Peter Green by Martin Celmis

Author:Martin Celmis [Celmis, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

10Manalishi

The Green Manalishi defies analysis, really. In fact, the word derives from greenbacks, American slang for dollars. A song about money as the devil incarnate marks in a way the start of Peter Green’s slow retreat from a crazy world to a place and time of his own.

Between 1970 and 1977, attempts to go back and regain the simple inner peace that he had taken for granted as a butcher gradually became more desperate. More than anything else, it was the trauma of fame that had hived him off from everything and everybody, and in ‘Green Manalishi’ – like Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ a couple of years later – he sketches out rock-star alienation. Whereas Bowie would describe it as ‘floating in a mowstapeculiar way’, Peter Green, when he wrote ‘Manalishi’ in 1969, was still resisting, trying to hang on and ‘trying to keep from following you’.

The song augured feelings that eventually overwhelmed Peter, and writing and recording it, he now says, sapped all his strength: ‘It took me at least two years to recover from that song. When I listened to it afterwards, there was so much power there. It exhausted me.’ Yet the experience remains one of his happiest musical memories from the Fleetwood Mac days, as he explained to Mark Ellen of Mojo: ‘Making “Green Manalishi” was one of the best memories. Mixing it down in the studio and listening back to it, I thought it would make Number One – lots of drums, bass guitars, all kinds of things, double-up on bass guitars, six-string basses, tracking on it. Danny Kirwan and me playing those shrieking guitars together.’ The track was recorded at Warner-Reprise’s studios in Hollywood on their third US tour and then mixed back in London about a month before Peter left the band on 28 May 1970.

All kinds of inspiration made Peter’s songwriting prolific throughout 1969: listening to Vaughan Williams and Stravinsky, learning the cello, perfecting his use of the wah-wah pedal – and then there was the acid and mescaline. ‘Green Manalishi’ was the product of a mescaline-induced dream Peter had had in which he was seemingly dead. It was not, he now stresses, a wake-up-screaming nightmare; it was far more insidious than that, like a new reality, full stop. Death’s siren, in his case, was a green dog barking at him from over the other side, and the fact that it was green to Peter meant money – greenbacks: ‘This little dog jumped up and barked at me while I was lying in bed dreaming. It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did. When I woke up, the room was really black and I found myself writing the song. Next day I went to Richmond Park and did the lyrics – the words were coming through thick and fast. Then I went back home and worked out parts for all the instruments on my Ferrograph tape recorder.

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