Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
Here are their love letters to records that forever changed their lives.
Jesse Redwing: Fleetwood Mac — ‘The Best Of The Original Fleetwood Mac’
Roses are red, violets are blue,
My heart is Green, Peter Green that is!
Is it weird that my dad introduced us?
When he gave me the Best Of The Original Fleetwood Mac album, all I cared about was skateboarding and punk rock. You showed me a white boy could truly be the “most sensitive guitar player I ever heard”. (I found out later B.B. King said it, but I was already thinking it).
Your sweet licks lulled me to sleep at night and woke me with a punch each morning. The subtle elegance and pure force of emotion of your playing and singing got me through those awkward years of teenage angst.
Isn’t love a funny thing? It can be born out of a silly mistake… Like when you took your Les Paul apart to see how it worked and put it back with the pickup in backwards. Who knew it could make your tone so distinct and purring?! Mmmm that tone makes me tingle in all the right places!
I know I’ll never be as sensitive as you were, Peter; I’ll keep blundering along like all the other poor white boys who picked up a guitar and started bashing away. As Sonny Boy Williamson said about the Yardbirds, “These boys wanna play the blues real bad, and they do!”
I’ll never forgive the German hippies who fed you all those drugs. I know they just wanted a piece of you and I can’t blame them for that! But they ripped out the irrepressible spirit of the blues that made Fleetwood Mac bigger than the Who and the Stones for a fleeting moment in the late ’60s, and left you in a state of burnt out acid psychosis!
The ignorant may only know the cocaine-fuelled (albeit somewhat brilliant) pop music of late ’70s, ’80s Fleetwood Mac. Perhaps you foreshadowed your own demise by naming the band after the rhythm section so they could go on after you flamed out like the shooting star you were.
If you’re reading this, Peter, please pick up your Les Paul and come back to us! Your playing will always live in my heart and my fingers any time I pick up a guitar.
All my love,
Jesse Redwing
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Jesse Redwing will perform in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne later this month. Head to his Facebook for all the dates, and go here to peep his new video for ‘Boogie’.
