For every Mick Jagger or Bruce Springsteen, stars who not only survive but thrive through the decades, there are Keith Moons, Brian Joneses, and John Entwhistles who die young. There are the one hit wonders who don’t get to make a career in the public light. But perhaps the saddest are those, like Peter Green, showing brilliant talent early and losing it all because of the damage drugs have done to their minds. Green was fortunate, enough, to survive, eventually find a few supportive freiends, and make himself nearly whole again.
Green was the original guitarist in Fleetwood Mac. That’s him singing and playing guitar on the original version of Black Magic Woman and Oh Well. The group’s original name was Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, as Green was as big a name as the other two; they’d all played together in one of the most important British blues bands of the ’60s, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Indeed, Green was the replacement when Eric Clapton left that band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 along with the other members of Fleetwood Mac and even had the chance to jam on Black Magic Woman with Carlos Santana (who was also inducted that night).
But he took too many tabs of acid and by the very early ’70s his mind had deteriorated to the point where he not only had to leave Fleetwood Mac, he had to be institutionalized. Even that time away wasn’t enough, as he spend much of the ’80s living on his own hearing voices. As you might expect he hardly touched a guitar in all this time. Finally in the ’90s he got his life and mind back when a few longterm friends and family took him in and spent the necessary time with him. By 1995 he even was able to relearn the guitar and launched a band with ex-Black Sabbath drummer Cozy Powell.
What was his life like through that time? He said: “On the medication, I was surviving like a worm… or a mouse. Even a mouse was having a better life than I was having.”
Ovation Network ran a half hour special on Green and included a few clips from early in his comeback. He looked old and a little weak but played, let’s just say, better than I ever could.
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