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Fleetwood Mac · S8 E2
The Ghost of Peter Green
LSD at a Munich commune, years of silence, an air rifle, and the long road back. What happened to the man who started it all
A commune in Schwabing, Munich, March 1970. Peter Green, the guitarist who built Fleetwood Mac from nothing, takes LSD with a group of strangers, and the person who walks out of that building is not the same person who walked in.
"Still Got the Blues" (Gary Moore, official music video, 1990). After Peter Green gave away his 1959 Gibson Les Paul, it ended up in the hands of Gary Moore, who used it to record this: a slow-burning blues ballad that became his biggest hit. Listen for the tone. That's Green's guitar, channeling the spirit of a man who couldn't bring himself to play it anymore.
The Unraveling
After leaving Fleetwood Mac in May 1970, Peter Green vanishes from public life. He gives away his guitars, grows his fingernails until they curl, and tells anyone who will listen that money is evil. By the mid-1970s, the man BB King called the greatest blues guitarist he ever heard is living alone in a bedsit in Richmond, unrecognizable to people who once watched him fill concert halls.
Sources
Celmins, Martin. "Peter Green: The Authorised Biography." Sanctuary Publishing, 2003.
Fleetwood, Mick. "Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac." William Morrow, 1990.
“He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”
— BB King on Peter Green, as cited in Mick Fleetwood's autobiography "Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac," 1990
Still Got the Blues, Gary Moore (1990)
Gary Moore plugged Peter Green's 1959 Les Paul into a Marshall amp and played this solo in one take. The tone is unmistakable: that same warm, slightly overdriven sound that made "Albatross" and "Need Your Love So Bad" glow. Moore was a technically superior player to Green, faster and more precise, but on this track he held back, letting the notes breathe the way Green always did. The result is less a Gary Moore song than a conversation with a ghost.
Sources
Rogan, Johnny. "Fleetwood Mac: The Complete Recording Sessions." 2003.
Guitar World. "Gary Moore: Still Got the Blues Revisited." 2010.
Schwabing, Munich
The bohemian quarter of Munich, home to the commune where Peter Green took LSD in March 1970. He walked in as one of the most celebrated guitarists in Britain and walked out as someone his own bandmates could no longer reach.
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Peter Green do when his accountant kept sending him royalty checks?
The Long Way Back
Green slowly resurfaced in the late 1990s with the Peter Green Splinter Group, performing the blues he loved with less fire but no less feeling. On February 25, 2020, Mick Fleetwood organized a tribute concert at the London Palladium, with David Gilmour, Kirk Hammett, Billy Gibbons, and Steven Tyler performing Green's songs to a sold-out crowd. Five months later, on July 25, 2020, Peter Green died in his sleep at the age of 73.
Sources
The Guardian. "Peter Green obituary." July 2020.
Rolling Stone. "Mick Fleetwood Hosts All-Star Peter Green Tribute Concert." February 2020.
Peter Green: The Numbers
Parisienne Walkways, Gary Moore (1978)
Before Gary Moore ever touched Peter Green's Les Paul, he was already channeling Green's spirit. "Parisienne Walkways" features Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy on vocals and one of the most emotional guitar solos in rock history. Moore worshipped Green's playing, and you can hear it in every bent note. The song reached number eight in the UK and became Moore's signature, a bridge between Thin Lizzy's hard rock and the blues revival he'd spend the rest of his career pursuing.
Parisienne Walkways, Gary Moore (1978)
Phil Lynott's lyrics are sparse and wistful, painting a picture of a love affair in Paris that feels more like a memory than something happening in real time. But the song belongs to the guitar. Moore's solo builds from a whisper to a scream, each phrase more intense than the last, until the final notes hang in the air like something unresolved. It's the kind of playing Peter Green pioneered: emotion first, technique second.
What did Peter Green do after leaving Fleetwood Mac in 1970?
Peter Green built Fleetwood Mac and then walked away from it forever. Next episode: the man who stayed through every lineup, every breakup, every comeback, never wrote a single song, and gave the band half its name.
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