peter green and danny kirwan

In the early days of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green and Danny Kirwan made for quite a dynamic axe-wielding duo. Unfortunately, a lot of the band’s material in this period suffered from the same jungle fever that afflicted so many guitar-based English bands at the time. I don’t have a problem with pasty English guys borrowing from the black blues tradition as long as they take those blues motifs and make them their own. I need to hear something unique brought to the table. Otherwise it just sounds to me like pilfering and leads to music that’s warmed over and once removed from the real thing. Many of the best English groups of the mid 60s - the Stones, Pretty Things, the Yardbirds, etc. - started off as boring blues groups and only become something new and distinctly English when they melded their blues influences with catchy pop song structures. But Fleetwood Mac arrived on the scene after the demise of the three-minute pop song. The Mac were very much a product of Britain’s return to the heaviness of the blues, which itself was an expression of the 60s moving from lightness into dark. I’m not a big blues enthusiast, but the interplay between Green and Kirwan makes me sit up and take notice.  Then Play On, released in the fall of 1969, is a strange assortment of fragments and fully-realized gypsy blues rock.  While the whole album is worth having and hearing, it’s the seemingly impromptu moments, ones where someone just happened to have a tape recorder handy, that best capture the chemistry the two guitarists had together. The whole Fleetwood Mac concept in the early days seems to have been motivated by a fetish for black Americana, but my critical faculties go out the window when I hear all that electrifying vibrato and those slashing rhythm chords...