Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green saluted with film, album

• Published date: 28 March 2021
• Author: GEORGE VARGA/TNS
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

He is saluted by an all-star lineup in the new concert film, DVD and double-album, Mick Fleetwood & Friends Celebrate the Music of Peter Green and the Early Years of Fleetwood Mac, which was recorded in 2020. It debuts April 24 on-demand on nugs.net and will be released April 30 in Blu-Ray, CD and vinyl formats. Guests range from ZZ Top's Billy F. Gibbons, Metallica's Kirk Hammett and Oasis co-founder Noel Gallagher to The Who's Pete Townshend, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, original Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer and three current members of the band Green once led – Fleetwood, Christine McVie and Neil Finn.

"Peter Green was most likely unaware of how significant his contributions remain, yet there are legions of us who still follow the path he trod so early on," Gibbons said via email.

A famously troubled soul, Green was 73 when he died in his sleep in July. As a young man, he wrote and sang such enduring Fleetwood Mac classics as "Black Magic Woman," which became a worldwide hit for Santana, "Oh Well, Pt. 1," which has been covered by everyone from Haim and Aerosmith to Jason Isbell and the late Tom Petty, and "The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Pronged Crown)," which has been covered by such bands as Judas Priest, The Melvins and Corrosion of Conformity.

That his music endures is as undeniable as the fact that Green, sadly, started his downward spiral as a young man and never recovered in his lifetime.

"When I look back on Fleetwood Mac, there are things I would have done differently," the Jewish musician born Peter Greenbaum said in a 1998 Union-Tribune interview to preview his sluggish performance at San Diego Street Scene with The Splinter Group.

Green, who suffered from schizophrenia and the cumulative effect of too many LSD trips and too many prescription tranquilizers, left music altogether in 1971. He did not record again until the end of that decade. His sporadic, on-again/off-again career after that came to a complete standstill in 2009. He died barely five months after the 2020 London tribute show in his honor, which he was invited to but did not attend.

"The concert was about celebrating the joy of who Peter Green was and what he did, creatively, so I've always steered away from [discussing his decline]," said drummer Fleetwood, who has led each of the many subsequent Fleetwood Mac lineups since Green quit 41 years ago.

"But I'm fine talking about that, too, since you interviewed him. For me, though, this is not about the 'long...