Peter Green Wrote the Songs That Built Other People's Careers

Peter Green founded Fleetwood Mac in 1967, led the band through its three most blues-committed albums, gave Carlos Santana one of the defining songs of his career, handed his 1959 Gibson Les Paul to Gary Moore, and walked away from all of it before he turned 24. He died on July 25, 2020, aged 73. The story of what he left behind is more interesting than most musicians' entire working lives.

Green was born Peter Allen Greenbaum on October 29, 1946, in Bethnal Green, London, the son of a working-class Jewish family in the East End. He started on bass, moved to lead guitar in his teens, and by 1966 had talked his way into John Mayall's Bluesbreakers as a temporary replacement for Eric Clapton. The fans were hostile. Clapton had just left for Cream, and nobody wanted a substitute. Green won them over anyway. Producer Mike Vernon, who showed up to record the Bluesbreakers album "A Hard Road" expecting Clapton and found Green instead, was converted by the end of the session.

When Green left Mayall in 1967, he took the Bluesbreakers' rhythm section with him: drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie. The band they formed took Fleetwood's name, and within a year they had released their self-titled debut. The second single off that run was "Black Magic Woman," released on March 29, 1968, and produced by Mike Vernon. It peaked at number 37 in the UK. Green had written it about a former girlfriend he'd nicknamed "Magic Mamma," and he'd built it on a minor blues structure with a Latin undertow he'd first sketched out in an earlier track called "I Loved Another Woman." The song was a modest hit. Then Santana got hold of it.

In 1970, Santana released "Black Magic Woman" as the lead single from their second album, "Abraxas." It reached number 4 on the US charts. The song became so associated with Carlos Santana that most listeners assumed he wrote it. He did not. Santana was explicit about the debt. "I've always really loved B.B. King and Peter Green," he told Guitar World in 2021, "and I wanted to combine that with Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria." Green's melodic phrasing, his way of bending a note until it ached, was the blueprint Santana worked from. When Santana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, he invited Green on stage to perform the song together. The gesture was not ceremonial. It was an acknowledgment of where the music came from.

Green's guitar itself became part of the lineage. His main instrument throughout the Fleetwood Mac years was a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard he had bought for £110 at Selmer's on Charing Cross Road, probably in 1965. The guitar had a manufacturing anomaly: one of the pickups had been installed in reverse, which created an out-of-phase sound when both pickups were engaged simultaneously. That hollow, slightly nasal tone is all over "Black Magic Woman" and across the early Fleetwood Mac recordings. After Green left the band in May 1970, he offered the guitar to Gary Moore, reportedly saying he wanted it to have "a good life." Moore played it for decades. Kirk Hammett of Metallica eventually bought it for a reported $2 million. Three generations of players, one instrument, all of them tracing a line back to a teenager from Bethnal Green who bought a secondhand Les Paul on a London side street.

B.B. King, who had no reason to flatter anyone, said of Green: "He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats." That quote has been repeated so often it risks losing its weight. King was talking about tone as an emotional property, not a technical one. Green's playing was quiet in a way that was unusual for the era. John Lennon, in a conversation with Paul McCartney, noted that Green "sings quiet" and "he's not a shouter." In the late 1960s, when John Bonham and Keith Moon were redefining what drums could do to a room, Green was making the case for restraint.

His final studio album with Fleetwood Mac, "Then Play On," released on September 19, 1969, and self-produced by the band, was the furthest he pushed that instinct. It brought in a third guitarist, 18-year-old Danny Kirwan, and moved away from straight blues into something more atmospheric and unresolved. The closing track, "Before the Beginning," written by Green, ends the record on a slow, open-ended note that sounds less like a finale than a question left hanging. Green left the band the following May. His last single with them, "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)," released in 1970, was written after a nightmare in which the devil appeared to him as a green dog representing the corrupting power of money. The riff is as heavy as anything Black Sabbath released that same year.

Green spent much of the 1970s and 1980s away from music entirely, struggling with mental illness exacerbated by LSD use. A television interview in 1988 revealed he no longer owned a guitar. He returned to performing in the mid-1990s and recorded with the Peter Green Splinter Group through the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Santana, in his obituary tribute, called Green's early instrumental "The Supernatural" — the title Santana would borrow for his own 1999 comeback album — "just sacred."

What Green left behind was not a catalog so much as a set of coordinates. Santana used them to build a career. Gary Moore used the guitar to find his sound. Judas Priest covered "The Green Manalishi." The Black Crowes covered it too. Kirk Hammett plays "Oh Well" on an unplugged Les Paul in a Guitar World clip and says, of the guitar's tone, "It sounds like the recording." Green gave away the instrument, the songs, and the template, and kept almost none of the credit. That is the shape of his influence: enormous, and mostly attributed to someone else.