He was the founder of Fleetwood Mac. He wrote their first number one. He named the band after the other two guys in it. By 23, he was gone. B.B. King said he was the only guitarist who ever gave him the cold sweat. He started giving his money away to charity. He gave his guitars to an Oxfam shop.
He pulled a shotgun on his accountant. Not because the checks had stopped coming, because they wouldn’t stop. He was remanded by the courts and committed to a psychiatric hospital. A doctor signed him up for electroconvulsive therapy. He vanished for 25 years. Rumors leaked out from time to time.
He was working as a gravedigger, a hospital porter, sleeping in his mother’s spare room. When somebody finally tracked down his old guitar, the famous one, and brought it back to show him, he stared at it and said it wasn’t his. That guitar would later change hands for sums approaching $2 million. Mick Fleetwood named the band after him, and Peter Green refused to put his own name on it.
This is Peter Green’s real story. Number one, the Jewish kid from Bethnal Green. He was not supposed to be Peter Green. He was born Peter Allen Greenbaum on October 29th, 1946 in Bethnal Green, the working-class East End of London. His father was a tailor turned postman. His mother came from Polish Jewish stock. He was the youngest of four children, and they did not have much.
Most British blues guitarists of the ’60s came from middle-class art schools. Peter came from a council family in the East End. What he had was a brother named Michael who taught him guitar at 10 years old. By 11, he was teaching himself everything else. What he learned to play, he learned to escape into. At school, the other kids had noticed his name.
Greenbaum was not a name you wanted to carry through a London playground in the late 1950s. The anti-Semitic taunts came with shoves and punches. Decades later, he said he took LSD in his 20s to get to a place where I wasn’t Jewish, but I wasn’t not Jewish, either. At 15, he made a decision that would erase a small but specific piece of him. He dropped the film.
He became Peter Green. He left school and got a job as a butcher’s boy. He played guitar at night in any band that would have him. Bobby Dennis and the Dominos, the Muskrats, the Tridents. He was 19 years old and going nowhere when he walked into a club in London one night in 1965 and shouted at the band leader from the audience that he was better than the guitar player on stage.
The band leader was John Mayall. The man he was claiming he could outplay was Eric Clapton. Number two, replacing a god. The graffiti was already on the walls of London. Clapton is god. Eric Clapton had just made the Beano album and become the most worshipped guitarist in Britain.
Then, in the summer of 1965, Clapton vanished, gone to Greece. Mayall was stranded. A skinny 19-year-old kid named Peter Greenbaum kept turning up at gigs, shouting that he was better than whoever Mayall had hired as a substitute. Eventually, Mayall let him sit in. Peter held the gig until October, when Clapton returned and demanded his job back.
Green was politely fired, but Mayall did not forget him. When Clapton quit in July 1966 to form Cream, Mayall called Peter Green, not as a backup, as the replacement. Replace Eric Clapton with this nobody? The blues community went into panic. In October 1966, they walked into Decca Studios to record A Hard Road.
The producer, Mike Vernon, turned to Mayall and asked where Eric was. Mayall told him Eric was gone. “Don’t worry,” Mayall said, “we’ve got someone better.” Vernon stared at him. “Better than Clapton?” Mayall replied, “He might not be better now, but you wait. In a couple of years, he’s going to be the best.
” A Hard Road hit the UK top 10 in early 1967, and the graffiti on London’s walls started to change. Green God. Number three. The band he named after other people. By mid-1967, Peter Green had a problem. He was too big for the Bluesbreakers. Audiences were coming to see him. Critics were comparing him favorably to Clapton in print.
A blues guitarist in Britain in 1967 had exactly two options. Stay quietly in someone else’s band, or become a frontman. Peter Green did not actually want to be a frontman. What he wanted was to play hard, raw Chicago blues with people he liked. He pulled drummer Mick Fleetwood out of the Bluesbreakers. He wanted bassist John McVie, too, but McVie was nervous about leaving Mayall’s paycheck.
So, Green did something extraordinary. He named the band after McVie before McVie had even agreed to join. Mick Fleetwood on drums, John McVie on bass. Fleetwood Mac. The thinking was that if McVie heard his own name on a marquee, he’d be too flattered to refuse. McVie eventually did join, but stop and think about this.
Peter Green was the star, the songwriter, the guitarist whose name was being painted on walls across London, and he named the band after the two guys behind him. Mick Fleetwood later said, “Peter could have been the stereotypical superstar control freak, but that wasn’t his style.” He named the band after the bass player and drummer for Christ’s sake.
The debut album came out in February 1968, UK top four. Then came Black Magic Woman, a haunting minor key blues that Carlos Santana would later turn into a global smash. Then came an instrumental inspired by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was called Albatross. On February 4th, 1969, it went to number one on the UK singles chart.
It remains the only UK number one single Fleetwood Mac has ever had. Not the Stevie Nicks lineup, not the Rumours era, not 40 million selling albums, not one of them ever matched what Peter Green did in his first year as a band leader. Peter Green did not lose his fame, he gave it away. Number four, the year his band was the biggest in Britain.
1969 was a loud year in pop music. The Beatles were on their way out. The Stones had Honky Tonk Women. Led Zeppelin’s debut was rewriting rock. Hendrix was four months from Woodstock. In the middle of all of that, quietly, almost shyly, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac was, according to multiple sources, out selling both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones on UK singles.
Albatross was followed by Man of the World in April 1969, UK number two. The only thing that stopped it from hitting number one was The Beatles’ own Get Back. Then came Oh Well, also number two. Three top two singles in a single calendar year. The third album, Then Play On, came out that autumn and was hailed as a masterpiece. But listen to the lyrics of Man of the World.
Peter Green sings about how he ought to be be He has fame, he has success, he has women, and then in the closing line he sings, “I just wish that I had never been born.” Mick Fleetwood said years later, “We had no idea he was suffering internally as much as he was.” But if you listen to the words, it’s crucifyingly obvious what was going on.
The band’s manager started noticing changes. Peter was talking about money differently. Not how to get more of it, how to get rid of it. He told the rest of the band that he wanted them to give away everything they had earned. The band refused. Peter grew a beard.
He started wearing white robes on stage. He hung a crucifix around his neck. Christine McVie said he had started to look like Jesus. And then came Germany. Number five, the night in Munich, the turning point. In late March 1970, Fleetwood Mac landed at Munich Airport on a European tour to promote Then Play On. The band was exhausted.
Peter was already different, withdrawn, distracted, talking about religion. At the airport, a strange welcome committee was waiting. A model actress-looking girl dressed in black velvet, a John Lennon-looking guy in wire glasses. They had no interest in the rest of the band. They followed Peter to the venue.
They watched Fleetwood Mac play. They stared at the other musicians with disdain. Then they invited everyone back to a party at a mansion in the forest outside the city. It was a commune. It was huge. It was by all accounts very full of LSD. What happened next has been told and retold in fragments for 50 years.
Peter Green was led down to the basement. Some accounts say his drink was spiked with acid. Other accounts say he took it willingly. But, here is the strange detail. When he came back up, he was claiming he had just played the best guitar of his life down there. The band’s manager, Clifford Davis, later said, “Peter Green and Danny Kirwan both took acid.
Both of them became seriously mentally ill that day.” Mick Fleetwood told Mojo years later, “John McVie and I always say that was it. Peter Green was never the same after that.” To Men’s Journal, he was even shorter. “He was wonderful, but he couldn’t handle the live.” The band finished the tour. Peter wrote one more song, and then he sat down with Clifford Davis on the tour bus and said the words that ended one of the most extraordinary blues guitar careers in British history.
He said, “I want to leave the band.” He played his last gig with Fleetwood Mac in May 1970. He was 23 years old. Number six, The Green Manalishi. The song he wrote in those final months explains everything. It was called The Green Manalishi with the two-pronged crown. It does not sound like a Fleetwood Mac song. It sounds like heavy metal.
The riff is slow, heavy, ominous. Producer Martin Birch achieved the eerie tone by recording in an underground concrete car park. Peter Green said the song came from a dream. He had been taking large amounts of LSD. One night he dreamed he was dead, lying immobile on his own bed. A green dog walked into the room and started barking at him from the afterlife.
“It scared me,” he said, “because I knew the dog had been dead a long time, but I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did.” He woke up writing the song. What was the green dog? Peter was very clear. It was money. The Green Manalishi was a wad of pound notes animated by the devil hunting him.
The devil is green and he was after me, Peter said. The single went to number 10 in the UK in May 1970. It was Peter Green’s last top 10 hit with Fleetwood Mac. The band had refused to give their money away. Peter had decided on his own to start giving his away anonymously. To War on Want, to Oxfam, where his guitars started showing up second-hand.
The money kept coming back to him. That became, by his own later accounts, the thing he could not solve. Number seven, the shotgun and the accountant, January 26, 1977. Peter Green walked into the offices of his accountant, David Simmons, carrying a shotgun. He had smuggled it back from Canada.
He pointed it at Simmons and made one demand. And here is where the story stops making sense. Peter Green had not come for more money. He had come to demand that the money stop arriving. Read that sentence again. Peter Green walked into his accountant’s office with a gun demanding that royalty checks stop being sent to him.
Not more money, not late money, not stolen money. He wanted the checks to stop. Simmons called the police. The police surrounded Green’s house. He was arrested. Held in remand, he failed the psychiatric assessment. Peter later said, “I was quite happy in prison, so I thought I’d be all right.
But they said, ‘You failed the psychiatrist test.'” He was committed to Horton Psychiatric Hospital. This was not his first hospital stay. He had already been an inpatient at West Park Hospital in 1974. He had been receiving electroconvulsive therapy at St. Thomas’ Hospital. He had been admitted to the private Priory Clinic.
Peter Green summarized it flatly, “They gave me ECT. They gave me injections and tranquilizers. I could hardly walk or keep my eyes open.” And when an interviewer asked him directly why he had ended up in hospital, he gave the most heartbreaking answer in the entire story. He said, “The main reason they put me in hospital was for giving my money away.
” Number eight, the lost years. For most of the 1980s, Peter Green disappeared, literally. Fleetwood Mac were now the biggest band in the world. Rumours was released in 1977. It had sold over 40 million copies. And the man who had founded the band, written its first number one, was nowhere. Reporters who tried to track him down kept hearing the same rumors.
He was working as a gravedigger in London. He was working as a hospital porter. He was living as a homeless in Richmond. According to multiple accounts, all of these were true at various points. By the mid-1980s, he had reverted formally to his birth name, Peter Greenbaum, and was living an almost hermit-like existence.
His self-confidence had completely collapsed. He was sleeping for up to 20 hours a day. He was, by every external measure, unrecognizable from the man who had once stood on stage with a number two single on the British charts. When Bob Welch visited him, he came away disturbed. Peter had had a piece of cheese stuck in his hair the entire duration of his visit, just stuck there.
He didn’t appear to notice it or care. Peter himself told The Times, “I was throwing things around and smashing things up. I smashed a car windscreen and the police took me to the station. They asked me if I wanted to go to hospital. Somewhere around 1991, his older brother Len and his wife Gloria took him into their house in Great Yarmouth.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, Peter Green was somewhere stable. An old friend named Nigel Watson visited and noticed something. Peter was on heavy medication that was prescribed to keep him quiet. He was sleeping most of the day. Watson took him off the medication slowly. He moved him into his own house for 9 months.
Every day at noon, Watson would come home and physically get Peter out of bed, hand him a guitar. His fingers wouldn’t do what his mind wanted them to do, but he was waking up. In 1996, Peter Green walked onto a stage at the Guildford Festival, picked up a guitar, and played for the first time in front of a major audience in over 20 years.
He was somehow back. Number nine, the guitar worth more than a mansion. There is one more character in this story. It is not a person, it is an instrument. They call it Greeny. In 1965, Peter Green walked into Selmer’s music shop on Charing Cross Road in London. He paid 110 pounds for a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard.
It was beautiful, but it had a manufacturing fault. The neck pickup magnet had been installed backwards. Most guitarists would have sent it back. Peter simply heard what it did and decided he liked it. That fault gave the guitar a nasal hollow tone that Kirk Hammett of Metallica would later describe as a strat through a 100-W Marshall stack.
You can hear it on Albatross, on Black Magic Woman, on solos that made B.B. King say, “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” It became one of the most famous guitars in rock history. In the early 1970s, broke and mentally unwell, Peter Green sold it to a young Irish guitarist named Gary Moore.
The price was roughly what Peter had originally paid for it. Peter told Moore he just wanted it to have a good home. Moore used the guitar for 35 years. On Black Rose, a rock legend. On Parisian Walkways. On his 1995 album Blues for Greeny, 11 Peter Green songs recorded on the guitar Peter had given up on.
In 2006, Moore sold the guitar for somewhere between $750,000 and $1.2 million. The dealer listed it for $2 million. In 2014, Kirk Hammett of Metallica bought it. And here is the final detail. Hammett later told the story of the day he met Peter Green and brought the guitar with him.
Hammett pulled it out and said, “Hey, man, I have a friend of yours in this bag.” Peter Green looked at the guitar. He said, “That’s not my guitar.” Decades of medication, hospitals, electric shock therapy, and the man could not or would not recognize the instrument that had once made him the most exciting blues guitarist in Britain.
A friend of Peter’s quietly said, “He knows that’s his guitar. He just wouldn’t claim it.” Number 10. The tribute. On February 25th, 2020, the lights came up at the London Palladium. 2,200 people had bought tickets. The lineup was almost impossible to believe. Pete Townshend of The Who, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, Kirk Hammett carrying Peter Green’s old 1959 Les Paul.
And at the center of it, on drums, Mick Fleetwood. “I wanted people to know,” Mick told Rolling Stone, “that I did not form this band. Peter Green did.” David Gilmour played Albatross. Kirk Hammett and Billy Gibbons played The Green Manalishi using the original guitar. Noel Gallagher revealed that almost every Oasis soundcheck for 20 years had started with a Peter Green song.
Peter Green was alive on the night of the concert. He did not attend. He was at home, quiet, painting and fishing, which had become his favorite hobbies. Mick Fleetwood had visited him a year and a half earlier and told Rolling Stone, “He plays acoustic guitar. He loves painting, and fishing is his hobby.
He’s okay. He also has really little or no ego at all, which is unbelievable.” 10 days after the show, the world shut down for COVID-19. 5 months later, on July 25th, 2020, Peter Alan Greenbaum died peacefully in his sleep. He never saw the footage. Mick Fleetwood later told Rolling Stone, “If you booked it 10 days later, it would have been canceled.
I almost feel sick to my stomach when I think that a week later and this wouldn’t have happened.” The Rolling Stones call themselves the greatest rock and roll band in the world. The Beatles became the most influential cultural force in popular music history. For one brief year, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac stood right between them, and then he gave it away.
He played a guitar that would one day change hands for sums approaching $2 million. He sold it for roughly what he had paid for. He wrote Black Magic Woman, but the world remembers Santana’s version. He wrote Albatross, but the casual listener does not know who wrote it. He started Fleetwood Mac and named it after the rhythm section.
He vanished for 25 years, and when he came back, he carried no resentment about any of it. B.B. King, the king of the blues himself, said Peter Green was the only guitarist who ever gave him the cold sweats. A working-class Jewish kid from Bethnal Green who picked up a cheap Spanish guitar at age 10.
A teenager who shouted from a club audience that he could outplay Eric Clapton and was right. A 23-year-old who walked away from the top of British music because the money had started barking at him in his dreams like a green devil dog. A man who pulled a shotgun on his accountant not to get more, but to stop receiving anything.
A guitarist whose own legendary instrument he could no longer recognize. A grandfather of British blues who watched a roomful of rock royalty pay tribute to him from the safety of his own living room five months before he died in his sleep at 73. The story of Peter Green is not the story of a tragedy.
It is the story of a man who had everything the world tells you to want and decided with quiet stubbornness that he did not want it. Peter Green did not lose his fame. He gave it away. If this story moved you, go put on the original 1968 Fleetwood Mac recording of Black Magic Woman, not the Santana version, the first one.
Listen to the way the notes breathe. That is the sound of a man whose tone made B.B. King sweat. Hit the like button, drop a comment, and tell us your first memory of hearing Albatross or Oh, Well. And if you have not already, subscribe and turn on notifications. The next forgotten genius we cover walked away from a career that should have made him the most famous voice of his generation.
Until then, peace, love, and the British blues. We will see you in the next one.
