Even Jeremy himself conceded in an interview with me that by the time the group recorded their third album, 1969’s Then Play On, he’d run his Elmore James style of blues into the ground. This comment won’t endear me to some fans of the band, but some of Spencer’s tracks are quite mediocre and repetitious. Some of those are pretty good, but the distance between their abilities and Green’s is substantial. These are interspersed, however, with quite a few sides featuring Jeremy Spencer as lead singer/guitarist and/or writer, and some (after mid-1968) on which Danny Kirwan takes those roles.
Fleetwood mac albums in chronological order mac#
The best early Fleetwood Mac tracks were those on which he sang (and, when they weren’t covering other people’s songs, wrote).
Yet it’s also in part because Green’s 1967-1970 recordings with Fleetwood Mac were quite uneven. By that time, the main remaining similarity with the band’s early days was the Fleetwood Mac name. In part that’s because memories of his time with the band have been superseded by the much more famous records they made after Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined. Peter Green was a major figure in late-‘60s rock, and one who still hasn’t achieved the recognition he deserves, even though a few of the songs he wrote and sang with Fleetwood Mac were big British hits. While his singing was on the rough and husky side, it excelled in projecting idiosyncratic character and personality as unvarnished and devoid of pretense as his songs. As a songwriter, he celebrated both joy and despair (if more often the low than the high) with a naked honesty rare in rock, and the equal of the African-American blues greats who’d inspired him to become a musician.
Peter Green on the cover of the UK magazine Beat Instrumental.Īs a guitarist, Peter Green was the master of a biting, sustain-laden bittersweet tone.