Peter Green

“… I feel it is time for a change”. With these words Peter “Green” Greenbaum brought an end to his time as guitarist with Fleetwood Mac in April 1970, setting off on a different path, far from the fame that the band's electric blues had brought him. Officially struck by a mystical-religious crisis, but in reality partly stupefied by LSD, Green abandoned his previous lifestyle to devote himself entirely to a kind of impromptu asceticism, one that would lead him to give away the fortune he'd amassed and drift from job to job, but which would also be sublimated into one of the most magnificent works ever released. Recorded in a single night, “The End Of The Game” remains one of the most blinding meteors ever to streak across the cosmos of rock music.

Green disguises himself as a shaman and officiates an ancestral rite, where darkness and tribal magic merge with the lysergic journey. So in “Bottoms Up”, the guitar stretches out, eternal and schizophrenic, over a dense rhythmic carpet, before exploding in a fit of mystic delirium. Extremely understated and intimate, “Timeless Time” evokes the ecstatic calm of the most expansive, dreamlike David Crosby, and together with the tender guitar phrasing of “Hidden Depth”, it conjures the languid, dreamy atmospheres that accompanied the hippie utopia, and the great creative season now sadly drawing to a close.

But just listen to the epic duel with Zoot Money's piano on “Descending Scale” to understand that Green's soul is scarred by conflicts that are anything but angelic. Calm and storm, pianistic ecstasy and raging guitar, set against a mysterious, archaic, endless forest backdrop. The obsessive, tribal-dance percussiveness finds its outlet in “Burnt Foot”: the drums dominate, the ceremony nears its climax, the guitar merely passes through the track, looming silently like some arcane presence.

The ritual reaches its peak, Green paints sketches of primordial madness, drawing out every ounce of evocative power from his instrument, fulfilling the role of rock shaman just as only the most possessed Morrison had before him; the closing “The End Of The Game” is the final release, blind fury takes over, a delirious return to a primitive form of consciousness. The mysterious, the unexplored, the endless and painful search for origins accompany Green through his concert of dissonance and wah-wah distortion. All the tracks rest on improvisation, buoyed by the remarkable technical skill of his collaborators, forging the fortunate union of psychedelia and jazz-rock that permeates the record and makes it one of the milestones of instrumental rock of the era. Visceral and intense, schizophrenic in its constant shifts between the ecstatic and the menacing, “The End Of The Game” is the scream in the silence of a generation watching helplessly as a dream slowly dissipates: the end of the game.

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30/10/2006