CHAPTER 4

THE BLUESBREAKERS

The Peter B’s really were something there for a moment and I’ve got no reason to err on the side of hyperbole. We were one of the two or three acts chosen to support the best of the best, because Bardens was a visionary musician. Under his guidance, the Peter B’s later became the Shotgun Express, which featured me and amongst others, a very talented, impossible to ignore, raspy vocalist named Rod Stewart. After Bardens was done playing that manner of blues and rock with all of us, in the 1970s he broke new ground as a solo artist, experimenting in the type of synth-based music that laid the groundwork for the electronic music of today. Peter was great and he was taken from us far too soon in 2002, at the age of fifty-six, by lung cancer.

But back then, once he’d put together the Peter B’s, we were booked solid. We filled support slots at every prestigious gig there was, which is how we got invited to play at Tara Browne’s birthday party. I’ve mentioned Tara already in passing, but I’ve not taken the chance to say that he was, truly, a wonderfully warm Irish lad. He was one of the heirs to the Guinness brewing fortune but you’d never know it unless someone told you. His wealth and influence had nothing to do with his charm; Tara was who he was and it came through.

He was a sprite, a dashing patron of all manner of culture to be sure. He was always there, always in the moment. He made the rounds with the Beatles and the Stones and he always did it right, he was never a nagging tag-a-long. So when Tara was set to turn twenty-one, every single person in our little bubble world was up for it, because we knew he would do it right. He chose one of the most gorgeous properties I’d ever seen, one that had been in his family for nearly a century. It was a castle in County Wicklow, Ireland, set in a wide green valley, complete with a staff, chauffeurs, stables, everything but a legion of hunters on horseback awaiting the release of the red fox. Tara flew up the two hundred or so guests in two private jets, including John Paul Getty, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and his girlfriend at the time, Anita Pallenberg. This party was special and those invited knew it too; all of us arrived in decadent, splendid costumes, whether they’d been kitted out at thrift stores or bought from a posh boutique. There was a glamour to it all that befit the setting.

I spent hours that seemed endless with Brian Jones at that party, because as soon as I walked into a hall as grand as a cathedral, he was the first person I saw. He beckoned to me to follow him upstairs before I had time to register the scope of the place.

‘Come on, Mick, let me show you something.’

I followed Brian upstairs. He led me down a hall, looking back to make sure I was with him, smirking in that knowing way of his. He opened a door and there, in the middle of the room, was the biggest block of opiated Moroccan hashish I’d ever seen in my entire life. There was nothing else in the room but that hash, a beautiful glass hookah and a bed.

‘Is this yours Brian?’ I asked, ogling that massive block of drugs.

‘Sure it is, Mick. It’s mine. It’s all of ours. It’s here for everyone. So let’s have some.’

This was the birthday party to end all birthday parties. For one thing the music was stellar, full of various bands playing everything from blues to all manner of Eastern excursions; in short, every musical genre the English rock-and-roll scene was currently into. The environment was indulgently magical, with jugglers and people dressed up as goblins and other mythological figures.

Tara being Tara, he even had a surprise for those who thought they knew everything. He’d arranged to have the Lovin’ Spoonful flown over from America to play during the height of the weekend. He’d told no one. At the time the Spoonful had a huge Top 10 hit in the States with ‘Do You Believe in Magic’, which we all knew, whether we liked it or not. What mattered was that Tara had flown in the hottest new group in the American charts that week–because he wanted them to play their hit song at his birthday.

That moment was beyond words. Just to be able to do that, so nonchalantly, as a surprise to your guests, was amazing. The Spoonful impressed me, for what it’s worth. I had thought they were bubblegum crap, but seeing them live, right there on the stairs of Tara’s house, I changed my mind. They could play; they weren’t just a piece of candy, they were the real deal. They blew everyone’s mind, because all of us who’d doubted them saw first-hand that John Sebastian had the goods.

Tara was quite the host, as he always was. Sadly, he left us about seven months after that party. He was killed in a car crash in December 1966, while speeding in his Lotus Elan through South Kensington. He failed to see a traffic light and smashed into a parked lorry. His passing touched us all.

There was some debate about it–on record even Paul McCartney and John Lennon couldn’t agree–but I’ve come to accept as truth that the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’ was inspired by the newspaper headline that Tara Browne had died and I couldn’t imagine a more beautifully appropriate song to be his eulogy.

In the spring of 1966, months before Tara passed and all that happened, the Peter B’s cut a single called ‘Do You Wanna Be Happy?’ and we added two additional singers to our roster, one male, one female. It made a huge difference, so much so that our name no longer made sense, so we changed it to the Shotgun Express. Our two new singers were the best anyone could hope to have. They were Beryl Marsden, one of the most powerfully beautiful R&B singers I’ve ever known and as I mentioned earlier, Rod Stewart, a North London chap who needs no introduction.

Can you imagine how great that band was? Those two singing, the bassist Dave Ambrose and me holding it down, laying back in the groove and letting them loose with Peter Green beside them–it was fucking gorgeous. In those days, Rod was the embodiment of the recently-deceased Sam Cooke and with Beryl up there with him, they could melt iron. Peter Green was coming into his own and it was powerful every night. Greenie was becoming known as ‘the Green God’, up there with Eric Clapton, who some people had begun to equate with God in graffiti all over London.

The Shotgun Express was a shooting star, too full of talent not to break apart. We were a powerhouse live, each of us doing our bit, but not always together. Although Rod Stewart was an equal band member, he was already a star because he behaved like one. It was my first experience of working with a prima donna, yet it made complete sense. Rod the Mod and his fantastic full head of hair, which if I remember correctly stood up on the strength of a mixture of sugar and lemon, could not be counted on to unload the van if it was raining.

‘Lads, I don’t think I’ll be doing that,’ he’d say.

‘Well, why the fuck not?’

‘Because the hair will get fucked up. And someone’s got to look good out there.’

It was hard to argue with him because it made sense, and he did look so damn good out there and sang so well that no one wanted to mess with that. After a while we never asked for his help again and let Rod the Mod sit there. No one minded because he did his magic on stage. Rod also taught me about clothes and was the first person to make me realise that being my size, shopping in stores was a waste of time. What I needed was a tailor, something I knew nothing about. Rod and I nearly worked together again, when Jeff Beck called me up to tell me he was forming a band with Ron Wood and wanted me to be their drummer. Peter Green and I had already formed Fleetwood Mac, so I turned Jeff down, but if I hadn’t, I might have become one of the Faces.

Shotgun Express was a group of talented individuals playing our hearts out, but missing the glue that turns a collective of musicians into a living, breathing band. Peter Green was the first to leave Shotgun Express, after which the rest of it fell apart. Rod went on to join the Jeff Beck Group, while Peter went back to playing for John Mayall, because after a year in the band Eric Clapton had set out on his own. I was the only one left jobless.

Back in the Bluesbreakers, Peter really took flight. He became the Peter Green, the stuff of legend. But fans of the Bluesbreakers were not receptive to him at first, because he was now the guy stepping into Eric’s shoes, and Eric had become the high priest of the blues. Doubt be damned, Peter showed them a thing or two. He became living proof that John Mayall was a true patron of British blues. He was a forward thinker too, a master of spotting young talent, as he still is today. He was like a father-figure, very businesslike. When you worked for him, you showed up on time and when he said he was going to pay you, you’d be paid. You knew where you stood with John Mayall, so playing in his band was a very secure place to be. John also gave his players all the credit and took care of his flock.

I was unemployed for the first time in four years when the Shotgun went bust. Lord knows I’d saved nothing, I’d been living week to week which was fine, but once that was gone I had to sort something out. The best idea I came up with was starting a business with a friend of mine named Dave DaSilva to clean windows and also to decorate them for the various shops and boutiques around London. My father came to our rescue by loaning us the money to buy what we’d need–ladders, buckets and brushes. We got ourselves properly kitted out and spent the next few months advertising our services, but we were all dressed up with nowhere to go. We tried, we really did, but Dave and I landed precisely zero jobs.

I tried to keep this from the family; I’d make up stories of how Dave and I had just cleaned some windows and how we’d been hired to install a few mannequins. My sister Sally didn’t buy it for a second, so she came round and saw how Dave and I were living. We were starving, eating the least expensive canned goods we could afford. Sally, my angel, out of the goodness of her heart, hired us to paint her new home off Kensington Church Street, across from a gallery space that her husband had bought.

That put more cans in the cupboard for a while, until Peter Green came calling, thank God, and asked me to join him in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. I was overjoyed but also shocked actually, because that band had one hell of a drummer. His name was Aynsley Dunbar and he was a fucking powerhouse, far superior to me. I don’t know exactly what happened there, but from what I heard it sounded like Aynsley was a bit too good for his designated role in Mayall’s outfit. He was such a massively-skilled drummer that he wasn’t content playing straightforward blues and couldn’t contain himself. He felt held back and had started to express himself through solos that became somewhat of a problem within the context of the band.

Peter Green had played with me in the Peter B’s, and he suggested me to John Mayall when things came to a head with Aynsley. They’d get no masterful insubordination from me, because even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t hold a candle to Aynsley’s playing.

I didn’t solo then, but in the years to come I learned how. In Fleetwood Mac my solo became a part of our repertoire, though it was never conventional. Usually it was a glorious mess. I’m not sure when in the late 1960s drum solos became expected in rock and roll, but it happened, and that lasted well on into the 1980s in all styles of rock. If history has deemed it a crime then I am most certainly a culprit.

When it all started, I was up for it, exhilarated by the pressure to captivate the crowd, and for that I felt I’d need props. Lacking much else, one night I absconded with a pair of wooden balls attached by a chain that made up the flushing lever of the toilet in the pub where we were playing. These were quite common, they were what you pulled to flush toilets in pubs all across Britain. Yet until then, I’d never seen them as rhythm instruments until the night I pulled them down, tucked them through my belt and started beating them with my sticks once I got back on stage. They sounded pretty good, and there they were right on my belt–my pair of wooden bollocks.

Those balls came to inspire all of my solos; I’d tap on them like a mad man, start dialogues with the crowd, I’d shout out whatever was on my mind. It might be nonsense such as ‘Please don’t leave me sitting on the toilet!’ or something inadvertently personal like ‘Have you phoned your mother lately?’

Solos eventually got me out from behind the kit, which was new and a great opportunity to follow whatever muse came to me. Peter Green loved it, he encouraged it, and even gave me an African talking drum, which allowed me further indulgence. A talking drum is a sublime instrument with an hour-glass shape, a drum head at either end, and stretched leather cords along the sides that allow the player to modulate the sound with his or her body. When you play a talking drum you lean into those cords to morph the sound the way a guitarist does by bending strings, and in both cases the result can resemble human speech. There’s nothing else quite like a talking drum.

My solos began as a way to keep the ship afloat when the shit hit the fan. If someone broke a string or the power went out, I’d start playing a Bo Diddley rhythm and hum and make noise until we’d got things sorted. But they grew from there, especially once I got the talking drum. I began to have my ‘Mick moments’ in the show and slowly became a bit of a showman, and I found that I liked playing the part. I’d get out there with my snare drum first, then fetch the talking drum, and I’d dance about like a mad jester. I’d clap my wooden balls together, I’d chant, I’d do whatever came through my mind. However shy I still was in my private life, during my solos I became someone completely different from myself, and I relished the transformation. I developed a confidence via that character that I may not have done otherwise. Those moments in the spotlight and the evolution of that role I played were what allowed me to eventually become the bandleader–and the ringleader–of Fleetwood Mac.

What I would call my first proper solo used to come at the end of ‘Green Manalishi’ when Peter would do long six-string bass improvisations. They would sometimes last twenty minutes and begin with just me on hi-hat, and eventually some drums. That same hi-hat style is there in what I do today, because I play one all the way through ‘World Turning’ which is a part of my solo section today. When we did it on ‘Manalishi’, it served as an intermission of sorts, and that moment has remained in the band’s live show in one way or another ever since, though my solos grew more ornate and outlandish with time. In the 1980s I even had a vest constructed, wired with digital pads that played samples of drum sounds when I hit them. It was a marvel and it allowed me to play with myself in front of thousands of people without fear of arrest.

Peter Green was the reason I joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and though I didn’t play with them for long, I consider it an honour to have been a member at all, because that band is a legendary institution. I’d watched every bluesman worth his salt become known to the world by playing with the Bluesbreakers. Mayall was a true professional and a consummate gentleman who made me feel welcome. There was nothing he could do to make the fans accept me, however.

You see, the people who came to see John’s band knew every member by name, so when they saw a new face, like mine, they’d shout about it.

‘Where’s Aynsley?’ they yelled.

‘Who the hell is that?’

Then they started booing. Very, very loudly. It took me back a bit, because I honestly wasn’t expecting such a visceral rejection. That’s when John McVie, who in all the years I’ve known him has preferred to stay in the background and do his job, took it upon himself to set the crowd straight. We’d started the first number, with the audience continuing to shout that I was no good and that Aynsley Dunbar was better, when suddenly John McVie stopped and started waving his arms until the rest of the band halted as well. Then he walked up to Mayall’s microphone.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Why don’t you fuck off? Just listen. Listen to him play. Then boo if you want.’

Most of them stopped–not all, but I no longer heard them. John had silenced them for me; his confidence in my ability dissipated my jitters and allowed me to play on with renewed vigour. I already liked John tremendously, but with that one gesture he cemented my loyalty and love for him forever. John has never let me down, not once, to this day. He was my brother from that point forward.

I found my place in the Bluesbreakers and as we did more gigs I really loved it, mostly because McVie and I became tighter as a rhythm section with each passing show. I have, as a true dyslexic, always played slightly behind the beat in a very idiosyncratic manner. John plays just slightly ahead of the beat which isn’t exactly perfect either, but when you put us together, it is. These aren’t things you can teach someone to do. When you find that kind of musical marriage, typically it’s a beautiful coincidence. That’s how it is between John and me; we’ve never had more than one or two conversations about how to play together or how we should play together in forty odd years. We just do what we do with no premeditation required.

John was the ideal partner for me, the only bassist I’d encountered whose playing effortlessly intertwined with mine. We were soon inseparable off-stage too, because we shared the same affinity for drinking and carousing. John was better at all that than I was, actually. And he had to be. John Mayall didn’t look down on enjoying a drink, but when it came to the shows, he ran a tight ship and inebriation wasn’t tolerated.

It’s not like McVie and I were the only ones who weren’t angels. There was a night when Peter Green didn’t even show up and I was far too gassed to go on. We figured without Pete, we’d cancel the show, but Mayall wouldn’t do it and made a point of going on regardless. He planned to play Peter’s parts, his own, and everything he was capable of. God bless him for it, I only wish I’d been in better shape to back him up. I was three sheets to the wind, and that was a very big mark against me. The last straw came a few weeks later after a gig in Ireland. Keep in mind that we were all good friends, so my dismissal wasn’t cruel or even awkward. We all laughed about it. It was clear that the rhythm section had too much fun together, so one of us had to go–and we all knew that McVie was not the kind of bassist you fired lightly because no one held a candle to him. So I was out and I knew it. I decided to make it easy on Mayall by bringing it up myself as we drove to our next gig. Mayall was going over the tour schedule and laying out the coming few weeks and months. After he mentioned a gig a week or so away, I interrupted.

‘So John, that gig you just mentioned, I’ll be gone by then, right?’

He couldn’t help but laugh with all of us and just nodded his head. ‘Yes, old boy, I’m afraid you will.’

It was without a doubt the easiest ‘you’re out’ conversation I’ve ever been a part of. You have no idea how horrible those are, whichever end of the equation you’re on.

In the history of my band, John Mayall must be celebrated, because if it weren’t for him, Fleetwood Mac would never have existed. I did only one studio session with his band during which I played on two recordings that were released as a single and to tell you the truth I can’t even remember the names of those songs. I mention that session though, because afterwards I stayed on to play with Peter Green and John McVie. Mayall had bought Greenie a few hours of studio time as a birthday gift so that he could record some songs he’d written. This was at Decca studios up in West Hampstead where we were recorded by Gus Dudgeon, the Decca house engineer there who went on to become extremely famous for his work with Elton John, which includes Honky Chateau, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and other Elton classics. John McVie and I were Peter Green’s rhythm section that afternoon and it was magical, and I don’t say that lightly. We did two covers and three instrumentals, the last of which was a twelve-bar up-tempo R&B number that Peter over-dubbed with a harmonica solo. It was a dirty bit of Chicago-style electric blues and it was fucking hot. It was by far the best track of the lot.

‘I’ve got a name for that one,’ Peter said with a knowing grin, as we listened back to it in the control room.

‘What’s that, Pete?’

‘I’m calling that tune “Fleetwood Mac”.’

He took a pen and wrote it on the white tape on the lid of the tin holding the finished two-inch tape.

‘You mean as in him and me?’ I asked, pointing to John and me. ‘Why would you call it that?’

‘Why? That’s easy. Fleetwood Mac is the name of my favourite rhythm section.’

The English obsession with American blues during this period is an interesting cultural phenomenon. At the core of American blues, and jazz and gospel, are slave songs sung by African-Americans brought involuntarily to the new world as cargo, to build a fledgling nation from the ground up. Those slave songs were a secret language among them, through which they could express the pain they dared not vocalise, under fear of torture or death, in any other fashion. This tradition evolved into the blues, which eloquently and harrowingly expressed the suffering that African-Americans continued to endure after their liberation. They were free but they weren’t accepted; they were poor, they were still treated as lesser beings. That pain and the alleviation of it through song is at the core of the blues, and later, jazz.

None of that had any direct historical connection to English history or society whatsoever. There was no logical reason for musicians in the early 1960s to become taken with American blues, nor for younger guys like me and other kids of my age to flock to it in the way we did. It may not be logical, but the reason is the Second World War.

The pioneers of the English blues scene were members of the generation just older than mine–guys about ten to fifteen years my senior. I’m talking about musicians like Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. Many of them weren’t necessarily super-talented, but all of them deserve credit for being the troubadours of an American art form that was all but dead in the country that gave it birth. Blues was too much for America in the 1950s and early 1960s; it was an uncomfortable reminder of a past that the country had yet to come to terms with or acknowledge properly. Rock and roll was different; although it was considered morally corrosive to the youth, it was safe compared to the raw honesty and societal verity intrinsic in the blues. It took a decade of unrest, from the Civil Rights Movement to Vietnam, to realign America with its own legacy, both the good and the bad. It also took two generations of English musicians celebrating and honouring the blues to reintroduce it to the country from whence it came.

The early English bluesmen were old enough to have been children in the Second World War and to have come of age in the ruinous aftermath. Our country was devastated by the war and they had seen it first-hand. They grew up playing in rubble, waiting in queues for food, many of them without homes for most of their formative years. Most had lost their fathers and uncles in battles on foreign soil or lost other family members in deadly German air raids. That didn’t happen in America, because, aside from the tragic attack on Pearl Harbor, the country wasn’t ravaged by war in the same way as the UK and Europe.

Post-war America turned its industrial machine to building highways, putting up supermarkets, and giving the boys back from war the life they deserved, whereas in England we were left licking our wounds, bound together by the necessity of rebuilding our ruined homeland. The UK, like so many other European countries, emerged from the war with a demolished infrastructure, a nearly bankrupt financial system and a population going hungry. This wasn’t the same suffering that inspired the American blues, but it was very real suffering nonetheless. I believe the blues appealed to those musicians because it echoed their pain. The source of the anguish was different, but the sentiment was the same.

There was also a yearning for something new, something to put the past behind us, and the blues provided us with that in England. It was music that our parents’ generation had no knowledge of, so it became a generation-defining movement. It was obscure and it made those of us who knew it and loved it feel a part of something powerful that was also very much our own. It had the same unifying power that the punk movement would have a decade and a half later.

It didn’t hurt that the music was so infectious and irresistible, either; the blues is impossible to ignore. It came over to the UK via American GIs, black Southerners mostly, who were stationed on our shores and it fanned out from there. The first wave of English bluesmen spread the word and the second wave, of which I was one, really took up the call. It was an interesting time, even more so when we English bluesmen carried the blues back across the Atlantic. For quite some time it felt like we were educating our audiences, and the fans we met, on their own history. We’d be playing gigs while legends like Muddy Waters were playing smaller venues just down the road. We made no bones about telling people that they were at the wrong gig. They had no business seeing us when the real deal was in their backyard and had been all along. In England we were running as fast as we could towards this American musical tradition, while America was running away from it just as fast. Aside from a few regional radio stations, there was nowhere to even hear the blues in the States.

Meanwhile in the UK, a generation of extraordinary guitarists was emerging through blues-rock groups, and the fans could not get enough of them. There was Eric Clapton’s Cream, of course, and the Jeff Beck Group, as well as a virtuoso from Seattle named Jimi Hendrix, who’d recently taken up residence in London and was in the midst of putting together a band. It was 1967 and as the saying goes, it was all happening. The Beatles had just released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a guy named Mick Taylor, who would later join the Stones, was taken on as Peter Green’s replacement in John Mayall’s band.

Mick Taylor is yet another reason why the English government should erect a monument to John Mayall, because Mayall maintained a high-functioning finishing school and breeding ground that gave the world some of the best guitar players in the history of rock and roll. The point is that the blues is somewhat simple musically but that doesn’t mean it’s simple to do. There’s nothing worse than a lousy blues player, believe me, and I think anyone who has suffered through a set by a sub-par blues band would agree.

John Mayall set the bar very high and kept it there. His guitar players in the 1960s, one after the other, became legends, and Mayall was the first to give them a proper stage upon which to shine. Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, all of them passing the torch to each other in Mayall’s ranks. He knew how to spot and develop talent, so his band became an invaluable institution, like the Count Basie Orchestra, which not only gave us Quincy Jones but also introduced us to so many incredible vocalists from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. John is still out there making music today and still flying the flag of the blues, backed by great young players. I think his example of never letting change hold you back, and always looking for an infusion of new blood to keep his musical endeavours fresh, influenced John McVie and me immensely. It’s certainly how we went about it in our band.

As it happens, Peter Green did not have a plan to leave the Bluesbreakers, because he was very happy there. He didn’t have to front the band, he didn’t have to sing if he didn’t want to; he could just play lead guitar and follow his muse. Nothing was ever done in secret behind Mayall’s back, the way some written history has implied. But something happened that day in the studio when Peter played with McVie and me. I think our chemistry, without the boundaries of being in the Bluesbreakers, got Peter thinking how it might be to have his own band, although bearing that burden as a frontman didn’t appeal to him.

Peter talked about going on a soul-searching trip to Morocco, as Eric Clapton had done, until he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his music and his life. That never happened, because Mike Vernon, a producer and the founder of Blue Horizon Records, where Fleetwood Mac would release their first few records, influenced Peter to stay in England and start his own project. Peter respected Mike greatly and thought it over for a few months. Once he decided to do it, he asked John McVie and me to be in his band. Mike wanted us too and he had a vision for Peter, which included enlisting the guitarist Jeremy Spencer. Mike Vernon is another behind-the-scenes player who deserves tremendous kudos for his guidance, not only in our career, but for many others in the English blues scene too. He did more than anyone knows to further the music and nurture the artists.