CN: details of post-mortem and cause of death.
I was by the sea when I was phoned by the coroner. The investigation has been completed, it has been more than six months since he died. They are now able to tell me the causes of Trevor’s death. He died of natural causes, in the opinion of the corner these were:
1a. Congestive cardiac failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
1b. Dilated cardiomyopathy
2. Hyperlipidaemia, asthma and steatosis of the liver.
They are also now able to tell me the weight of his major organs. His kidneys for instance weighed 164g each. His liver weighed 2070g. His brain 1522g. I picture each one in a weighing scale set against objects of mythical significance, the heart weighed against the feather of the Egyptian goddess Ma’at, the Kidneys compared to a birds egg, the liver set against a jar of marbles, his brain the counter-balance for a heron.
With no knowledge of anything I scour the report for insight. I read that the gallbladder and bilary tree were unremarkable and that the pancreas showed autolytic changes. There was no lymphadenopathy of the spleen, the vessels of the circle of Willis showed minimal atherosclerotic change. These yarrow stalks cast across the page narrate the sudden death of my father. I try to read them myself, I put the opinion of the coroner to one side and I take it all in. I consult his notebooks, I read through pages of words and small diagrams. I wish I had kept his guide to the I Ching.
Out in the North Sea the particles of his cremated remains continue to wash back and forth with the tides. Where is the closest piece? Is he in the waves that churn beyond the breakwater? How much of him has been lifted by evaporation only to rain down over the East of England? Are the tiny pieces of my father on the windscreen of a car hurtling along the A12? I try to take stock of all the facts.
I know that on the screen of his computer he was watching a livestream from a South African nature reserve when he died. The person from the coroner explains that he will have felt short of breath. Perhaps he thought he was having an asthma attack, his inhaler was on the floor. His trousers were folded over his walker. His hearing aids were on the bookshelf. Did he have them in when the paramedics arrived? Did they take them out or had he removed them already. I ask myself what his death was like. I try to balance hope with realism. Quick, yes, but painful. A short panic and then a moment of clarity. I hope he pictured himself returning to the world. I wonder if he imagined the North Sea wetlands where he now forms part of the mud. His ashes take the shape of a curlew’s footprint. I decide that he did think of this, that he thought of the landscape he loved more easily than people. He felt relief, I decide, because he would be better at being mud than he was at being a human; I don’t think he would see that as an insult, I know he wouldn’t, he was earth.
Trevor was a man of the world, in the same sense that Peter Green was. I have always aligned Green with Trevor, ever since I watched a documentary about the guitarist and singer who helped found Fleetwood Mac and played on their first three albums. Maybe because, born in Bethnal Green, dying on Canvey Island, he shared an estuary tone with my dad. Green dropped out after mental health problems sometimes attributed to a bad trip in a German commune, and later diagnosed as schizophrenia which would be treated with electro-convulsive therapy in the 1970s. His undoubted talent and his struggle to exist in the world have led me to link them together in my mind. And their love of blues music.
I listened to Fleetwood Mac’s song Man of the World on Trevor’s copy of the CD The Best of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. Trevor will have been a bit young for this music the first time around, Green was with the band 1967-70. I talked to him about Green after I watched the documentary, I wonder if he bought the CD then? A self-involved thought, but he was my father and I’m entitled to a little self-centredness I think. Always hoping to discover some way in which I influenced him. Man of The World is a song which I find almost too poignant to listen to. The biggest reason that I have linked Green to Trevor is that this song has always seemed to articulate something for me about my dad. These are the lyrics:
Shall I tell you about my life
They say I'm a man of the world
I've flown across every tide
And I've seen lots of pretty girlsI guess I've got everything I need
I wouldn't ask for more
And there's no one I'd rather be
But I just wish that I'd never been bornAnd I need a good woman
To make me feel like a good man should
I don't say I'm a good man
Oh, but I would be if I couldI could tell you about my life
And keep you amused I'm sure
About all the times I've cried
And how I don't want to be sad anymore
And how I wish I was in love
Green is trapped in a heterosexual fantasy of redemption through the conquest of women, but on the other hand deeply aware of how unsatisfactory this is. The second verse, encapsulates depression so well that it almost summons it in the listener. It feels dangerous to hear this song sometimes. The nonplussed ‘I guess I’ve got everything I need’ the resigned ‘I wouldn’t ask for more’ the bitter ‘And there’s no one I’d rather be’ and the extinguishing thought ‘But I just wish that I’d never been born’. And all of this accompanied by a guitar played in the purest tone, and a voice so open, so vulnerable, so easy for me to link to my own voice. To the way I think when I am depressed. And maybe this is actually why I link Green with the Trevor; because I identify with him. I guess, and I am just realising this now, that in Man of the World I found a conduit to Trevor protected by a sort of cut-out, an airlock of plausible deniability.
The way he sings ‘I guess I’ve got everything I need’ with this desperate emphasis on need which reveals that what he means is – he does not know what else he needs. And then he comes so easily on the idea ‘I need a good woman / to make me feel like a good man should’ as if it is rehearsed. It is a fantasy for Green, he doesn’t seem to really believe that it could be that simple, but he has to hope that he can solve his problems. Soothe himself in someone else’s arms when he cannot make the same gestures of care towards himself. Such a childish idea of what it is to be in love. That verse comes in with bouncing percussion and a sudden groove only to cut out immediately afterwards. As if he has momentary slipped into a pre-determined role, fulfilling his understanding of what it is to be… only to find it unsatisfying and return to a more truthful mode of expression.
‘About all the times I’ve cried / And how I don’t want to be sad anymore / And how I wish I was in love’. The desire to be in love in the last line feels so much more real than the search for the good woman, or the ‘pretty girls’ that feature earlier in the track. And I wonder what that love stands in for? certainly something more profound than conquest. It rings true. The last word leads into a series of speculative chords and a final resonant note that seems as if it might sustain forever outside of the recording. I guess Green was looking for something.
Peter Green left Fleetwood Mac just after recording his last song with the band. The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown). It marks that shift that happened in British rock music around that time when musicians linked blues to British folk. This song is so fucking ominous and heavy. Page and Plant must have heard this and other Green songs like Oh Well when they were writing Immigrant Song. Who could resist the horror of the Green Manalishi and the staccato chord that drives it along. This song is often mentioned as a sort of break with reality for Green. It was written after the Munich LSD trip pointed to by his band mates as the point of no return.
Can't believe that she needed my love so bad
Comes sneaking around, trying to drive me mad
Busting in all my dreams
Making me see things I don't want to see
Is that love the same love as in Man of the World not romance but something else. Conviction, commitment, obsession? The fearsome Manalishi busting through the barrier of the unconscious and tormenting Green. Latching on to this unmet, poorly understood, but deep as anything need that he feels? In some interviews Green has linked the figure to money. Apparently his leaving the band was in part a result of his insistence that they should not accrue wealth from the music they were making but instead dispose of their earthly possessions. In a biography Green is quoted linking the song to a vision of a green dog in a dream he had:
"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."
It is so like Hughes’ thought-fox; and yet more malevolent this vision seems to have a greater command over Green.
But there is always an unmet need in Green’s playing. I think it is what makes his guitar sound so pure and his vocal so open. From songs he recorded with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers you can hear that he is reaching for something he cannot locate. There is a beautiful instrumental on A Hard Road the record he made with the Bluesbreakers it is called The Super-Naturaland it contains that same sense of desperation and searching that animates his later music. Some British Blues musicians are copying the sounds made by musicians that have experienced deprivation; but for whatever reason Green really feels a lack. You can hear it.
Trevor, like a lot of other Men of The World felt unfulfilled I think. For a long time he tried to find answers in relationships with women, and this is one of the things that led to the end of his marriage with my mum. He was not a good man in this regard. He also sought meaning in the mystical, and in nature, and in his artwork and his writing. In all this desperation he overlooked the people that were prepared to love him as he tried to find people and things that would rescue him. A kind of haunting, an actual haunting sometimes, and one that I think Green felt too.
His post mortem feels so definitive. It describes a body that is no longer him, and a body which has long since been cremated, distributed, disposed. It marks a return to the mundane. He is now truly a man of the world. The earth re-absorbs him, dust and air, particulate pollution. I wonder what he would have made of that. Maybe it would have been reassuring to him that in the end he would not have to be sad anymore. I know that feeling, but more than he could, I think I have been able to find satisfaction in the everyday, and in the love that is close at hand.