Wow. Just wow. Thank you. He’s the real deal. His stuff is raw and minimalist, but it is just distilled essence of blues, ain’t it? He sounds like Hound Dog Taylor without as much distortion and while he has a different sound, he has the basic rawness of RL Burnside and Asie Payton, both Fat Possum artists, too.
Jeez, where’s **elelle **when you need him? He’s a Doper who knew these guys and always has a story. I wonder if he knew Cedell Davis?
I must admit, it is late, I had a great meal at Ristorante Milano (they weren’t serving the white-sauce lasagna tonight, but the Osso Bucco over soft polenta more than made up for the absence!) and have to get up at 4:30am tomorrow morning to get to the airport for my flight.
Okay - so what can I do about Peter Green? **BubbaDog **- hmm, what can I tell you? Okay - try this: Imagine a guy from the exact same scene (Brit Blues in the sixties) playing the exact same guitar (a '59 Les Paul 'burst) and the same amp (a dimed Fender Twin), who also replaced Eric Clapton (Beck replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds; Greenbaum (his given name) replaced Clapton in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers) - but had a COMPLETELY different style. How’s that? 
Okay - listen to The Supernatural(YouTube link, again with the silly pictures - why do people do that?!?!?). Okay - the first thing you think is “wow, should Carlos Santana sue Peter Green? Because that sounds exactly like Santana” but then you realize that this came out before Santana, well, even existed, as a band or a guitar presence anyway. Bottom line? Santana owes, IMHO, 100% of his career to Peter Green and the fact that Santana took that approach to guitar and kept it going while Green unfortunately became an acid casualty of the 60’s like Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.
Okay, so if good blues = less is more and simpler is better, then Green is the guy who took that to an extreme with a guitar feeding back. Here’s the deal: when you play electric guitar, you sometimes want to hit a note and hold it. When the note endures, like a singer holding a note for a long time, that is called “sustain” as in “dude, did you hear the sustain he got out of his rig - how does he do that?” Well, beginning guitarists can’t make a note sustain; you have to press down just so - it has to be hard enough to keep the note fretted, but somehow, if you are pressing too hard, you kinda choke off the note, too - you don’t let it catch the wave of feedback that the overloaded amp wants to drive into the note. It’s weird. Ah, but what is interesting is that if you crank an amp so it is feeding back just enough (not so much that it simply overloads and farts out noise) AND you have that just right amount of pressure - oh, AND you work your finger in a little circle as you are fretting the note so you put a little vocal-sounding vibrato into the note? Well, for want of a better term, you coax the note along - the feedback is adding energy and the combination of your hard-but-not-too-hard finger pressure and waggle of vibrato keeping the feedback from reaching white-noise critical mass and instead the note just…sustains. And a damn good guitar play like Peter Green or Santana can coax a minute or two of sustain out of a note. THAT is what you are hearing when you listen to The Supernatural - yeah, if you put on headphones you can hear that they are being all 60’s psychedelic and panning the guitar from one speaker over to the other (dude, are you high yet? that’s so rad! ;)) but coaxing that kind of sustain out of a note? Please - that’s some master-class shit we are talking about, okay?
The CD I recommend doesn’t even have The Supernatural on it - that’s on John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers CD A Hard Road which is entirely purchase-worthy - but Green wanted more control so pulled Mick Fleetwood and John McVie away from Mayall, and, being a passive-aggressive pre-acid-casualty kinda guy, had the band named Fleetwood Mac - but since everyone knew it was his band, it was typically referred to as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Anyway, that Best Of CD has some GREAT stuff on it - Green hooked up with a great slide player, Jeremy Spencer (who disappeared on a tour in a California and turned up in a religious cult he is still a member of to this day) and Danny Kirwan (another great Les Paul player who had his own psychological issues that led to unpleasantness on and off stage - what is it with these guys?!). They have great, great songs like Black Magic Woman (what? you thought that was Santana’s? No - he was kneeling at the feet of the master, thankyouverymuch) and Albatross (an ambient, mellow instrumental - just beautiful).
Peter Green is one of those deeply in-the-know kinda players. His Les Paul - which legendarily had a magnet flipped in one of it’s pickups by mistake so that when both pickups were selected it had a different, out-of-phase tone - was owned for years by Gary Moore of Thin Lizzy and his own blues work - but he sold it a couple of years ago when he needed the money. It was listed for well over $1million (like I said, folks who like Peter Green LOVE Peter Green) but I am not sure how much it actually sold for. Peter himself came out of, um, retirement a few years ago and has played a few gigs, but near as I can tell, it’s kind of like that piano player from that move Shine - the fact that he is alive and capable of playing at all is a lot more important than whether he is actually any good or not…
