To Keep the Dark From the Light

Peter Green : In The Skies

[Purchase]

In May of 1979, after spending eight years in obscurity, the original founder of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green,  reemerged with his first solo album since the beginning of the decade. In The Skies is a soulful record that must have delighted fans of the early Mac. He was the lead guitarist who wrote Fleetwood Mac's 1968 U.K. Top 40 hit "Black Magic Woman", made even more famous by Santana in 1970.

By 1970, the year they released the Top 10 hit "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)", Green had been struggling with LSD, had withdrawn from other members of the band and was talking about giving his money away. In April of that year, he announced his departure from the band: 

"There are many reasons why I'm leaving. The main thing is that I feel it is time for a change. I want to change my whole life, because I don't want to be a part of the conditioned world and as much as possible, I'm getting out of it."  

And he was out of it. 

Green put down his guitar and took menial jobs, even working as a gravedigger. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, institutionalized and given electro shock therapy. He turned down royalty checks and record contracts because he wanted nothing to do with the "devil's money".  Finally, his brother Michael convinced the president of PVK Records to let him spend as much time as necessary noodling around a studio until he came up with the album that would be the atmospheric and very mellow In The Skies. Amidst the frenzy of all things Fleetwood Mac, the album peaked in the U.K. album charts at #32 and received a score of B+ from critic Robert Christgau who wrote:

For a supposed resident of Cloud-Cuckoo Land, Fleetwood Mac's original hitmaker is doing all right... Green's new music goes back even before Then Play On, but it's a lot more confident--simple guitar excursions with a Latin lilt, like Carlos Santana with a sense of form (or limits).

#30 Duster Bennett "I Chose To Sing The Blues" 1970

Could the entire pub rock scene (that eventually gave us Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and the many incarnations of Nick Lowe) have all come from a single Welsh man who could play harmonica, guitar and drums at the same time? Probably not. But Duster Bennett could do all three and write remarkably catchy tunes like this one from his 1970 album 12 Db's.

                           Duster Bennett, the original one man band


Bennett was a bluesman at first. He recorded his first solo album with members of Fleetwood Mac and toured the US in 1970 with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Had he not been a blues singer, who knows? As he suggests in this song, he could have been a gambler, a lover, doctor or maybe even president.

         Peter Green, Duster Bennett, B.B. King

Instead he chose to sing the blues. In 1975 Jimmy Page signed Bennett to Led Zeppelin's Swan Song label. On a March night in 1976, after performing with Memphis Slim, Bennett apparently fell asleep at the wheel of his van and dies in a collision with a truck. He was 29.

In 2007, Sony released the Complete Blue Horizon Sessions. Now, like so many artists before him, his legacy is there--ready to be discovered-- by future generations.