10 Outrageous Hard Rock Stories
5. The German Cult That Almost Destroyed Fleetwood Mac
Years before Fleetwood Mac would give us the band defining album, Rumours, they had been a blues rock band, headed by guitarist Peter Green. The end of Green’s Fleetwood Mac would usher in the fabled era of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, but Green's departure itself, is a tragic and cautionary tale of drug use.
In 1970, whilst on tour in Germany, the band fell under the lure of Rainer Langhans. Langhans had been a former member of Kommune 1 - a countercultural political movement that proposed a combined ideology of anti-authoritarianism and sexual revolution. In short, it was a cult. Langhans had his own plans for cultural revolution, and wanted Green to be a kind of guitar-wielding messiah for others to flock to.
As soon as the band got off the plane, they were met by Langhans and Uschi Obermairer, a rather alluring model, who whisked Peter Green off to a mansion in Munich where they held some kind of strange acid sex party. Green was fed copious amounts of LSD, and set about in a makeshift recording studio to play for an audience of sex-crazed Germans. Despite members of Fleetwood Mac attempting to pull Green away from this madness, he refused to leave.
John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, to this day, hold Rainer Langhans accountable for the mental decline of Peter Green, who, after this incident, would be diagnosed with schizophrenia and withdraw from the public eye for a number of years.