Green Shadows (Fleetwood Mac, 2003)

A couple weeks back I foolishly deleted this album from my library (not intentionally) and had to resurrect it from a backup wisely kept on an external hard drive on another computer. Needless to say this collection isn't exactly Rumours, an album you could probably hit was a stone thrown at random into a field of albums. The whole situation was very much on my mind when it was time to pick the next album of the week, and it was a little weird that it should be this one. I even had to double check to confirm it was random.

I'm not sad about this because early Fleetwood Mac is awesome and this was way overdue. Unfortunately, early Mac is really confusing. First, it doesn't sound anything like the radio-friendly stuff of the late 1970's and early 1980's. In fact, with the exception of "Oh Well (Part 1)" getting the occasional live workout, even the band's most devoted fans have likely heard nothing from this era. Second, the control over the catalog from this era was sloppy at best, so much so that an American release (English Rose) was nothing more than an odd mishmash of material from previous and upcoming British albums. Third, no matter how "tormented" the band was at its commercial peak many years later, this was a band the suffered from serious personnel convulsions that would jettison leaders (Green, Spencer, Kirwan, Welch) with a frequency that would have killed any other band. Of the three, point two is what makes this compilation a little hard to follow.

Green Shadows isn't really a "best of" the Peter Green era; it's more of a rarities collection. Most of the songs are either scratchy demo versions, even scratchier live versions (which may predate the first album - there are no helpful liner notes here), and "un-issued" alternate versions of studio tracks. It covers from (probably) just before the first album to 1970's "Green Manalishi" single and Green's departure from the band. For a period of just under three years it shows a lot of change, from blues covers, to blues-inspired originals, to not-even-that-bluesy originals. Although the band was called "Fleetwood Mac", the public secret was that this was Green's band, named in hopes of landing Fleetwood and McVie for his rhythm section, which he ultimately succeeded in doing. All three, along with slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer, carried serious British blues credentials, though the sound was almost entirely directed by Green and Spencer. Like most of the bands of the British blues boom, they soon started to wander into other musical fields. As Spencer was increasingly marginalized, the band got less bluesy, also fueled by the addition of guitarist Danny Kirwan, who ultimately replaced Green completely. Spencer held on a little longer, but was whisked away into a cult and severed his relationship with the band. Bob Weston and Bob Welch joined later than the scope of this compilation, but they are also a part of the extensive "prehistory" of Fleetwood Mac.

I could go on, but, as you might have noticed, I'm running a little behind schedule here!