Sadly, original Fleetwood Mac guitarist/vocalist Peter Green passed away earlier this week at 73 years old. For metalheads, he was responsible for "The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)," a track that has beeen covered by everyone from Judas Priest, to the Melvins to Corrosion of Conformity.
Metallica's Kirk Hammett paid stunning tribute to Green in a new message, and notes he is the current owner of Peter Green's '59 Les Paul, nicknamed "Greenie."
"No words can describe how I feel right now," Kirk wrote. "Peter Green lives on through his music and his instrument. Our loss is total. Peter Green, Rest In Peace my friend!!!"
Hammett is working on a new book and music project in tribute to Green. On a recent edition of the Let There Be Talk podcast, transcribed by Music Radar: "I am singing on it; it's an easy song to sing, it's got that talk-singing kind of thing, I can handle that. That's about the length of my singing abilities, but I'm into it. I'm so into it, I'm into all aspects of it, it's just one of those things, it just kind of unfolded like this. It gets a little uppity in the end, and what I did was I just modernized the whole song, modernized it with modern tones, kind of like a more modern arrangement; I've made the uppity part heavy and dynamic."
"I actually took a lot of liberties with it" added Hammett," he added, "and so I got a little nervous about playing the song for him because I took a lot of liberties, I don't know if he would be offended by it, but I played him the track, and right after it ended, he just looked at his friend and asked him something about the weather or something. [Laughs.] I didn't know if he liked it or not. The guy named Mark, who's spearheading this whole project, he told me that Peter liked it, and he was able to determine that from Peter's body language."
One of the people contributing to the project is Pink Floyd's David Gilmour.
Brooklyn Vegan notes that prior to a tribute concert to Green earlier this year, which was organized by Mick Fleetwood, Kirk talked about how much it meant to play Peter's legendary guitar on his website:
"I actually took a lot of liberties with it" added Hammett," he added, "and so I got a little nervous about playing the song for him because I took a lot of liberties, I don't know if he would be offended by it, but I played him the track, and right after it ended, he just looked at his friend and asked him something about the weather or something. [Laughs.] I didn't know if he liked it or not. The guy named Mark, who's spearheading this whole project, he told me that Peter liked it, and he was able to determine that from Peter's body language."
Here's video of that performance:
