The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown) (often simply called The Green Manalishi) is a song written by Peter Green and recorded by his original version of Fleetwood Mac. It was to be the final song Green wrote and recorded with the band. He would leave just a week after the song was released as a single in May 1970.
The song has a very uneasy and eerie feel. It makes total sense that it came at a time when Green was struggling with LSD and having violent nightmares.
Green had withdrawn from the other members of the band at this point for a number of reasons, one of which was that they did not see eye to eye on finances – specifically, what they should do with their earnings. Green was reportedly angered by the other band members’ refusal to share their financial gains. Green had come to loathe the fame and fortune he had acquired. He proposed to the band that they only keep what was absolutely necessary financially and give the rest of the money away to charities. Suffice to say, this idea did not get much of a foothold, with drummer Mick Fleetwood saying he felt they barely had any fortunes to speak of at that point in any case.
This is a crucial backdrop to The Green Manalishi. There are several theories about the meaning of the song’s title, and it has been heavily rumoured that it is about a kind of LSD, but Green always maintained that the song is about money, as represented by the devil.
Green wrote the song after experiencing drug-induced dreams in which he was visited by a green dog which barked at him from the afterlife. He understood that the dog represented money. “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.”
These dreams were recurring, with Green typically waking up feeling unable to move while messages about money formed in his brain. He went deeper into these experiences in a 1996 interview with Mojo, reiterating that the song is about the evils of money and that The Green Manalishi was the devil manifested as a wad of cash. He said, “I had a dream where I woke up and I couldn’t move, literally immobile on the bed. I had to fight to get back into my body. I had this message that came to me while I was like this, saying that I was separate from people like shop assistants, and I saw a picture of a female shop assistant and a wad of pound notes, and there was this other message saying, ‘You’re not what you used to be. You think you’re better than them. You used to be an everyday person like a shop assistant, just a regular working person.’ I had been separated from it because I had too much money. So I thought, How can I change that?”
One early morning, Green woke up from one of his nightmares with a horribly uneasy feeling. The room was dark, and he got up and immediately started writing the song. He said, “When I woke up I found I was writing this song. Next day I went out to the park and the words started coming. The Green Manalishi is the wad of notes, the devil is green and he was after me. Fear, inspiration is what it was, but it was that tribal ancient Hebrew thing I was going for. Ancient music.”
Now, when the day goes to sleep and the full moon looks
The night is so black that the darkness cooks
Don’t you come creepin’ around
Makin’ me do things I don’t wanna do
Can’t believe that you need my love so bad
Come sneakin’ around tryin’ to drive me mad
Bustin’ in on my dreams
Makin’ me see things I don’t wanna see
‘Cause you’re da Green Manalishi with the two prong crown
All my tryin’ is up all your bringin’ is down
Just takin’ my love then slippin’ away
Leavin’ me here just tryin’ to keep from followin’ you
The band, which for this single consisted of Green (guitar, vocals, six string bass), Danny Kirwan (guitar), John McVie (bass), and Mick Fleetwood (drums) went into the studio to record it. Jeremy Spencer (guitar) was also a member of the band, but had found himself marginalised and is not thought to have been present at the recording session even though he appeared in the band photo on the single cover sleeve. According to an interview with Spencer on the BBC Peter Green documentary DVD Man of the World, he was however present when Green was recording the eerie howling noises heard at the end of the song.
The song was produced by Martin Birch, who recalled that Green was initially frustrated because he could not get the sound he wanted. Danny Kirwan reassured him that they would stay in the studio all night until the band got it right.
Green said later that although the session left him exhausted, The Green Manalishi was still one of his best musical memories. “Lots of drums, bass guitars… Danny Kirwan and me playing those shrieking guitars together… I thought it would make number one.”
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The B-side of the single was an instrumental written by Green and Kirwan, titled World In Harmony. The two tracks were recorded at the same session in Warner/Reprise Studios, in Hollywood, California. This is the only track that would end up bearing a Kirwan/Green writing credit. The two had plans to collaborate further on a guitar-driven album, but the project never materialised.
The Green Manalishi was released as a single in the UK on 15 May 1970 and reached #10 on the British charts, a position it occupied for four consecutive weeks. Perhaps amazingly, it was the band’s last UK top 10 hit until the Tusk single reached #6 in 1979.
I’ll readily admit that it’s a joyful thought that a song by Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac – and this song in particular – fared better in his homeland than any of the singles from the multi-million selling album Rumours. Peter Green would not be forgotten so easily by his own countrymen, although it’s obviously a totally different story in the US.
A 13-minute live version of The Green Manalishi was recorded in February 1970, prior to the single’s release in May, but it remained unreleased until 1985 when it was unofficially released on a number of records, such as Cerulean and Rattlesnake Shake. In 1998 it was finally officially released along with the entire set of recordings on the Live in Boston: Remastered 3CD boxed set.
The Green Manalishi would also be played live by subsequent versions of Fleetwood Mac, with Bob Welch and then Lindsey Buckingham singing the vocal and taking on the song’s guitar parts.
Green would later admit in an article by Neil Slaven on Unio Square Music, “It took me two years to recover from that song. When I listened to it afterwards there was so much power there… it exhausted me.”
In retrospect, the song seems like an obvious cry for help from Peter Green, but this wasn’t so clear to his bandmates, who say that his descent was a gradual process, and that they didn’t read so much into this song. “Peter going off the rails was not an immediate thing,” Mick Fleetwood explained. “He left Fleetwood Mac under the most controlled circumstances.”
Supposedly, Green was unable to record Robert Johnson’s Hellhound on My Trail following the incident, having conflated Johnson’s hellhound with the green dog-demon of his dream. He used to perform this track in the 1960s, but Green’s sole post-Manalishi cover of Hellhound was sung by bandmate Nigel Watson.
Green died in 2020 at 73, having built quite a legend by giving away most of his money. He gave most of his savings to a London-based charity called War On Want, which provided aid to developing nations, mostly in Africa. Green explained: “Last thing at night they used to put pictures on telly of starving people and I used to sit there eating a doughnut and thinking, Why have I got this big stash that I don’t need when probably I’m going to die with it and all this is going on?”
The song is a firm fan favourite, and has also been embraced by the heavy metal community through Judas Priest covering it on their Killing Machine (US title: Hell Bent For Leather) album, as well as continually including it in their live sets and on the Unleashed In the East live album.
When Mick Fleetwood put on a tribute show for Peter Green in February 2020, Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top) and Kirk Hammett (Metallica) were amongst the guests performing the song, Hammett performing it on Peter Green’s original guitar.
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