 |
|
at a glance...
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Year Formed: 1964
Personnel:
Arthur Lee: Vocals, guitar
Bryan MacLean: Vocals, guitar
Johnny Echols: Guitar
Ken Forssi: Bass
Michael Stuart: Drums, Percussion
Related Artists :
Jimi Hendrix, Shack
Notes:
Arthure Lee formed Love amidst a flourishing L.A. rock scene that had already produced The Byrds; while that band's folk-rock clearly influenced Love, their early work also incorporated the rough-and-ready sound of '60s garage psych later made infamous by Lenny Kaye's Nuggets comps. Second LP Da Capo featured their only minor hit, proto-punk curiosity "7 and 7 Is". The band was already notorious: their refusal to tour, Lee's herculean drug intake, and their fragile interpersonal chemistry made them unlikely targets for longevity from the start. But if the band's third album, Forever Changes, cemented Love's place in history, it also heralded a painfully early demise. The album is almost universally regarded as one of the finest achievements of the rock era, but it also served as a virtual full stop to Lee and Love's quality output. The band soon fell apart around its deranged leader, and while Lee tried recording with (an allegedly besotted) Jimi Hendrix and resurrecting the Love name at several points between 1969 and 1974, he never again released anything of consequence. In the 1990s Lee ran into recurring trouble with unlicensed guns and ended the millennium in prison, still proclaiming his innocence. MacLean died in 1999.
Links: The Arthur Lee and Love Discography
|
|
 |
|
Love
Forever Changes
Elektra/Rhino, Released 1967, Reissued 2001
|
|
|
 |
|
What hurts the most is when you love too much. We all think that if we just give, that others will give back to us; but wisdom comes from learning that this just isn't the case.
Arthur Lee so loved the world that he birthed this nasty/beautiful bad trip of a record, so that we might never wander in the forest of naiveté again. Nothing on Forever Changes is what it seems, and if Lee's acid wisdom is compelling, it is also frightening, the negative image of a vulnerable psyche driven insane by too much pain.
Everything was falling apart for Arthur when this album was conceived and recorded in the fucked-up summer of 1967. His excellent band, Love, was in tatters, with none of the members even willing to learn their parts; his already sensitive soul was overburdened with misery and drugs; and the hippie dream had imploded in LA's summer heat.
Churlish souls joked that Lee should have called his band Hate, and Forever Changes certainly has plenty of piss and vinegar to go around. "A House is Not a Motel" is a mariachi rocket ride across the desert, Love kissing goodbye to LA's streets-of-gold optimism with a fierce guitar solo and Lee's clear-eyed parable about the mud and blood of reality poisoning. The sad joke of freedom is satirized on the chilling, paranoiac "The Red Telephone"; the betrayal of youth culture by Madison Avenue is all over "The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This"; and Lee's take on what everyone else was calling the Summer of Love is reflected in "Bummer in the Summer".
Lee later briefly disowned the album's orchestral folk production, claiming an unfulfilled wish to strip these songs down to the proto-punk basics of earlier Love material like "7 and 7 Is." Thank heaven he didn't -- the ridiculously unconventional horn, string, and guitar arrangements on this album sound like an alien battle engagement, even in their gentlest moments somehow more violent and psychotic than a thousand distorted guitar armies, and more truly evocative of the psychedelic experience than anything ever recorded.
And one of the genius parts of this new re-release is the outtakes, which show that you have to work really damned hard to sound like you just threw everything together. One track is an eight-minute snippet of studio time for the non-LP single "Your Mind and We Belong Together," in which Arthur gets after everyone in the band -- especially lead guitarist Johnny Echols -- for slacking off: "Echols, maaaan, I don't understand your trip, man ... you're the one who says you can blow in the studio; nobody to bug you -- you gotta blow, man!"
But Forever Changes leaves us not with Lee the obsessed taskmaster, Lee the drugged lunatic, or even Lee the twisted drop-out. "You Set the Scene" is one of the great album-closers, its combination of resignation, realism, and salvaged hope revealing a bruised but wise soul, mature beyond the dying innocence of the times.
You see, Arthur thought he was going to die, and "You Set the Scene" was going to be his farewell to the world and the music industry and himself and everything. Which makes it pretty damned poignant. And while he didn't actually die, his career did -- Forever Changes tanked at the stores and none of Love's other records were really ever any good. So this was the end for real, a Dear John letter to the universe. Woe be unto you if you've never heard it.
If you like Love, check out:
Love Da Capo
The Beatles The Beatles
Shack Waterpistol
Michael Head Introducing the Strands The Magical World of the Strands
The Beach Boys Smile
The Verve A Storm In Heaven
-- Matt Cibula and Jesse Fahnestock
Ink Blot Home
about | archives | contact | links
|
|
 |
|
|
