Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Lo-Fi Mojo: Fleetwood Mac (1.0), “Oh Well”

by Mojo Flucke

Some no-compromise music fans — especially those with ears tuned to the blues-centric, distortion-fueled sound that comprises the DNA of all quality rock, ever — would say that Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are not only are responsible for making pop music the Superfund cesspool that it is today, but they also poisoned what was one of the greatest blues-rock bands of all time. Other people might have a slightly dissimilar telling of the events we’ll call The Christine McVie-As-Yoko Theory.Still others might say that Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green did it himself, squandering away his genius with drugs and letting his sometimes-fragile mental health go to seed. In this reality, his bandmates, left to their own devices, did what they had to do to stay in business, make a living, and dominate the world’s airwaves.

Whatever your take on the events that shaped Fleetwood Mac’s history — if you want to win a bar bet, ask “I bet you don’t know who wrote and originally recorded “Black Magic Woman”; that, my friend, would be Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac — it’s hard to dispute the contention that Peter Green played some aggressive, wonderfully grungy blues noise. You can bet Jon Spencer heard Green’s records more than a couple times before erecting his Blues Explosion — which sounds a lot like a tribute to “1.0″ Fleetwood Mac.

One of Green’s last songwriting contributions before dropping out of the band he created was “Oh Well,” available out there in about 15 different studio and live versions as every label in the world tries to cash in on completist Mac fans minted during the Buckingham-Nicks era. Fact is, pretty much all vintage Mac from this period rages in a fierce blues pocket, and in my experience, the crappier the sound quality, the better the performance. This MP3 came from a little disc called The Vintage Years Live. Here’s a 1969 Beeb performance via YouTube:

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  • Paul Janisch
    Strange that you would describe Green's playing as aggressive. He stands out from his contemporaries (Clapton, Beck, Stan Webb etc) in that he played fewer very well chosen notes, more often than not without distortion. You can feel the emotion that comes out of his playing, just as you could with BB King's earlier work. It is for this reason that Clapton has described him as the best British blues guitarist ever.

    Anyway - thank you for posting this. Green's influence is still felt today and the more people that recognise him for this that better it is.
  • mojo
    This is an interesting comment--I had to think back why "aggressive" fit...and I think it's because I have a lot of the old live recordings that I listen to. I think in some performances he was either emotionally or chemically flying. Kind of like Santana at Woodstock. If I just concentrated on the studio stuff in my listening, I might indeed have a different perspective.

    BB's early work (sigh) you are a kindred spirit. If you haven't read the Stanley Booth account of BB vs Albert King in a cutting contest in the book "[sic] rythm oil" it is one of the most priceless pieces of blues prose I've ever read.
  • You can bet Jon Spencer heard Green’s records more than a couple times before erecting his Blues Explosion

    And I'll bet you Jimmy Page heard "Oh Well" more than a couple times before writing "Black Dog."

    I still have a sneaking fondness for the original long studio version of the song, where the two-minute "rock" bit is followed by ten minutes of soundtrack music for an imaginary spaghetti western.
  • Eric S.
    "Black Magic Woman" is a great piece of trivia; however, I would have been just as stumped by "Green Manalishi". I assumed that was a Judas Priest original.
  • And just to add the icing to that cake: Fleetwood Mac's version is so much heavier than Priest's, it's just ridiculous. And is that a sentence you ever thought you'd read?
  • mojo
    Fleetwood Mac 1.0 is so different, and once you start listening you start to realize how powerful they were. Granted, the late 60s were different times, too, so who knows what Peter Green would have been playing in 1978 if the band had stayed together as originally constituted? Definitely not disco (ha) but probably it wouldn't have sounded so...as you put it...heavy, which is apt. Early Mac is in my all-time rock pantheon.
  • Paul Janisch
    There was a lot of cross-pollination at the time. I think there is a huge Green influence in "Since I've been loving you". The most interesting Green phase is on those Mayall tracks where Green was expected to sound like Clapton. To the casual listener you might just think that you are listening to a Clapton knock-off. The reality is that you are listening to a guitarist asserting himself in such a way that you don't miss Clapton at all. The solo in "The same way" is an example of Green playing Clapton who is playing Green.

    A total master and constant inspiration. Now if only I owned that Les Paul......
  • One of the top rated shows at Wolfgang's Vault is a Mac concert from Stockholm in 1969. It features Green, Spencer, and Kirwan in addition to Mick and John. It's an amazing show, and yes, "Oh Well" is there. You can listen to it for free, or buy it for $10. Wolfgang's Vault is an invaluable concert resource for everyone to know about anyway:

    http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/dt/fleetwood...
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