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Fleetwood Mac · S9 E6
Peter Green (1946–2020)
The founder dies quietly in his sleep. The band he left behind became something he never imagined
July 25, 2020. Peter Green, the man who founded Fleetwood Mac in a London rehearsal room in 1967, dies in his sleep at the age of seventy-three. The band he built became something he never imagined and never wanted.
"Midnight Blues" (Gary Moore, official music video, 1990). Gary Moore spent his career chasing the tone Peter Green left behind. This track from the "Still Got the Blues" album is Moore at his most emotionally exposed, playing the kind of slow blues that Green perfected and then walked away from forever.
The Last Tribute
Five months before Green died, Mick Fleetwood organized a tribute concert at the London Palladium on February 25, 2020. The lineup included David Gilmour, Kirk Hammett, Billy Gibbons, and Steven Tyler, all performing songs Green wrote before he turned twenty-four. It was a roomful of legends playing music by a man most of their audiences had never heard of.
Sources
The Guardian. "Mick Fleetwood & Friends Review: A Fitting Tribute to Peter Green." February 2020.
Mojo. "Peter Green Tribute Concert: The Full Story." March 2020.
The London Palladium
The theater where Mick Fleetwood gathered some of the biggest names in rock to celebrate Peter Green's music on February 25, 2020, five months before Green's death.
Midnight Blues, Gary Moore (1990)
Moore recorded this track using Peter Green's 1959 Les Paul Standard, the same guitar that created the original Fleetwood Mac sound. The tone is unmistakable: warm, slightly out of phase, with a quality that sits between a cry and a whisper. Moore spent decades chasing that sound, and on "Midnight Blues" he gets closer than anyone else ever has. It's a slow blues that says more in the silences between the notes than most guitarists say with a hundred.
Sources
Guitar World. "Gary Moore and the Peter Green Les Paul." 2008.
Moore, Gary. Interview with Guitarist Magazine, 1990.
TAP TO REVEAL: Where is Peter Green's legendary 1959 Les Paul now?
Peter Green: 1946-2020
Love That Burns, Fleetwood Mac (1968)
This is Peter Green at the very beginning: twenty-one years old, singing a slow blues about heartbreak with a voice that already carries more weight than it should. "Love That Burns" was recorded before "Albatross," before the LSD, before everything fell apart. Listening to it now, knowing everything that comes next, the title takes on a meaning Green couldn't have intended.
Love That Burns, Fleetwood Mac (1968)
Green's lyrics are sparse and direct, the words of a young man who already understands that love costs something. No metaphors, no riddles, just the plain statement that this feeling is burning him from the inside. Reading them stripped of the guitar, you realize how much of the song lives in the spaces between the words.
Who owns Peter Green's legendary 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard today?
Two years after Peter Green dies, the band loses its other heart. On November 30, 2022, Christine McVie dies peacefully at a hospital in London. Next: Songbird.
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