It’s always a treat to see one legend pay tribute to another, whether it’s Jimi Hendrix covering Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band just two days after its release, or Whitney covering Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” Experiencing another artist’s take is special, whether they reinterpret the song or pay homage closely to the original.
There are countless examples we could draw from, but I recently came across a cover that grabbed my ear. Slash played a show with his band at S.E.R.P.E.N.T. in July of last year (2024), featuring an entire set list filled with covers—banger after banger.
They played everything from Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” to the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Slash’s cover of an old Fleetwood Mac song surprised me; I had forgotten it existed and never expected him to choose it. That song is “Oh Well” from the 1969 album “Then Play On.”
This Fleetwood Mac era is often referred to as “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac,” as he was the frontman, lead singer, and lead guitarist at the time. Their sound wasn’t the pop “Rumors” era most think of, but a blues-rock, jam-heavy, sometimes hard-edged style. Most people probably wouldn’t recognize these as Fleetwood Mac songs.
Songs like “Black Magic Woman,” “Albatross,” and “ I Loved Another Woman” are all notable examples from this era. Heck, I had no idea “Black Magic Woman” was originally a Peter Green Fleetwood song, but I digress. “Oh Well” is a two-part song that Peter Green wrote in 1969; the acoustic intro, which he called a “throwaway riff,” was meant to be the B-side to “Part 2” of the song.
The two parts show opposing musical sides in Green’s mind. Part 2 reflects a classical Spanish guitar sound that Green initially intended to be the main focus of the song, but it was later decided that it should be the tail end closer for the piece.
The song achieved success on the UK chart, peaking at No. 2, and minor success on the American Billboard chart, reaching No. 81. Part 1 is by far the more memorable of the two parts, seeing as part 2 feels almost like a song from an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool. It’s moody. It’s beautiful. It’s well-written, but it’s forgettable to most, myself included.
Part 1, on the other hand, is a damn jam. The heavy blues riff and call-and-response aspect of the song influenced Jimmy Page to write “Black Dog,” which had a similar feel to the first part of “Oh Well.” One of many times Page and Plant would be “influenced” by other artists’ work and “forget” to credit them, as the countless lawsuits they’d settle outside of court throughout their careers would show, but that is a different story.
Anyways, here we are in 2024, in Redmond, Washington. Four songs into a rockin’ set of covers—“Purple Haze,” “Parchment Farm Blues,” “Killing Floor,” “Born Under a Bad Sign”—the band thinks, “Perfect time for an obscure British blues rock track from a little-known Fleetwood Mac album. The real ones will know.”
I’m glad they did. It reminded me how badass the song is and sent me digging back into that era of Fleetwood Mac. The riff captures that 1960s white-guy blues feel that introduced so many to the genre.
My head was nodding along the whole time, and Slash and the guys are killing it. They’re tight, but not stiff or lifeless and stuffy. Once they hit that halfway mark, the tempo jumps up into an all-out guitar shredding jam, before dropping back into that back-and-forth opening groove, and closes out with a full-on hypnotic improv soloing session, complete with a classic drawn-out Slash-style outro. It makes for a well-rounded performance to break up the hits that blanket the rest of the set. I don’t think it was the crowd’s favorite of the day, but it’s a wonderful take on the song, and it gives Slash all the room in the world to do whatever the hell he wants, and he apparently wanted to melt everyone’s faces off with his guitar.