a virgin cassette and off to my guitar teacher’s house I went.

He quickly picked out the main riff, the lead breaks and the fills, and we were off to the races.

I love this song because it is a casual pace, not driven and frantic. It isn’t a difficult rhythm line to play, and like I am fond of saying it is an open and airy structure with plenty of room to stretch your chops.

Listen to this, and think of yourself as an 11-year-old listening to this in their bedroom on a monophonic battery-operated AM/FM transistor radio.

Bliss

1. Home of one of the original shock-jocks, Dennis Erectus, and the tag line “Don’t touch that dial, it’s got KOME on it”

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