I Loved Another Woman - Fleetwood Mac
In 1970, while on tour in Europe, the band were met at Munich airport by two young wealthy Germans, a man and a woman, who seemed to be only interested in Peter Green, not the rest of the band. After the gig, they were invited by the Germans to their "huge mansion place, in the forest" in two cars with Green and Danny Kirwan in the first car alongside Road Manager Dennis Keane and their hosts. By the time the rest of the band in the second car arrived at the mansion, Green was downstairs playing his guitar through giant amps in a huge studio.
According to Jeremy Spencer it was "a hippy commune sort of thing.....a rich, rich place...it was really weird, and the music coming up from below down there - it was, it was bad news".
Keane realised that there was something seriously amiss " and then as, like anything else, it wears off and if you can wear off with it then you know what's going on, you're aware of it and that's (when) immediately I said well, we've gotta get out of here..."
The upshot was that by the time they got Peter Green and Danny Kirwan out and into the car they were both completely "out of it" due to the drugs they'd taken. Band members Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Jeremy Spencer, plus Dennis Keane concur with then-manager Clifford Davis' opinion that:
"Peter Green and Danny Kirwan both went together to that house in Munich, both of them took acid as I understand it, both of them as of that day became seriously mentally ill - I think it's too much of a coincidence for it to be anything other than taking drugs, as of that day".
Peter Green himself always played the incident down, describing it as just another party and reckoning he'd played some really good music there, but to the layperson it's easy to see, or rather hear, that little he recorded after that, both vocally and in his guitar playing, had the subtlety, natural fluency and deep soulfulness of his Mac recordings.
He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of the seventies in and out of psychiatric hospitals as well as undergoing e.c.t. (electro-convulsive therapy). He suffered from mental illness for the rest of his life.
Whatever it was that he had, call it what you will, his muse, his mojo, the understated, subtle emotional power of his music, it left him that day.
Quotes from the BBC documentary "Peter Green - Fleetwood Mac".