Black History Month Artist Spotlight: Arthur Lee & LOVE
Happy Black History Month! Last year I shared stories of a different artist every day for the month of February, and it was a blast.
Arthur is in the middle with his shirt off holding his arm around Johnny with Bryan Maclean the other songwriter in between.
The story I want to share this month is about Arthur Lee and his band Love, which also featured the -still living- 77 year old Johnny Echols, two black men from Memphis, Tennessee. By 1963, they had collaborated with Jimi Hendrix and Billy Preston(separately) before moving across the country to Los Angeles to get rowdy on the LA club scene with their band Love, where they headlined for acts like the Grateful Dead and their later infinitely more famous Elektra record label partner The Doors. These guys were a mixed-race band in 1965 on the scene, a year before Sly and the Family Stone.
When I first stumbled upon the band Love, I was 16 years old. It was 2008, and the album Forever Changes had just been remastered and put on iTunes, where the year 1967 and the colorful album art caught my attention. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the record label had chosen to paint them all awash of color out of fear of putting images of a mixed-race band on the album cover. From the first minute of Alone Again Or’s acoustic guitar speaking in flamenco tones with the trembling brass and strings building a bridge to lift you into the heavens in the background, I was in Love. Why wasn’t anyone talking about this band? Digging into the character of Arthur Lee, I learned he was considered a Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett-like character who had taken too much LSD and lost his mind. Having consumed all the media about the band in existence, I know now that the real problem with why there was no true follow-up to Forever Changes. If you have never given the album a spin, I highly recommend you listen to the 11 song, 43 minute album that was released on November 1st, 1967, just after the conclusion of the Summer of Love. In an interview with Rick Rubin, the Detroit rapper Danny Brown says Forever Changes is his favorite album of all time.
A full ten months before Jimi Hendrix released Are You Experienced in May of 1967, Arthur Lee, the mixed-race folk rocker, and his Los Angeles band Love had their biggest hit with “7 and 7 Is” peaking at no.33 on the Billboard charts in 1966. This proto-punk song is known for its innovative drumming, which apparently took their drummer, Snoopy, quite a long time to get the hang of. The sounds of this song couldn’t be further from the sound on next year’s release. On November 1, 1967, Elektra Records released the ambitious masterpiece Forever Changes, recorded in 64 hours, which, due to the band’s mixed-race character, never saw them tour the East Coast or anywhere outside of Los Angeles for that matter. The structure of the album apparently was a fluke as the second songwriter Bryan Maclean’s song Alone Again Or sets the tone for the entire album, but if Arthur had had his way it wouldn’t have set the scene. The record label made this decision for them. This marks a firm difference between the creation of Forever Changes and Brian Wilson and the Beach Boy’s album Pet Sounds. Like Pet Sounds, Forever Changes features lush orchestral arrangements that provide arching ethereal essence, anchoring the album in another time and space beyond the conclusion of the Summer of Love in California.
The lyrics of the 3rd song Andmoreagain perfectly capture the ethos of 1967’s growing anti-commercialist countercultural scene.
“And I'm wrapped in my armor
But my things are material
And I'm lost in confusions
'cause my things are material”
In the 6th song, The Red Telephone, Arthur quotes German playwright and painter Peter Weiss pulling lines from his 1963 play Marat/Sade, set in a historical French lunatic asylum.
“They’re locking them up today
They’re throwing away the key
I wonder who it will be tomorrow, you or me
We’re all normal and we want our freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
I want my freedom
All of God’s childrens gotta have their freedom”
Lee's poignant adaptation of these lines, rounding out the song written by a Black man from Memphis just after the summer of love, perfectly signals a culmination of civil rights and a hippie counterculture in rebellion. The last line “All of God’s childrens gotta have their freedom” is actually the voice of soul legend Issac Hayes.
The violent Gogo-dancing guitar stylings of the LA Strip collide across the album in songs like A House Is Not a Motel and Live and Let Live with the themes of social injustice that rippled across the United States college campuses responding to the Vietnam War and against the Dow Chemical Company melding with the quieter folky rock sound making the album stand out from the band’s other outputs(and other records of the time).
The tragic legend is that nonconsecutive heroin habits by key members of the band created friction, leading to the demise of the original lineup. The combination of Arthur Lee’s songwriting, guitar playing, and visionary style with longtime musical partner Johnny Echols on guitar and Bryan Maclean, a white guy from Los Angeles, formed the crux of this unique timeless sound. When Arthur moved on alone, he found new band members that played in a more dirty blues style, eventually moving into a funk sound with the posthumously released album Black Beauty in 2015. Black Beauty was recorded in 1973 and also deserves a listen. Every member of this version of Love was Black, and the album is full of solid performances that sound somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and George Clinton.
Peace and Love
Will
-In trying times, put on a record-
Also, Our Hearts are with everyone affected by the fires in Los Angeles. As soon as Emily and I can come back to you WE will.
It’s hard to find a good picture- most are black and white but the shades Arthur is wearing are multicolored and very psychedelic for 1966