I recently sold a story dedicated to Paul Kossoff, the guitarist with the band Free who was felled in his twenties by drugs. The rumor is that Koss had been clean for some time when a fan handed him something without warning. He died of a heart attack a short time later. Since I'm an SF writer, my story doesn't foreground drugs, picking a more contemporary way of Going Down Slow. I can't say more about where it'll appear yet, but stay tuned.
In the meantime, here's a documentary on Peter Green, a similarly astonishing blues guitarist with a depressingly familiar trajectory. In Green's case, he was introduced to LSD early on and appeared to weather that, but was somehow, mysteriously, taken in by some German "aristocrats" or "rich people" who plied him with LSD. In the documentary, at around the hour mark, you'll hear the band discuss how strange this was and how he immediately became seriously mentally ill (schizophrenia). Green, who was still alive at the time and appeared in the doco, doesn't appear to see it that way at all and the disconnect is quite startling. Who were these peculiar Germans - a cult? a religion? - and why did they meet Green at the airport as if by appointment?
We may never know, and I certainly shan't, because I can't tell what everyone is saying. I've lost the ability to understand English accents. :(
Anyway, "The Burn Out," about a teen fan who meets her boy-band idol and gives him a gift, is coming soon to a book store near you.
I'm still only half-way through it. But Mick Wall's When Giants Walked the Earth has an interesting insight on Black Dog:
...musos stroked their beards appreciatively over the peacocking, lugubrious riff - originally in 3/16 time, smirked Jones, "but no-one could keep up this that!" - and Plant's acapella vocals, based on Fleetwood Mac's recent hit, "Oh Well"...
Oh Well, of course. One of my favorite tunes but I had never thought about the two of them together. Apart from being in a very tappable four four, it does have a similar structure. Here's Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac with Oh Well.
He's very modest isn't he? He can sing, he is pretty and I like thin legs.
And here's Page himself Oh Welling with the Black Crowes and Joe Perry in 1999. (Thanks, C!)
While I'm here, here's another bit of Peter Green, with a better picture.
Danny's broken a string and Peter just rips this out as an improvisation
while he fixes it. It's spellbinding.
If you've forgotten what Black Dog sounds like ... how could you?... then try this one, the Jimmy-Page-Quick-Costume-Change version.
My first love was the blues. Oh, okay, that's a complete lie. My first love was Marc Bolan. But my second or third love was the blues. Or so. Anyway, it was in there somewhere. So I'm a slut, sue me.
Due to my age, I missed out on the first flowering of British Blues, and had to catch up by working my way back using as a starting point the Immediate Anthology of British Blues (that's the URL for the only volume I can find on Amazon, vaguely similar to the old vinyl volume II I have at home) and Pete Frame's Rock Family Trees as clues to chase down the remnants of the not-long vanished culture. I doubt if I discovered anything amazing you couldn't discover yourself. In fact, today I actually wanted to point out something I didn't discover at the time.
I only found out about early Fleetwood Mac a few years ago.
I was inoculated against Fleetwood Mac by my unadulterated hatred of the work they were producing by the time I started searching out older records. I thought that any band which was multi-platinum and featured floaty, soft-focus women in even more floaty gauzy dresses couldn't possibly have developed from a prior stage that was more to my liking. I was wrong about that. Like many bands of the period, FM started out as a pure blues band. In its line up it featured one of the three or four best British blues guitar players, Peter Green. Together with Danny Kirwan he produced twin-lead guitar that is, as they didn't say in those days, to die for.
I've still never bought a Fleetwood Mac album, for fear that it might have a Vaseline-lensed female lurking somewhere inside the cover, but I have caught up with a few tracks here and there, and some of those are now on available for your vidding pleasure on YouTube.
I'll lead off with a gem, a short (and unhappily truncated version) of Fleetwood Mac playing live at the Playboy Mansion for Hugh Hefner and his bunnies. Peter Green, who must have had all of his marbles at the time, chose to play Rattlesnake Shake, a song about an activity strongly associated with Playboy magazine and I don't mean Golf or even single malt drinking. The track also features an outstandingly pretentious intro by Heff himself that marks him out as a complete practitioner of the art discussed supra.
Rattlesnake Shake
That's cool and ironic and stuff, but if you want to feel the emotional charge of Peter Green's playing, try this one, World Keeps Turning. Danny Kirwan's broken a string and to fill the gap, PG rips out a solo number that just blows me away. BB King once said Peter Green made him sweat – with this one, you can see why. Watch his right hand (no, he isn't doing the rattlesnake shake).
World Keeps Turning
Here's my personal favorite. Oh Well. Watch Peter Green crack up after a flub. It's great to see him smile. Then, Shake Your Moneymaker (this one is slow to load; give it a chance.) A clip from the Peter Green Story. And to round it off, the famous Albatross. I normally hate songs about seabirds, but I give this one a pass. Barely.
PS – YouTube videos come and go like spring flowers. If the links die, in this message or any other, give me a holler and I'll try to refind one. If you want to do it yourself, or explore YouTube, double-click on the embedded video and it will take you straight to their website and you can search.
I sometimes mention a product on this blog, and I give a URL to Amazon or similar sites. Just to reassure you, I don't get paid to advertise anything here and I don't get any money from your clicks. Everything I say here is because I feel like saying it.
