Peter Green’s guitar added the flash to Fleetwood Mac’s first four albums. Undoubtedly one of rock’s finest blues guitarists, and a superb vocalist and songwriter as well, Green attracted worshipers who believed it was he, and not Eric Clapton, who was God. Said blues legend B.B. King, “[Green] has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”
Then came his famous freak-out (which was almost certainly acid-induced) at a commune in Munich. He would later be diagnosed as schizophrenic, which goes far towards explaining his increasingly erratic behavior and the mental muddle that’s 1970’s The End of the Game. Gone was the Peter Green who wrote and leant blistering guitar and raw vocal emotional power to such songs as “Black Magic Woman,” “Rattlesnake Shake,” “Man of the World,” “Oh Well,” and “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown).” In his place was an artist capable of producing an incoherent mess.
The End of the Game isn’t a collection of songs—it’s a mishmash of excerpts rearranged seeming at random from an instrumental jam session recorded only a month after Green drifted away from Fleetwood Mac. You have to wonder how the LP made it to record store shelves at all. If Green wasn’t thinking straight, the head honchos at Reprise Records weren’t thinking at all. I have this mental image of Reprise execs cornering the guy who approved the LP’s release in the second floor bathroom and beating him to death with their toupees.
You can call The End of the Game an experimental album, but that’s paying it too much of a compliment. Rather it’s the formless, amorphous result of a disordered mind. It’s as if Green had told his songwriting skills to pack their bags, then handed them one-way tickets to Barbados. He also handed them checks for very large sums of money, because they’d be there indefinitely.
After waving them off at the airport he set to work on The End of the Game, which might have taken listeners to some interesting places had Green not seen fit to tear the jam apart and reshuffle the pieces to no apparent purpose. You can forget about continuity. Say goodbye to beginning, middle, and end. Bid adieu to logic and proportion because they’ve fallen sloppy dead.
The only track worth a hearing is opener “Bottoms Up,” a nine-minute guitar excursion that, while hardly in the same league as Green’s incendiary playing on live takes of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rattlesnake Shake,” proves Green could still shoot sparks. “Descending Scales” is a free-form—by which I mean directionless—series of seemingly random twists and turns distinguished only be the piano of Zoor Money. “Timeless Time” is as quiet and inoffensive as that freshman kid in the back row of algebra class who is trying her very hardest to achieve invisibility.
“Burnt Foot” doesn’t live up to its title—you would expect a lot of frantic hopping around, but what you get instead is a jazzy drum workout by Godfrey McLean followed at about the halfway mark by some hardly inspired guitar from Green. “Hidden Depth” features a crazed piano opening over which Green strews notes, then slows to a dull crawl so enervating no one in the studio had the energy to alert the bouncer.
Closing track “The End of the Game” opens with Green playing an extended wah-wah guitar solo before slowing to oodles of noodling, leaving you to wonder where the guy was whose guitar playing was capable of shorting out the power on entire city blocks. Hanging out at Kommune 1 in Munich with the likes of Uschi Obermaier and Rainer Langhans? Down at the local, standing the patrons pints? Or tucked away in the studio broom closet, eating from a tin of spotted dick?
Peter Green’s The End of the Game brings to mind the famous exchange in Apocalypse Now. “Are my methods sound?” Colonel Kurtz asks Captain Willard. “I don’t see any method at all, sir,” replies Willard. The album’s title would have been prescient had Green not reappeared after eight years of obscurity to release 1979’s In the Skies. He went on to release four more studio albums and more than a half dozen LPs with the Peter Green Splinter Group before passing away in 2020 at the age of 73. None of these albums shook the world to its foundations. All of them were gifts we had no reason to expect at all.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
