"It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did. When I woke up, the room was really black and I found myself writing the song."
—Peer Green on ‘The Green Manalishi’
From the studio version to the screeching 16-minute version some hardcore fans probably consider definitive to the 1977 Oklahoma version with Stevie Nicks, who does a great job emulating the wailing, demonic voices that distort the end of the track like madness’ oncoming storm, ‘The Green Manalishi’ is a haunting final release from Peter Green before departing from Fleetwood Mac.
With the quite-disjunctive ‘World in Harmony’ as its B-side (a sign of a never-materialized but considered guitar-heavy project between Danny Kirwan and Peter Green, complete with Kirwan’s charming, resonant guitar-work), the track seems even more of a head-scratcher.
Both tracks appear on the rerelease of Then Play On; couldn't find a good pic of the full gatefold, so you get the banged up old copy on my wall, which does not have either track for two reasons: 1) it is not the rerelease and 2) it did not come with the record, I just use old gatefolds as posters when I like them.
Really wish I'd had more luck digging up who the artists were for some of these, they're really quite beautiful and it'd be nice to see more of their art.
Or maybe not: Peter Green’s infamous acid* trip inspiration ranks up there with Syd Barrett’s for the crowd who wanted a boogeyman in hallucinogens after Leary ignored Huxley’s advice and started handing them out willy-nilly, triggering a DEA crackdown that’s just now beginning to be lifted as psychedelics have shown positive uses in therapy, as opposed to their current status as Schedule I.**
Despite the fascinating use of darkness throughout the song (and who can get past that sinister, crackling starting line? "The night is so black hat the darkness cooks... Don't you come creepin' around...") I find the use of green my main draw.
Green is, of course, the artist’s name, as well as the color of his Mephistophlean (or Son of Sam-esque, in a creepier sense) dog in his vision; green is tied to money in a negative sense and I could swear in one of Mick Fleetwood’s memoirs, or else another recounting of the incident, Green recounts a bundle of money being offered to him, with the money splitting in half, leading to the track’s subtitle: 'With the Two-Prong Crown.' However you choose to envision it (whether a regal crown, a jester’s hat with a hidden third point, or Ravenclaw’s diadem with bunny ears duct-taped on), I imagine it isn’t too hard to envision a crown with two horns. Ultimately, I think the purpose of the two points, as Green would’ve seen them, was a fork in the road: which path do you choose?
But in our cooking night, we don't get the snowy tranquility of Frost's road not taken.
In Green's own actions and decision to leave the band, this is reflected: his suggestion that Fleetwood Mac only keep enough money from their music to live and give the rest to charity—well, there’s a reason Green was living like a hermit while they were the biggest band in the world, doing enough coke to conjure up Freud’s spirit, and having elaborate, wasteful luxuries like grand pianos in hotel rooms or having them repainted for brief stays of a few days.
Tens of thousands of dollars, flushed away just like that, daily, on extravagances.
Mick discusses this in his book and I’m not trying to shit on the guy but one of the stories that bugs the hell out of me to this day is him discussing making The Visitor, I believe, and talking about how, bankrupt and struggling and trying to crawl back from this, he was struck by the simplicity of the lives he saw locals leading. Anyway, he discusses how impressed he is, living a simpler life without all the lavish BS he’s used to—and how, struck by this, he decided to take off his Rolex and smash it.***
Going back to Green a bit here: don’t smash that watch, pawn that shit and hit the grocery store or dig up the World Vision number and see how that money can be used to help people. We’re talking a Rolex, man—that’s gotta be at least a couple grand, even back then, if I remember the scene in Leaving Las Vegas right, and that’s a shitload of water and Top Ramen if nothing else.
Anyway, returning to the color green: I also find interesting to think back to a class at UW, a junior English seminar. Now, in my experience, every English major has a bit of a storyteller in them and is prone to liberties with the facts—I certainly am no exception, though I attempted to balance this with my historical background. My point being, this claim from my professor was from an English professor, not a history one, so I’d be a little more shaker-of-salt on credibility as a result cause I haven’t done the research to verify it myself. (And yes, academics notice these things, so I’m distancing myself if my English professor was wildly off—trust me, my junior seminar professor in history made it very clear he knew that I’d read Hamilton and gave accurate quotes, but that he was giving me a pass on making up page numbers because I forgot to put them down the first time and damnit, deadline’s in thirty minutes).
The argument goes that green at the time was associated with the devil instead of red, like we more commonly see today. This had to do with ‘pagans’ (an amorphous term, if we remember my earlier remarks about O’Donnell’s book Pagans) and them being seen as worshipping nature. This makes sense, and the text we were assigned for this was ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ wherein, of course, the Green Knight is in fact Lord Bertilak and his severed head, like renewing nature, can regrow (or else Lady Bertilak can work miracles with some thread and a needle).
Now, my initial essay for this class didn’t pass muster (Sir Gawain, champion of women and Dame Ragnelle [Ragnell’s not just Ike’s golden sword, didn’t you know?], being put into the role of a woman and made effeminate throughout the story as the butt of a joke was seen as sexist instead of, “Him having to sit around not having sex with this really good-lookin’ Lady Bertilak throwing herself at him, getting kisses from her, and then having to kiss that big ol’ hunk Lord Bertilak when he rolls in with his impressive hunting haul for the day seems like it'd be funny to a bunch of drunk English guys.” I dunno, to me this definitely still seems like a Will Ferrell movie waiting to happen.
Nature is, today, still associated with green and still faces a difference of opinions, albeit now the dualism is less “good and evil” and more “profit vs. nature.” There’s a reason “conservationism” (the term favored by Teddy Roosevelt, good Republican) has been effectively obliterated from the political dialogue, allowing the profit-hungry (who hated ol’ Teddy even back in the day, see 1912 Election and my comments on Shlaes' Coolidge—Roosevelt was massively more popular than Taft, so why is the Wall Street Journal alumni writing that this shows the public was hungry for Taft’s pro-business, anti-individual stance, which Roosevelt [and most of the public, apparently], found too weak on trust-busting?) to capitalize and write off everyone from Rachel Carson to Al Gore to the entire environmental movement to ~99% of climate scientists as a bunch of “tree hugging liberals.” So, actually, while I want to say nature is more accepted and seen as a positive today, that’s not true. Even “nature” as we often encounter it is heavily sculpted and criticized instead of allowed to grow in its own natural, wild beauty. And that's when it 'survives'—look at what we did to Walden Pond.
Money, as well, has come into account and serves as a mirror image here, you could say. Even John Milton, of Paradise Lost fame, struggled with the issue, as well he should. Guy grew up on the profits of usury and lived on it his entire life—in David Hawkes’ biography, it’s even suggested his marriage was a result of a debtor hoping that by him marrying into their family, he wouldn’t chuck them to the poor house, where people often would die. His was, predictably, an unhappy marriage and so while his opinions on how divorce should be easier for people are the right conclusion, they come from the wrong reasons: he probably wrote that thinking how much easier it would be to dump his wife and chuck her deadbeat family in prison for vengeance.
Guess we can’t be too surprised a guy who worked for Cromwell ended up being a Caesar garbed as a Cincinnatus thanks to history’s kind view of his writing. Money-lending, since ancient times, in Judeo-Christian values, for profit/interest is seen as (well, not anymore) a grave sin, among the worst—akin to shedding the blood of the borrower. This is because of a few reasons, the easiest being that it targeted a person’s underlying wealth and therefore was intended to cause harm to them and their future ability to provide for both themselves and those around them.
The second is a little more complex and involves sodomy, but ultimately comes to a similar conclusion. See, despite all those dickhead homophobic fire-and-brimstone pastors, the argument goes that for a long time, sodomy wasn’t seen as a couple dudes or a couple gals having a consensual good time, it was fruitless copulation—which means it would apply to most everyone, because I think it’s safe to say as a species, we figured out how to jack off before we learned how to write literature.
I digress: money was seen as the flip side of this: sterile objects unnaturally copulating. This goes against God and nature as God intended it, as money is not natural and cannot reproduce—and the penalty of this sin is interest, which is then paid for with more money (the blood, sweat, and tears of labor) to account for this “sterile copulation.” I could go off a lot here, but I don’t think it takes a genius to conjure up examples of this throughout history, if we think about it, from real-gold Croesus to gilded-toilet Trump.
Moving on, we’ve got the word itself which is a bit fun to tinker with and think on: Manalishi, while it does conjure up a nice Mephistophlean image for those of us who are Faust-inclined (and certainly not hurt by lines about it “creeping around… makin’ me do things I don’t wanna do…”), leaves some questions of word origin.
The easy solution would be ‘Mana,’ which by 2024 anyone who’s picked up a strategy RPG in the last few decades can figure out. Lishi could be arguably drawn from Leshi, a sort of forest spirit—but those are more of a Slavic thing, so culturally we’re not on the right track. In Green’s visual experience, you’ve got the Black Dog/Hellhound that Sirius Black made popular back in Prisoner of Azkaban, which matches pretty much everything (other than the gobbledegook name).
If we draw on pronunciation a different direction and remember the guy was trippin' balls, you could also see a garbled mashing of "man" and "leash"—returning to the 'creepin' around' line, you could see this being (in a Jungian sense) Green seeing his Shadow as having a "leash" on the Man (Personal Consciousness). Or, long story short: his decision to ask the band to run with minimal cash and give the rest to charity came from a battle within himself where he very likely was tempted by the thought of going on to live a life in the lap of luxury and struggled deeply with that. His temptation was a Leash on the Man trying to break free from this, and when his friends took a different path, he decided he had to dip out or else he might not be able to continue resisting temptation.
There might be something interesting to explore in the 'Man-A-Leashee' interpretation if you mix in an unusual conception in Jung's Red Book about red being the color of life, something that is the domain of humans and is desired by and necessary to sustain, metaphorically speaking, the divine; the line, "Can't believe that you need my love so bad..." mixed in with that peculiar above phrase 'Man-A-Leashee' is some fun food for thought (or a joint).
But hey, Celts and that area aren’t much of my wheelhouse, I know next to nothing. Maybe there’s some kelpy-dog sorta thing (it's mythology, where Loki can take a horse cock well enough to make Kenneth Pinyan proud and give birth to Odin's eight-legged horse; anything's possible) out in their folklore or one of the countless things from that whole chunk of mythology I’ve never found a solid book on. From Mary Leader to Carl Jung to the Doors to Jugdral to just how full of shit Caesar was about the Gallic tribes, Celtic references tend to elude me.
But I will leave on a fun little note that inspired the above digression: today, we’re familiar with all sorts of ‘shared universe’ series and the like, from Marvel to whatever else. In the (beloved by me) Sausalito Record Plant live recording, during the performance of the track ‘Angel’ (and I believe in a few other places on some bootlegs), Bob Welch does one of his open-mic improvs and throws in the line “too many Manalishi hangin’ round… Lord! Deliver me from, deliver me from, this dark despair…” which is a nifty little incorporation of Green's word in a new place but similar context as a negative figure "hangin' round." While my whole ‘shared universe’ throwaway line might be a bit of a grandiose way to present a silly throwaway line, it’s pretty cool Welch was a thoughtful fella who was able to throw in nifty little lines like this.
Other notes:
—*More recently, I have come across mescaline referenced as the drug Green took. Over the years, I’ve more commonly heard LSD—this might be memory (mine or someone else’s), might be a mistake, might be due to the relative obscurity of mescaline, at least today. Thankfully, ya boy can give a bit more context here: more often, you would hear people refer to peyote. Peyote is a slow-growing cactus and after Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan—wherein he recounts chewing peyote under the guidance of the fictional Don Juan (not only fictional and also not the Casanova-esque Don Juan). If memory serves, later Castaneda is told during his trip, he chased around a dog and pisses on it on it (don't worry, the dog returns the favor after Castaneda passes out, all balances out).
Anyway, after this came out, peyote became popular and people, without thinking, didn’t think about sustainability, which led to it now being ‘vulnerable,’ but not ‘endangered.’
Mescaline is the active ingredient in peyote to give you trips, per my knowledge, comparable to psilocybin in mushrooms or THC in marijuana. Now, sustainability is important and to paraphrase Hunter Thompson, I would never recommend drugs to anyone (but they’ve worked out alright for me), so if one were to be inclined to explore a similar experience, one would need to find a cactus that also produces this active ingredient but is faster growing and less at risk, and then go about the delicate but simple process of extracting it. San Pedro and Peruvian Torch can be quite pretty in the proper growing conditions, I’ve heard, but it should be noted peyote possession (especially with intent to manufacture or sell) is illegal as hell, as is turning a pretty cactus into a drug, so I certainly would never recommend that to curious, inquiring minds. That would be bad.
Tying this back to Green, however: the timeline does match up and Castaneda’s not the first guy in the world to figure out what mescaline is. Maybe I’m just spinning out a poor defense but: I find mescaline more associated with the States and it seems like LSD would more fit with the scene. But, to be honest, the drug of choice doesn’t really matter, they’re variations of hallucinogens (I would compare mescaline more to looking through stained glass when you close your eyes while LSD had more striking and impressive visuals, bu also involved a lot more of time being wonky: think of “Time flies when you’re having fun,” and the dreadful drudgery of waiting in a doctor’s office, but magnified).
—**Schedule I drugs are considered to have no medical use and a high risk for abuse. Naturally, this means most profitable drugs (particularly those adored by rich white people [see: Throat GOAT 'Just Say No' {more like 'Just Suck a Golf Ball Through a Garden Hose'} Nancy Reagan being a pillhead who abused the fuck out of the Reagan kids to the Trump White House hopefully using some of those misappropriated funds for Pez dispensers for all those pills] like opioids and amphetamines and cocaine) remain Schedule II.
[For the record, I was a hallucinogen guy and haven't touched coke—but based on the inherited nasal issues and family lore, my mom in particular had quite the proclivity for some, ah, "nose clams" whenever the opportunity arose prior to meeting my old man. Imo, it's also hinted at in some of the court docs regarding her divorce I've seen. Both folks like pain pills, too, as I recall from wisdom teeth: those pain pills were not for me and they don't have a problem but am I really sure I need to take one and open the bottle at all, can't I just suck an Altoid and pretend?]
Now, naturally, we can see the impact of racial bias: powder cocaine is associated with yuppies and rich white assholes on Wall Street, so it's Schedule II; since you're more likely to find rock instead of powder cocaine in Black neighborhoods, however, a much, much smaller quantity of this will land you in a helluva lot more trouble and is, naturally, Schedule I. All I'm saying: look at our prison labor economy the racial demographics of prison and remember that the Reconstruction Amendments allowed slavery as a punishment for a crime; when Oliver discusses prisons not wanting to release productive prisoners back into society, there's some real strong echoes of slave owners who wanted to keep profitable slaves, huh?).
For another bigoted usage, let’s look at the overlap of homophobia and the demonization of pot: we knew all the way back in the Bush Sr. administration of its medical benefits, as the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program was showing and we still had seven surviving patients as of a few years ago being provided with federal weed so, you know, it showed success and was quietly shut up.
Where's the homophobia come in? HIV/AIDS was a serious crisis at the time and treatment very rudimentary—especially end-stage, patients would suffer with agonizing pain to the point eating was impossible.
Marijuana was found to alleviate this (the munchies) and so there was an idea to mass-apply for the program in order to help those suffering to at least die in a bit less pain. But that's too much to ask, cause we’re talking about republicans here: despite probably being the best post-Eisenhower president (though we can thank Eisenhower and the Dulles bros. for a lot of our geopolitical problems today, that's a rant for another day) Bush Sr. shut down the program and in that time, there was still such ignorance and bigotry toward the LGBTQ community, well, who wants to help with “the gay disease?” As a kid in the mid-2000s, I learned about AIDS and got the clarification lecture from my conservative parents that I “didn’t understand” it was “the gay disease,” which was why the godly and God-like Reagan administration was correct in laughing and joking at their pain and suffering from a horrifying disease.
It was just the way things are, and it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, after all. (Now that gay marriage is legal, they're all pissy about the whole 'How dare a trans person use the bathroom and be allowed to take a piss in peace! This is a violation of our children!' which is really odd, cause I don't recall my Mandated Reporter, daycare-running mom having such a fixation on making sure children were safe when she walked in on my nine-year-older half-brother [with help from my loving half-sister as a lookout and for 'tickle torture' when I got too loud] molesting me a few times during second-third grade and ignored it nor when she and my dad found the pictures and decided the correct response was to burn them while she explained to me it was my fault... anyway... seems like the real motivating factor is bigotry, to me.)
[Also, just gonna throw it out there: if she really gave a damn about protecting children, our last conversation when I suggested she report what happened and take some of that "personal responsibility" her and my pops are so big on would have ended with her doing that, not the entire nuclear family, one by one, disowning me and threatening to sue me if I speak up about it.]
—***This memoir of Mick Fleetwood's also got him some ire from Lindsey Buckingham, who responded with the track ‘Wrong’ off his wonderful Out of the Cradle album. The lines "Leisure line to heaven/Puttin’ on the hits… Piggy in the middle? Piggy on the cover!” are digs at Fleetwood—and despite Mick’s claim he never connected the dots, I dunno how, considering ‘Piggy in the Middle’ is, if memory serves, the chapter that pissed off Buckingham and he felt disrespected by. He legit just names It in the song in that second line I included. But then, given it was probably mostly ghost-written, he might not be aware of the chapter titles.
—Peter Green made a slight reappearance on Tusk—though, in a very peculiar way. 'Brown Eyes,' a personal favorite Christine McVie track, has a version with Green. Interestingly, despite almost identical instrumentation the lyrics are almost a completely different set. I have no idea if this is an earlier or later recording in comparison to the album version but it is fascinating—and given Green's struggles and some of the comforting lyrics, it's hard not to wonder whether this was sort of her way of trying to ease the man's troubled mind: "Yesterday's tears/You're over the sad years/I want you to know I'll always be here..." are easy to imagine directed at a former musical collaborator who, even then, would've been still struggling. I know nothing of Green's visit to the Tusk sessions beyond this, so I do not have a story akin to when Pink Floyd broke down on Syd Barrett visiting the studio in rough shape while working on Wish You Were Here.
There's a missed 'Songbird' line in here, but as much as I love that song, calling her that is kinda beaten to hell and back.
—I may come back and try to 'punch this up' with some pictures (not in the Honeymooners sense) but editing this ended up adding length instead of reducing it, so this is already quite divergent from the handful of scribbled notes I thought were a bit fun.
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