Rattlesnake Shake
I know, I know, I’m late to the party.
On my second trip over the hill today, from Sherman Oaks to Santa Monica, I heard Fleetwood Mac’s "Rattlesnake Shake" on SiriusXM.
Felice complained that her presets were screwed up. So I was checking them out. I was in her car, since mine was now in the shop and I had to go back to Santa Monica to discover whether I’d left my cell phone in my house or at Subaru of Santa Monica or on the bus or…
You can’t live without a cell phone anymore. This occurred to me when Subaru of Sherman Oaks told me they’d call me. Where? I was not gonna be home all day tomorrow. The naked feeling of driving without a cell is bad enough, but what if you really need to use it? They said they’d call me when a loaner became available… Then again, how would they reach me? If I borrowed Felice’s car to go to James’s studio in Glendale, which was the original plan, but…
And thinking about all this, wondering how to play it all out, and I’m a planner if nothing else, to the point where sometimes I find it hard to move, because I’m afraid of making a mistake, I keep pushing the SiriusXM buttons. And even though I’ve been on the freeway for a long time at this point, they’re still playing the same damn Fleetwood Mac song on Deep Tracks.
It’s obviously live. And at first it seemed a bit garage-bandy, which is why I did not stay there.
But now that I was on the off ramp at Cloverfield/26th, the song had slowed down and I was enraptured. This was obviously Peter Green, the legendary Peter Green.
And the track kept getting better and better. I was reminded of the blues rock era, of the days of innovation, when one track could take up an entire album side.
And I thought how even though this track was at least forty years old, it was new to me. That’s what’s great about great music, it’s a land mine, just waiting for you to discover it and get blown up.
And I come home and start Googling and clicking on YouTube clips and checking allmusic.com and EVENTUALLY, I find the version of "Rattlesnake Shake" I heard on the radio.
Not the live YouTube clip from the Playboy show, with Hef and Barbi Benton doing the introduction of a truly live cut.
Not the version done by Bob Welch and Mick Fleetwood.
Not any version on Spotify. Not any version on Rhapsody. But the one on Napster. From the 2002 album of a February 1970 Boston Tea Party concert, "The Vintage Years Live".
You can hear it here:
It’s a Chinese site. We may overload and kill it. You can’t catch the entire thing on YouTube, it’s a time limit thing.
And maybe you won’t get it. Maybe you have to be driving in your car. Maybe you have to be stoned in the dark in a club.
But listening to this extended, almost twenty five minute version of "Rattlesnake Shake" makes me think we just might be celebrating the wrong edition of Fleetwood Mac.
(P.S. It’s not only Peter Green, it’s Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan AND Mick Fleetwood and John McVie.)
