So, yes, I've gone out of sequence here, Peter Green wasn't supposed to be my object of study until October – but Nature has no respect for our plans and selfishly took this brilliant if troubled musician from us on July 25th, so swapping him to August and really delving into his style seemed an appropriate way of paying my respects to one of the truly great blues players.
Born Peter Allen Greenbaum on October 29th 1946 in London's Bethnal Green as the youngest of four children, it was Peter's brother Michael who first got him started, teaching him his first few chords. But by 11 he'd caught the bug seriously and begun teaching himself, heavily influenced (as many of his generation were) by The Shadow's Hank Marvin. By 15 he was playing professionally, playing bass and lead guitar in a variety of covers and rhythm and blues based bands. When John Mayall's Bluesbreakers exploded onto the scene with Eric Clapton after recording the now legendary “Beano” album in 1965, Green (having dropped the “baum” from his surname after being teased about it at school) was inspired to focus heavily on lead guitar and was a frequent attendee at their gigs during the “Clapton Is God” era of 1965-66.
It was Clapton's self-admitted unreliability and flakiness – leaving mid-tour to take a holiday in Greece – that would lead to Green's breakthrough. John Mayall recounts that during the Bluesbreaker's gigs with a variety of dep guitarists, Green would frequently be in the audience. “Peter had pestered John to employ him,” remembers Clapton, “often turning up at gigs and shouting from the audience that he was much better than whoever was playing that night. “
Soon enough, he would get his chance to prove it. After four concerts with the Bluesbreaker's as a dep, Green was hired as a full time band member and recorded “ A Hard Road” including self-penned instrumental “The Supernatural”, famous for it's eerie shimmer and sustain, as well as a blistering cover of Freddie King's “The Stumble” - which I spent most of August transcribing and will form the basis for this month's licks.
During his tenure with the Bluesbreaker's, Green met drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, and in 1967 they left the Bluesbreakers to form Fleetwood Mac with additional guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan. Early Fleetwood Mac brought success with blues influenced tracks like “Oh Well”, “Green Manalishi”, “Man Of The World” and the instrumental “Albatross” which incredibly remains Fleetwood Mac's only number one single!
Unfortunately this period also brought Green into contact with LSD which he began taking in increasing quantities. This, combined with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, led to his quitting Fleetwood Mac and music in general for an extended period. The details of this are widely available, so I'm going to switch to a personal perspective here as his re-emergence in the mid 90s coincided with me getting serious about guitar playing, and my dad playing me the famous intro solo to the Fleetwood Mac with the encouragement to “learn that”! Which I duly did, with the aid of an early copy of Guitar Techniques magazine running a feature on him in early 1996 with transcriptions of both that and “Albatross”.
Fast forward a couple of years to 1999, and I was at Leeds University in my second year, and a regular at the open mic down the road from the university itself. I struck up a friendship with Jet Martin who ran it and was a solo blues artist, and one evening he mentioned to me that Peter Green (now with the Splinter Group, a blues project he formed in the 90s as part of his rehabilitation) was playing at the nearby Irish Centre, and as he shared management he was going to be the support – and would I like to be on the guest list?
Having never been on the guest list for anything, unsurprisingly my answer was yes, and not only did I get to see Peter Green himself from about 6 feet away, but also to meet him! However it was clear that his recovery at that point was far from 100%, he was very distant – not unpleasant, perfectly polite...just carrying on a completely separate conversation from the one I was trying to have with him- still, I have his autograph!
Right, enough history, let's get to analysing his playing style.
It will come as absolutely no surprise to both of you who've been following this blog that the major and minor pentatonics formed the basis of Green's style, and he had a beautiful knack of blending the two (for example, the cover of “Need Your Love So Bad”). His approach blended position 3 of A minor pentatonic with position 4 of A major:
And here's a typical Green style lick blending these two:
Now, Peter Green is rightly revered as a beautiful “feel” player with exquisite taste, touch and tone. But he could also put pedal to metal when he wanted to, and on his cover of Freddie King's “The Stumble” he does exactly that, pulling out this absolutely blistering triplet based E minor pentatonic run: https://youtu.be/NLpziHTO-Nc?t=70
Check out the ingenious way the phrasing seems to double back on itself, as well as the dash of b5 from the blues scale to top things off. Not to mention the sheer size of the thing – over four bars long! In terms of the mental agility required to pull off something like that it's akin to running the 100m sprint but on a tightrope strung across Niagra Falls – hugely impressive.
Have fun with these and see you next month for God himself, the John Mayall- era Eric Clapton!
