"Stop Messin' Round" is a song written by English guitarist and singer Peter Green, which he recorded with Fleetwood Mac. It is an upbeat twelve bar blues shuffle and is representative of the group's early repertoire of conventional electric blues. The lyrics deal with the common blues theme of the unfaithful lover and share elements with earlier songs.
Peter Green is a British blues rock singer-songwriter and guitarist. As the founder of Fleetwood Mac, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Green's songs, such as "Albatross", "Black Magic Woman", "Oh Well", "The Green Manalishi " and "Man of the World", appeared on the record charts, and several have been adapted by a variety of musicians.
Fleetwood Mac are a British-American rock band, formed in London in 1967. They have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making them one of the world's best-selling bands. In 1998, select members of Fleetwood Mac were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2018, the band was declared MusiCares Person of the Year.
Electric blues refers to any type of blues music distinguished by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be popularly amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters in the 1940s. Their styles developed into West Coast blues, Detroit blues, and post-World War II Chicago blues, which differed from earlier, predominantly acoustic-style blues. By the early 1950s, Little Walter was a featured soloist on blues harmonica or blues harp using a small hand-held microphone fed into a guitar amplifier. Although it took a little longer, the electric bass guitar gradually replaced the stand-up bass by the early 1960s. Electric organs and especially keyboards later became widely used in electric blues.
The song was first released in mid-1968 as the B-side of "Need Your Love So Bad", which appeared on the UK singles chart. The song is included on several Fleetwood Mac albums and other artists, such as Gary Moore and Aerosmith have recorded it.
"Need Your Love So Bad", sometimes known as "I Need Your Love So Bad", is a blues song first published in 1955 and written by Mertis John Jr..
Robert William Gary Moore was a Northern Irish rock guitarist and singer-songwriter.
Aerosmith is an American rock band, sometimes referred to as "the Bad Boys from Boston" and hyped as "America's Greatest Rock and Roll Band". Their style, which is rooted in blues-based hard rock, has come to also incorporate elements of pop rock, heavy metal, and rhythm and blues, and has inspired many subsequent rock artists. They were formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1970. Guitarist Joe Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton, originally in a band together called the Jam Band, met up with vocalist Steven Tyler, drummer Joey Kramer, and guitarist Ray Tabano, and formed Aerosmith. In 1971, Tabano was replaced by Brad Whitford, and the band began developing a following in Boston.
Lyrics
Fleetwood Mac's "Stop Messin' Round" is credited to Peter Green and C.G. Adams, the pen name often used by the group's manager, Clifford Davis.[1] The song's first of only two 12-bar vocal verses includes:
A pen name is a pseudonym adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their "real" name. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise their gender, to distance an author from some or all of their previous works, to protect the author from retribution for their writings, to combine more than one author into a single author, or for any of a number of reasons related to the marketing or aesthetic presentation of the work. The author's name may be known only to the publisher or may come to be common knowledge.
Clifford Davis is a British musician and music manager, chiefly known for his time as manager of successful blues rock band Fleetwood Mac from 1967 to 1974.
Baby please stop messin' round You're messin' round all the time Baby please stop messin' round You're messin' round all the time Now if you don't stop messin' round You'll be somebody's baby 'stead of mine, yeah[1]
Battle Records was an American independent record label, founded as J.V.B. Records in Detroit, Michigan, United States, by the record shop owner Joe Von Battle in 1948. The label specialized in gospel music, jazz and rhythm and blues.
Stop messin' around Baby please stop messin' around Stop messin' around Baby please stop messin' around Now you know I'm gonna take my .44 pistol I believe I'll blow you down[a]
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Green's second vocal verse also includes four bars of stop-time: "I want you to squeeze a me baby, 'til my face turns cherry red, You roll me so hard baby, I'm fallin' out of bed now", before concluding with the same refrain as the first.[4]
Recording and musical style
Fleetwood Mac recorded "Stop Messin' Round" at the CBS studio in London on 28 April 1968.[1] The core group—guitarist Green, bassist John McVie, and drummer Mick Fleetwood—were augmented by pianist (and future McVie wife and full-time group member) Christine Perfect and saxophone players Steve Gregory and Johnny Almond.[1][lower-alpha 2] Five takes were attempted: the first three were incomplete and the fourth yielded the master later included on Mr. Wonderful.[5] The fifth take was used for the single release.[5][lower-alpha 3]
In order to capture a sound more typical of live performances, a public address or PA system was used in the recording studio.[6] Producer Mike Vernon describes it as "dirtier, gutsier sound – closer to that generated at a club performance".[7] He adds: "[T]here is a full density of sound that... is a result of having recorded the full band and guest musicians as one unit. No overdubs".[6] In a 1999 interview, Vernon singled out "Stop Messin' Round":
The records we made [for Blue Horizon Records] were a fairly good representation of that kind of excitement [but] probably we never actually really captured the live performance in a studio – with the exception of "Stop Messin' Around" from the Mr. Wonderful album.[8][lower-alpha 4]
"[Early Fleetwood Mac] zeroed in on two things—B.B. King and Elmore James—and they played the shit out of that music. They had the sound of B.B.'s [1965] Live at the Regal album down almost as good as B.B. did!"
Fleetwood Mac biographer Donald Brackett describes the approach on Mr. Wonderful as "the straight goods in terms of gritty white blues within a traditional format"[10] and the material as "pure scintillating blues, rough in form and raw in content".[11] Critic Richie Unterberger sees it as attempt to emulate the sound of the American Sun Studio (Memphis) and Chess Studios (Chicago), where many of the classic electric blues songs were recorded.[12] However, he describes the overall album sound as "rushed, raw, and thin".[12]
Chicken Shack co-founder and bassist Andy Silvester recalled Green as a perfectionist and advising Fleetwood on his drum parts.[13] At Green's request, Silvester played Fleetwood a Jimmy Reed song: "[I played Reed's] 'My Bitter Seed', which just had this amazing groove to it: the tempo was really slow and yet it shuffled along with a lot of swing... it just flowed [but Fleetwood's drumming] already had that".[13] (Fleetwood later remarked: "Shuffles... I'm sick to death of fuckin' shuffles!")[14]
The most prominent feature of "Stop Messin' Round" is Green's guitar work:[15] only two 12-bar verses have vocals,[4] the remaining four (LP version) are devoted to Green's guitar soloing.[16] Author Douglas J. Noble notes that Green's early blues guitar style reflects "a fluid approach to phrasing", where his notes are slightly behind or ahead of the beat.[17] He adds "Green made great use of quarter tonebent notes",[17] which is a feature of blues guitarists, such as B.B. King (to whom he was often compared).[18] Noble's transcription shows a tempo of 132 beats per minute (or Allegro) in the key of C, which he describes as "a straight-forward medium tempo shuffle blues".[19] Green also uses both a C blues scale and C pentatonic major scale.[19]
Releases
In mid-1968 in the UK, Blue Horizon released "Stop Messin' Around" as the B-side to "Need Your Love So Bad", which was recorded during the same sessions. The single reached number 31 on the UK Singles Chart on 23 July 1968.[20]Epic Records issued the singe in the US, but it did not reach the record charts. Subsequently, the song was added to Fleetwood Mac's second British album, Mr. Wonderful (1968)[21] and their second American album, English Rose (1969).[22]
In a song review for AllMusic, critic Matthew Greenwald writes:
The opening track from Fleetwood Mac's second album finds the band at once staying true to their authentic blues roots while expanding arrangements. Essentially a Jimmy Reed-styled blues-rocker, "Stop Messin' Around" is buttressed by an excellent, funky horn section. Some excellent solo sections from Peter Green highlight the song and show the band digging in to a more hard rock groove than the songs from their debut.[15]
In a review of English Rose, critic Bruce Eder describes it as one of the songs "representing the stronger tracks" from Mr. Wonderful.[22]Richie Unterberger calls it "Mr. Wonderful's one gem" among more derivative tunes in his group biography, Fleetwood Mac: The Complete Illustrated History.[26] In Legends of Rock Guitar: The Essential Reference of Rock's Greatest Guitarists, "Stop Messin' Round" is identified as one of six "guitar high points" in Peter Green's career.[27]
Renditions
Irish guitarist Gary Moore recorded the song for his first blues album, Still Got the Blues (1990).[28] For a while, Moore owned Green's 1959 Gibson Les Paul, which Green frequently played with Fleetwood Mac[29] and used to record many of the group's best-known songs.[30] Moore used the guitar to record his tribute album to Green, Blues for Greeny (1995), which features Fleetwood Mac-era compositions by Green.[31][lower-alpha 5]
Welsh guitarist and Savoy Brown co-founder Kim Simmonds recorded an acoustic ensemble version of the song, that appears on the tribute albums, Rattlesnake Guitar: The Music of Peter Green (1995) and Peter Green Songbook (2000). In a 1996 review in Cadence magazine, Bob Rusch describes it as "a surprisingly jazzy rendition".[32]
Aerosmith recorded the song as "Stop Messin' Around" for their blues tribute album, Honkin' on Bobo (2004).[33] Group guitarist Joe Perry provides the lead vocals, with Steven Tyler contributing the blues harp.[34] Perry later explained: "[Steven]'s not a technical player... He just let's it rip and he's great. Ripping is what we do best."[34]
↑ As with most early Fleetwood Mac songs, Jeremy Spencer does not contribute guitar to recordings on which he does not sing.
↑ At 2:38, the single version is 20 seconds longer than the album version and includes an extra 12 bars of guitar solo as well as the lyrics "Now baby please stop messin' round, You're messin' round with my heart".
↑ Also participating in the interview, Peter Green's response to Vernon's assertion was "Maybe".[8]
↑ Guitarist Kirk Hammett of Metallica bought Green's original 1959 Les Paul guitar for a reported US$2 million in 2016.[30]
Brackett, Donald (2007). Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. ISBN978-0-275-99338-2.
Celmins, Martin (1998). Peter Green: Founder of Fleetwood Mac – The Authorised Biography. London: Sanctuary. ISBN1-86074-233-5.
Noble, Douglas J. (1990). Instant Peter Green. Essex, England: International Music Publications. ISBN0-86359-733-5.
Prown, Pete; Newquist, Harvey P. (1997). Legends of Rock Guitar: The Essential Reference of Rock's Greatest Guitarists. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Hal Leonard. ISBN978-0793540426.
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