COMING UP GREEN
If there’s any single word that aptly sums up Fleetwood Mac’s continuing career, it’s adaptability. Indeed, the only thing that seems consistent about the band’s trajectory is their very inconsistency. Over the course of nearly 55 years, the band’s membership has undergone so many incarnations it’s nearly impossible to keep track, with the current count up to nearly two dozen players that have come and gone since the group formed in 1967. While many know them best for the time Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks spent with the band and brought them to multimillion selling status, there’s an entire backstory that led up to that point, one which found them pursuing a direction that was decidedly different from the soft pop, Top 40-friendly sound that came later.
Those hallowed origins are now coming back in focus with the release of
Mick Fleetwood & Friends Celebrate the Music of Peter Green and the Early Years of Fleetwood Mac, a 2-CD/Bluray set (see sidebar for infomation on all formats) that captures a concert that took place in London on February 25, 2020, just prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. It was an all-star reunion of sorts, one that celebrated the man who literally shaped the budding Fleetwood Mac’s seminal sound and set them up as one of the most influential English blues bands of the ’60s and beyond. Guitarist Peter Green not only contributed some of the most essential songs of the Mac repertoire — “Oh Well,” Black Magic Woman,” “Love That Burns,” “Rattlesnake Shake” and “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)” among them — but also remained an indelible presence long after he left the band. He remains so now, despite his passing last July.
In a sense, the concert was a catharsis for drummer Mick Fleetwood
