Label: Rewind Records (Austria), 477358 2
Style: Blues Rock, Rock
Country: London, England
Time: 35:47
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 224 Mb
When
John Mayall formed the Bluesbreakers it was out of respect and
admiration to those performers; and he's stayed with the blues,
cultivating a number of fine young blues musicians including guitarists
Eric Clapton and Peter Green. After Clapton left Mayall, moving on to
form Cream, Peter Green replaced him. Now Green has formed his own
group, Fleetwood Mac (along with another former Bluesbreaker, bassist
John McVie).
Whereas Clapton expanded onto new horizons with Cream,
Green has chosen to remain dedicated to the blues, and on this, their
first recorded effort, Fleetwood Mac have established themselves as
another tight English blues band - joining Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Ten
Years After and Savoy Brown as chief practitioners of blues in England.
Green,
like Mayall, has studied the records and performances of Howlin' Wolf,
Memphis Slim, Junior Wells and Elmore James carefully. The piano riffs
on "Hellbound on My Trail" are lifted directly from Slim's classic "If
You See Kay," but it's done well, if perhaps a little too
self-consciously. Fleetwood Mac (the name is a combination of the names
of members of the group), know what they're doing, they dig the music
they're playing and that's great - but the drawback here is that they
don't put enough of themselves into it instead of what they've heard
from the original artists.
Green is a more than competent guitar
player, and the Mac's treatment of "Shake Your Moneymaker" is just as
powerful as the first Butterfield version (on the Paul Butterfield Blues
Band album). The harp work is proficient in most places but rather weak
on "Got to Move," the old Sonny Boy Williamson song. Green's
composition "Long Grey Mare" is one of the best cuts on the album,
anchored by McVie's strong bass line. The record has a strange,
prematurely vintage (if there can be such a thing) sound to it, like an
old classic recording made in the late Forties or early Fifties.
Like
most modern white bluesmen, Fleetwood Mac try very hard to live the
kind of music they play - not picking cotton in the Delta, but
maintaining the hard-life blues tradition, gigging at small clubs in
Northern England and in scruffy halls in the East End. Their music
retains an unaffected rough quality. They play well, and if it sounds a
little scratchy at times it's because that's the way they happen to feel
at that particular moment. The licks they've copied from other
performers are natural enough - it's more of a tribute than an
imitation.
The English continue to prove how well into the blues they
really are, and know how to lay it down and shove it back across the
Atlantic. Fleetwood Mac are representative of how far the blues has
penetrated - far enough for a group of London East-Enders to have cut a
record potent enough to make the South Side of Chicago take notice.
(rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/peter-greens-fleetwood-mac-248342/) Review by Barry Gifford. August 10, 1968
01. My Heart Beat Like A Hammer (03:00)
02. Merry Go Round (04:11)
03. Long Grey Mare (02:17)
04. Hellhound On My Trail (02:01)
05. Shake Your Moneymaker (02:57)
06. Looking For Somebody (02:54)
07. No Place To Go (03:24)
08. My Baby's Good To Me (02:52)
09. I Loved Another Woman (02:58)
10. Cold Black Night (03:18)
11. The World Keep On Turning (02:31)
12. Got To Move (03:19)
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