Fleetwood Mac
Green on 18 March 1970
In 1969, after signing to
Immediate Records for one single ("Man of the World",
[17] prior to that label's collapse) the group signed with
Warner Bros. Records' Reprise Records label and recorded their fourth studio album
Then Play On, prominently featuring the group's new third guitarist, 18-year-old
Danny Kirwan. Green had first seen Kirwan in 1967 playing with his blues trio Boilerhouse, with Trevor Stevens on bass and Dave Terrey on drums.
[18] Green was impressed with Kirwan's playing and used the band as a support act for Fleetwood Mac before recruiting Kirwan to his own band in 1968 at the suggestion of Mick Fleetwood.
[19] Spencer, however, made virtually no contribution to
Then Play On, owing to his reported refusal to play on any of Green's original material.[
citation needed]
Beginning with "Man of the World"'s melancholy lyric, Green's bandmates began to notice changes in his state of mind. He was taking large doses of
LSD, grew a beard and began to wear robes and a
crucifix. Mick Fleetwood recalls Green becoming concerned about wealth: "I had conversations with Peter Green around that time and he was obsessive about us not making money, wanting us to give it all away. And I'd say, 'Well you can do it, I don't wanna do that, and that doesn't make me a bad person.'"
[12]
While touring Europe in late March 1970, Green took LSD at a party at a
commune in
Munich, an incident cited by Fleetwood Mac manager
Clifford Davis as the crucial point in his mental decline.
[20] [21] Communard
Rainer Langhans mentions in his autobiography that he and
Uschi Obermaier met Green in Munich, where they invited him to their
Highfisch-Kommune. Their real intention was to persuade Green to help arrange for
Jimi Hendrix and
the Rolling Stones to perform as headline acts at a
Woodstock-styled festival in
Bavaria.[
citation needed] Fleetwood Mac
roadie Dinky Dawson remembers that Green went to the party with another roadie, Dennis Keane, and that when Keane returned to the band's hotel to explain that Green would not leave the commune, Keane, Dawson and Mick Fleetwood travelled there to fetch him.
[22] By contrast, Green stated that he had fond memories of jamming at the commune when speaking in 2009: "I had a good play there, it was great, someone recorded it, they gave me a tape. There were people playing along, a few of us just fooling around and it was... yeah it was great." He told Jeremy Spencer at the time "That's the most spiritual music I've ever recorded in my life." After a final performance on 20 May 1970, Green left Fleetwood Mac.[23]