Hiwatt has twinned outstanding soundboard recordings of the Peter Green/Jeremy Spencer/Danny Kirwan Mac lineup, which makes the 2CD set noteworthy enough. This was also the troubled Green’s final tour as well, and hearing early Mac classics like “Albatross” and “Green Manalishi” (plus numerous blues workouts) alongside more recent-at-the-time fare like the mighty “Oh Well” and an 11-minute “Coming Your Way” are even better inducements to pick this up.
The concerts apparently were recorded by none other than the Grateful Dead’s soundman, as the two concerts were being conducted as benefits for the Dead – they’d recently been busted “down on Bourbon Street” (re: “Truckin’”), and the Mac had been on had that very night. Drummer Mick Fleetwood famously recounted the following story to Britain’s Q magazine in 1990 which is instructional here: "The police were out to bust Owsley's ass, and they busted The Grateful Dead too. He lost all his money keeping out of jail for years, but eventually they got him. That Dead song with the line 'busted down on Bourbon Street' (Truckin', from the LP American Beauty), that was the night that Fleetwood Mac played with them at The Warehouse in New Orleans. Owsley had spiked the water fountains and after our set, John McVie was out of it, and couldn't handle the fact that the Dead were going to get up and play! So he stood in the audience while the rest of us jammed with the Dead. The audience loved it - a massive freak-out. That was what caused Owsley eventually to go to jail. We were nearly there. We were following their car back to the hotel, absolutely out of it on acid. I drove the car from the back seat with my feet while somebody else worked the pedals from the side - nobody was in the driver's seat. Oh God!" Mick nearly weeps. "We got lost, and by the time we arrived, they'd been busted… Back in those days with acid and mescalin and stuff, we had a laugh - to start with. But these were isolated incidents. We weren't drug orientated at all, really. But when Jerry went off, we'd been in San Francisco, on mescalin.”
