Peter Green (1946-2020)

HE TURNED HIS BACK ON FAME, FORTUNE AND SANITY TO BECOME A BLUES-ROCK LEGEND

- Alan di Perna

I SPENT A considerable amount of time in the late Sixties lying on the floor of my girlfriend’s bedroom, listening to an album called A Hard Road by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. It featured an exciting newcomer to the British blues scene at the time — a guitarist named Peter Green, who had accomplished the Herculean feat of replacing Eric Clapton in Mayall’s band. By this point, Mayall’s previous disc — Blues Breakers: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, the so-called “Beano album” — had already become the stuff of legend. This was the era of “Clapton is God” graffiti.

But Green’s work with Mayall offered a different, and arguably deeper, dive into the mysterious, mystical thing that we call the blues. Green didn’t dazzle in the same way that Clapton did. Instead, he reached right inside your chest and wrenched your heart from its cavity. But to say, as some have, that Green favored emotional expression over technical virtuosity also sells him short. There’s a high degree of mastery in his work with Mayall and the band he went on to found — Fleetwood Mac. But Green deployed that mastery from a place of humility with respect to the grand tradition of the blues. He saw the electric guitar not as some kind of macho superstar phallic symbol, but as an implement with which we can claw and scrape our way to the essential truth of the human heart.

Sadly, the great heart of the man we knew as Peter Green stopped beating on July 25th of this year. He was 73 and died in his sleep. Not much more is known about his passing at the time of this writing.