Play On: Now, Then, and Fleetwood Mac: The Autobiography

by Mick Fleetwood

  The backstage area at the Warehouse was up a set of rickety wooden stairs, right above the stage. There was a table laid out with the usual cold cuts, carrot sticks and celery, with bottles of Coke and beer stuck in a cooler tub filled with ice. I remember going up there and having some, then doing our sound check. Peter’s voice sounded beautiful in that big open space.

  I don’t remember where I was when I realised that Owsley had spiked the drinks. Jenny told me that she was upstairs in that dressing room and had started to feel cooped up. She wanted to get downstairs and watch the crowd walking into the venue. At the bottom of the stairs she bumped into Danny Kirwan.

  ‘Jenny, Owsley spiked all the drinks,’ he told her, grinning impishly. ‘I don’t think I can go on. I can’t play my guitar!’

  ‘You can do it,’ she told him, even though she could see how jittery he was. Truth be told, Danny always seemed a bit nervous, but this was beyond that.

  That’s when Jenny’s trip kicked in. She remembers looking out at the crowd and seeing their eyes glistening. She saw bits of straw in their mouths when anyone smiled. Later as she watched me play, my whole body turned into a skeleton, just as I’d seen Peter’s do when we’d first tried Owsley’s acid. It was too much for Jenny as it had been too much for me, and she looked away in horror.

  Meanwhile I was out of my mind, sitting at my drum kit, trying to make sense of what we were trying to do. At least we were all in the same boat; when Peter got on stage, he grabbed two sticks and banged them together for a while before reaching for his guitar. Once he did, things fell into line and somehow he led us through it. Still, it was a roller coaster from start to finish.

  Time becomes a laughable concept when you’re on LSD; it can crawl to a halt or fly past you at the speed of light. During that set there were moments of both and then suddenly it was over. All of us were flying all the way through the Grateful Dead’s performance and on into the night. The entire place emptied out and still John McVie, Danny Kirwan, Jenny and I were there, wandering around the empty room. We had no idea where or when the others had left. I managed to find someone to drive us back into town. We intended to go to the Grateful Dead’s hotel, where the party was going to continue. We were staying in a different motel.

  Jenny and I sat in the back of the guy’s car, with me right behind the driver, and John and Danny in the front. As we started moving, I noticed that the driver’s head was bowed, so I looked over the seat and saw he was looking into his lap, rolling a joint with no hands on the wheel. I did the only sensible thing and reached my arms over the seat to steer the car for him. When he was done, we just kept driving like that because it seemed perfectly normal.

  I have no idea how long we cruised the streets looking for the Grateful Dead’s hotel, but we never found it. I think we spent several hours going in circles, passing old warehouses and driving over decrepit rail road tracks, not venturing far from where we’d started. Somehow, some way, we eventually found our motel.

  It’s a good thing we did, because if we’d been at that party, it would have spelled the end of Fleetwood Mac. That night the authorities raided the Dead’s hotel because they were after Owsley, who they knew was an LSD chemist, and they arrested everyone else present. The incident became the inspiration for the line ‘Busted down on Bourbon Street/Set up like a bowling pin’, in the Grateful Dead song ‘Truckin’’. If we had been arrested with them, we would have lost our visas and the ability to tour the States for many years.

  Instead when we got to the motel we found our bandmates and hung out in Jeremy Spencer’s room. The acid was still far from over, so we spent the rest of the night and on into the morning talking about our beliefs. It was a rare moment of sharing amongst us, because we usually spent our time guarding ourselves from ridicule when we weren’t making fun of each other, in the way young men in bands, or groups of any kind, often do.

  Jenny remembers that night well, she’s told me that it changed her life. She saw musicians as modern day disciples, spreading the word of something greater through their music. Music was the only way to do so because it brought people together and everyone understood. I think that was the closest all of us got to ever discussing religion, despite the fact that religion was a large part of Jeremy’s life and would soon become a part of Peter’s.

  With all that was happening for the band, we failed to see that our leader, Peter Green, was changing. He’d grown moody and brooding, which came through in his new material. There was a sadness to his lyrics that hadn’t been there before, which you can clearly hear in ‘Man of the World’, the follow-up single to ‘Albatross’. Considering lines such as ‘There’s no one I’d rather be, but I just wish that I had never been born’ and ‘I could tell you about my life… about all the times I’ve cried, and how I don’t want to be sad anymore’, it’s all right there. But it’s not as if Peter was suddenly morose; like the narrator of that song telling the listener how amused they’d be to hear about his life flying around the world, seeing all the pretty girls, outwardly that’s still who he was. But not so internally. Regardless, ‘Man of the World’ reached number 2 in England and kept us on a roll.

  Our next album, Then Play On, was even more of a departure, because for the first time we didn’t record live in the studio and then choose the best take. We employed editing and overdubbing extensively, because for the first time we could and also because it suited where were going creatively.

  Peter was squarely at the helm of the ship on this; we’d jam for hours in the studio and then leave him there with the engineer and producer to edit things down to a shining jewel. For the first time, Jeremy was entirely absent from the proceedings; in fact I don’t think he played a note on that album. Stylistically we were two bands in one, but the division became distinct and the new album didn’t have room for Jeremy. It wasn’t a rejection and Jeremy didn’t take it that way, because we planned to release an EP of his tunes shortly thereafter, possibly as Earl Vincent. It was just that Peter didn’t want the album to be a mix of styles. He had a vision to communicate via the songs and the studio as well, using it as an instrument the way the Beatles and Stones had with their most recent albums.

  Then Play On was entirely Danny and Peter, with Peter letting Danny write most of the songs, trying ever-harder to hide from what was expected of him as Peter Green, The Green God. Try as he may, Peter’s songs were the ones that made the album special. His playing was sublime and his lyrics, even at their most depressed, were expressive and poetic. Peter had become disillusioned with our success, and whatever the cause, this period of time is where the onset of his mental health issues emerged. I have no doubt that they were brought on by his use of LSD, but when it comes to the human mind, nothing can be that black and white. Peter’s illness would have happened regardless, or maybe it was just part of his quest, but in my opinion LSD fractured his mental stability sooner rather than later.

  Then Play On became Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hit, selling over 100,000 copies in the States and reaching the Top Ten in England. It included ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, perhaps the most enduringly famous song from the album and that era of the band, which is an ode to masturbation as a cure for the blues. I’m named in it, as a guy who does the rattlesnake shake to jerk away my sadness whenever I don’t have a chick. That was an appropriate immortalisation of my younger self, to be sure.

  McVie and I were convinced that Peter’s choice of single, ‘Oh Well’, was too sad and we even bet him that it wouldn’t chart. Well, were we ever wrong; it went to number 2 in England and Peter took our money. The album was the right piece of music at the right time and it made us a bona fide mega-act in Europe that year. It felt like we’d finally found ourselves and were onto something, and all of us were ecstatic about it–all except Peter. Our popularity, our tour schedule and our record sales had the opposite effect on him; they put him into a dark, depressed cocoon of his own making. He’d started talking matter-of-factly about leaving the band even before ‘Oh
Well’ exploded.

  This happened fast, and as someone who knew Pete well and felt that I understood him, I tried every which way to get him to open up about it. I wanted to know why our success made him sad. We’d come up together, we’d walked the same road, put our shoulders to the same burden and I thought we’d shared the same goal. I expected us to be toasting the fact that we had no lack of gigs and could enjoy the creative freedom that comes with success. We had earned it.

  ‘Mick, why did you start playing?’ Peter asked me during one of these chats.

  ‘Because I love the music and because I don’t think there’s anything else at all that I’m very much good at. I don’t even think I’m very good at what I do, Pete, but I know I should be doing it, because I love it.’

  ‘I started playing because I wanted to, Mick,’ he said, staring at me for a long moment. ‘I still play because I want to. I never did it for the business. I never did it to make a living. And the more I’m in it, the more I know that I’m not cut out for this business. I can take it or leave it at any time. I see it for what it is. It’s just playing.’

  That threw me. It was like talking to someone I didn’t know. ‘But Pete, aren’t we playing, together, every night? Isn’t that what you’re doing? Isn’t that what we do? Don’t you like being on stage with us? Do you not want that in your life?’

  He stared off for a moment and then looked back at me. ‘I really don’t know. I don’t think I want to be on a stage at all anymore.’

  ‘But Peter,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to understand, but I’m not sure I do. You and John and I have worked so hard, we’ve all worked so hard, to be able to do what we want, to play what we want. We’ve worked hard and now we’re finally there! We have the freedom to do what we like. We can write whatever kind of album we decide we want to write, and we can play it for people all around the world, people who are there just to see us. You understand how much of a privilege that is, don’t you? I can understand that you may be tired. Touring is hard, and the routine wears us all down. But we’ve just got to the point where we can call our own shots. We’ve finally made it. All of that tedious stuff is over for us. Now we can really start to enjoy what we set out to do.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Mick. What looks like success to you is horrible to me. There’s nothing in this to hold me here. We play every night but we play the same fucking thing. Night after night after night we play the same thing and it’s making me sick. I don’t want to play the same thing; I want to jam. I don’t want to ever do the same thing twice. I don’t want to know where it’s going when it starts. And I can’t do that here. I’m going to have to move on to something new.’

  Peter had taken more than a dozen LSD trips that I knew of by then, and continued to do so. We will never know how that played into it. What matters is that Peter changed, fast and drastically. He’d never done so before, but he began to talk about religion incessantly. He was Jewish but that wasn’t what he talked about. He’d decided he wanted to convert to Christianity. For a month or more, he turned every conversation to Christ and his conversion and then, just as quickly, he never spoke of it again.

  Since the day I’d met him Peter adored the attention of girls and sought out love. Among all of us, with McVie coming in second, Peter was the guy pulling girls after gigs, before gigs, pretty much all the time. Overnight that behaviour stopped because he found it disgraceful. He was consumed with an all-encompassing ideal of ‘doing good’, a pursuit Pete now believed all human beings should be devoted to. Playing music professionally did not fit into his new program.

  ‘Peter,’ I said to him one time, ‘we are doing good. We do a job that makes people happy. That is doing good. People who do jobs that bring other people happiness or do good deserve to be paid just like everyone else.’

  My words were met with a Peter Green X-ray vision stare. However much he’d ever trusted me, I could tell that he no longer did. He looked angry and suspicious.

  Very softly he said, ‘Mick, I don’t want to waste my life. That’s what I’m doing. I’m wasting my life. I don’t want to die thinking I never did a fucking thing for anyone.’

  I had nothing to say, because there’s no answering that.

  ‘You know Mick, sometimes I think music is everything, sometimes I don’t think it’s anything. I don’t know what it is and that’s all right. All I know is that I don’t give a shit about the money.’

  I’d had nothing to say before; and even less after hearing that.

  Fleetwood Mac marched toward 1970 with more accolades than ever before, mostly thanks to a dedicated fan base. In the 1969 year-end polls in Melody Maker, we were voted the number one progressive group–the Beatles were number one pop group that year–and Peter was the number three composer behind Lennon–McCartney and Jagger–Richards. We’d also outsold the Beatles and Stones in Europe in record sales and concert tickets. We were one of the biggest bands in the world, but with a leader who was fading fast.

  Peter grew more disillusioned, more sensitive, and increasingly hurt by the suffering he saw all around him. On tour I’d find him in his hotel room crying at the evening news and at one point he gave £12,000 to various charities. Then he approached the band and asked that we give all of our earnings to charities of our choosing. He wanted us to refuse any gigs or deals through which we could make money; all of it should be given away. We weren’t averse to charity, but this was too much. We’d discuss it with him for hours, but there was no changing his mind. Peter wanted us to live and tour monastically and to donate one hundred per cent of our profits to charity.

  ‘We won’t stop working,’ he’d say. ‘We will dedicate it to purpose. It is the only way to make a difference.’

  ‘But Pete,’ I said, ‘you like your money. You like to have cash and you like having people look after you. All of that costs money.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Mick,’ he said. ‘You’re dead wrong. I can walk away from it. I don’t need it. There’s so much poverty. I would feel better if I earned money and gave it all to the poor. That is how you make a difference.’

  These debates were endless loops that arrived inevitably at the same impasse. Peter didn’t want to make money from music and the rest of us felt there was nothing wrong with that. To be clear, we were willing to do free concerts to raise money and to donate to organisations that helped the poor and underprivileged. But Peter wouldn’t accept anything short of complete and utter selflessness when it came to what we earned as a band. So we’d always end up staring at each other in silence. And it got worse from there.

  Once he understood that the rest of us weren’t going to change our minds, Peter began acting crazier with each passing day. He took to wearing robes, caftans, and a huge wooden crucifix. He grew his hair and beard very long and when he spoke to the press he would only discuss his search for God. Later, when he’d see his words in print, he’d feel violated and ashamed and that would send him to a dark place that was hard to watch. To be fair, his words were often taken out of context and exaggerated outrageously, but he had made extreme statements to begin with. Peter took it all so personally that he suffered tremendously. In the span of a few months he degenerated from a vibrant, confident man into a sad and fragile soul. I felt helpless and devastated watching him slip away.

  I recalled a conversation I’d had with Peter years before, when John had finally joined the band.

  ‘You know there’s something else to the name, Mick,’ he said. ‘If I ever do leave, you’ll be okay.’

  ‘What do you mean, Peter?’

  ‘You’ll be okay without me if I leave, because you’ll have a band. I don’t want something that’s all about me. That’s why I chose a name that is the two of you, not me.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s your band, Pete,’ I said. ‘We wouldn’t be here without you. And this band is all of us, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is, but Mick, you have to understand something–I don’t really want any of this. But you do. And now
you have it. No matter what happens, you’ve got a band. You and John have a band named after the two of you. I don’t matter and I like that. I can leave if I ever want to.’

  He did matter, of course, but he was right about how he’d set things up. His choice of name left us a band and a legacy, and a built-in emergency exit for him.

  In the end, Peter left because the rest of us didn’t want to give it all away. We agreed with the beauty of his idealism, but we were practical. We didn’t see ourselves as materialistic for wanting to earn a living from music–we couldn’t have been because our living was quite meagre. No one in the band was rich by any means; for example, Jenny and I lived in a third floor walk-up rented flat. Our dream was to have enough saved to buy a place of our own where we could raise a family. We had yet to enjoy the fruits of sustained success but it seemed that we were about to. Peter found that idea repulsive. He was the only one amongst us that wanted to live like a pauper.

  Pete left the band for good during a sold-out European tour in February 1970, but was very responsible about it, agreeing to fulfil all of his obligations. We were in Munich when a bunch of well-to-do German hippies got a hold of him and took him to their commune. They all lived in a big old house where Peter joined them in getting fried on LSD for a few days. He met us at the gig and played with us, but it was the last we saw of him for quite a while. John McVie and I have had years to discuss it all and we’ve decided that Munich was the moment when Peter was truly gone for good. We weren’t sure what to do and after a few days our road manager and I went to fetch him. We found him tripping but lucid enough to tell us he was through.

  ‘I’m not coming with you,’ Peter said. ‘I’m going to live here now. I have everything I need.’

  These Germans were taking advantage of him and whether he stayed in the band or not, we weren’t going to leave our brother in their care.

  ‘That’s fine, Pete, you can come back and live here for the rest of your life, but you need to come with us now,’ we said. ‘You have some things to settle before you come back here for good.’