In 2016, Ray Robertson published Lives of the Poets (With Guitars), essays on the lives of different musicians, reviewed on Goodreads as “essays every bit as rollicking and energetic as many of the performers discussed.” There’s now a follow-up book called Dust: More Lives of the Poets (With Guitars) and I asked Ray if anything surprised him in researching the book, particularly if there was an overlooked musician. Ray provided the following excerpt about Danny Kirwan. The title of the book — Dust — is taken from his last song, recorded with Fleetwood Mac.

The legend of Fleetwood Mac goes something like this: in the beginning, there was Peter Green, Gibson Les Paul for hire in John Mayall’s mid-60’s Bluesbreakers, a brilliant but psychologically troubled musician who put the Mac together in 1967 (unassumingly naming it after his crack rhythm section of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie) and played some staggeringly good guitar and wrote a bunch of great tunes before having his guitar god wings clipped by drugs and mental illness. Then, the story goes, the rudderless good ship Mac floundered on the seas of artistic and commercial irrelevancy for a few years in the early seventies before the pop gold renaissance that came when Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the group at the decade’s midway point.  

A legend, H.L. Mencken wrote, is a lie that has attained the dignity of age. Fleetwood Mac’s dark ages (1970-1974) are the lie that has become rock and roll legend, and principally because of the guitar playing, song writing, and singing talents of Danny Kirwan, who joined the group in the summer of 1968 as an alarmingly fresh-faced eighteen year old prodigy and was booted from the band four years later for drunken volatility—and by the age of thirty was out of the music business for good and on his way to full-blown alcoholism, debilitating mental illness, and eventual homelessness. 

For a former member of a world-famous rock and roll band, Danny Kirwan is remarkably unknown, both in terms of the biographical details of his life and the wonderful music he created. He’s not a legend—he’s a mystery. Although he’s still waiting for the biography he deserves (I nominate Martin Celmins, Peter Green’s biographer and all round British blues authority), the music, as always, is there for us to listen to. The wife of Duster Bennett, the one-man British blues band, told Celmin, who wrote Duster Bennett’s biography, “Everything you want to know about Duster is all there in his music.” Maybe not everything—we still need that Danny Kirwan biography or documentary—but musicians do communicate most meaningfully through their music.  That’s why they’re musicians. And whatever else Danny Kirwan was—alcoholic, mentally unstable, homeless and impoverished—he was foremost a musician. Danny Kirwan might be Fleetwood Mac’s mystery man, but it’s a mystery with a soundtrack that deserves to be heard.