Round about twenty years ago an Australian friend of mine came to visit me when I was living in Warsaw in Poland. We had got to know each other in Germany one of my previous ports of call. He was a good fellow. One of the things I remember most about his visit was going down to Warsaw's main synagogue so he could pay his respects to his father who had left Poland just before the Second World War for the long trip down to Australia and a new life. Sensible man.
As I said Ian was a good bloke. Entertaining, bright and funny. A very good heart. He did have the habit of grabbing hold of the remote control and changing channels from a programme you were watching though. Never the most desirable characteristic in a house guest. There's another episode I particularly recall. We were listening to a compilation C90 cassette mix of mine. Everybody of a certain age will know exactly what I'm talking about. They were religiously compiled acts of love.
Alone Again Or the first track from Love's great masterpiece Forever Changes started playing. When it came to the line 'I think that I could be in love with almost anyone' Ian almost visibly bristled. 'Come on. Take off this hippie crap and put something decent on.' I tried to reason with him, it was difficult to know where to start but he wasn't having it so in the end I complied. I think he wanted to put on something like Weezer one of the cassettes he had brought me or Elastica perhaps. Humph!
We're not in touch anymore. Nothing to do with this episode honestly. The last I heard he was a golf coach back in Australia and had started a family. I wish him well. As I said he was a good bloke. But twenty years on I need to call him out. Ian Rubenstein you were wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! Alone Again Or and Forever Changes are as good as it possibly gets. I won't tell you where you can stick your Weezer tape!
'Looking like a born again. Living like a heretic. Listening to Arthur Lee records. Making all your friends feel so guilty about their cynicism. And the rest of their generation. Not even the government are gonna stop you now. But are you ready to be heartbroken?'
These lyrics, from Lloyd Cole & the Commotions great first album Rattlesnakes (released in 1984), were probably the first I ever heard of Arthur Lee and Love. It was a good sign. Pretty much every name Cole drops on the record and every musical influence that went into the making of that record is worth tracking down. They had good taste.
It wasn't particularly difficult to unearth Forever Changes from there. For an album that hadn't sold particularly well in the UK first time round it still had a relatively high profile. This is testament to the sheer, undeniable quality of the record itself. It was still in print and readily available. I bought it at some point over the next couple of years when I got to university. I've been playing it ever since and don't plan on stopping any time soon.
'It's difficult to convey just what a dash Arthur Lee must have cut when he first broke through on the Strip in 1966.... They were a unique phenomenon: an interacial 'two-tone group playing an extraordinary hybrid of R&B, folk rock and psychedelic pop. And Arthur was at the centre of it all, a black freak on the white scene, a ghetto punk in beads and pebble glasses.'
The first great misnomer about the band is their name.
'Jerry Hopkins who briefly managed them...thought they should have called themselves Fist, a sentiment later echoed by Peter Albin of Big Brother & the Holding Company, who felt Hate would have been a more apt name for the group. But if Love were hoods, they were psychedelicized hoods, and the tension within the band between punk and flower was part of what made their songs so compelling.'
Some of the early Love records are almost as special as Forever Changes but I won't be reviewing them here. At first they were a garage band not a million miles from those great set of groups so lovingly compiled a few years after the event by Lenny Kaye on Nuggets. However, they were a cut above every one of those bands, (with all respect to the 13th Floor Elevators), great as their individual statements were. Love really should have been huge. But they were utterly uncompromising. Menacing.
Love on American Bandstand. 'I was as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs' Arthur Lee
This clip says a lot about them and explains why they were destined to fall short of where their talents and ambition might have taken them. They're doing their take on a Bacharach and David song but this is hardly Dionne Warwick or Cilla Black. Love have twisted it into a new shape, much nastier than anything any other American group was serving up at this point in time. The Velvet Underground and The Doors were still months away. MC5 and The Stooges barely embryos. But everything those four bands went on to try to do in terms of challenging and trying to subvert American straight conformist culture Love are doing here.
It's a deranged, edgy, dangerous performance. The audience seems nonplussed at points. Lee is quite clearly tripping out of his tree and seems to have been doing so for quite some while. There are echoes of other bands, mostly of The Stones, in their look, hair and clothes and the way they carry themselves but they're strange, distorted echoes. Brian Maclean looks like Brian Jones developing a thousand yard stare midway through a tour of duty.
The stand up drum kit surely predates the Velvet's use of it. Drummer "Snoopy" Pfisterer, seems as if he can barely maintain a basic beat (he was relieved of his duties before the band got round to recording Forever Changes). Johnny Echols twin necked guitar looks plain odd. It's certainly not necessary for this song. The band are dressed in the Sunset Strip's hippest brightest garb but they look decidedly ill at ease. Lee is constantly licking his lips and swivelling around trying to keep track of the camera. They don't fit. Sorry, but if every man jack of them is not on some heavy reality shaking intoxicant it really doesn't show.
When the presenter comes on at the end of the song and tries to converse with the band the sheer abyss between Love and the straight culture they're half-heartedly trying to make inroads into becomes almost embarrassing. It's an incredible document of its times. However, it seems doubtful whether the appearance on the show would have sold them a single record. Except perhaps to some strays who would probably have found their way into Love's coop anyway eventually.
“Only when a group really reaches the top, can their careers withstand what they may suffer from being continually rude and uncaring to fans and reporters alike. In my opinion, Love will soon be on many blacklists in the music industry, rather than in the ‘little red book’ where they want so badly to belong.” Rochelle Reed
From here Love powered on to 7&7 Is (their only Top 40 single) and Da Capo where they really gave an indication on what they could do. The set of songs on the first side Stephanie Knows Who, Orange Skies, Que Vida, Seven & Seven Is, The Castle and She Comes in Colors, are as good a suite as anyone came out with as 1966 became 1967. The second side is a 19 minute blues jam called Revelation which is less necessary. And so to Forever Changes which they recorded in the summer of 1967.
This record doesn't need me to plead its case. Almost fifty years on now its reputation is assured and will probably only grow regardless of what Ian Rubenstein has to say on the matter. It's as good as the very best in 1967, some year for rock music, which puts it up there with The Velvet Underground & Nico, Sergeant Pepper and the first two Doors albums, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Surrealistic Pillow, Younger Than Yesterday and Are You Experienced. For me I'd put it in a class on its own with the Velvets debut right now and it's much better produced than that album. It's that good. It's an astonishing document.
First song Alone Again Or? still sounds pretty great to me despite Rubenstein's scorn echoing back across the years. It's the obvious hit single off the album. Everything else is too strange, too long, too baroque, too dark for American radio despite their beauty. Between Clark & Hilldale and Bummer in the Summer are the only other 45 candidates to my ears though the latter's title alone might have disqualified it. Alone Again Or? on the other hand could easily have been huge given the airplay.
It's still by far Love's best known song. It became a de facto hit over the years. The Damned chanced their hand at it. Shamefully. Did they like it at all in the first place?
Ironically the song is MacLean's not Lee's. It's more upfront, romantic and wistful than most of the album that follows, lacking the ingrained cynicism evident in Lee's songs. Whether the 'I could be in love with everyone' is to be taken at face value is up for question. Somebody said it to him after all. The fact that the guitars are fiercely acoustic rather than electric is one of the things that make it stand out so much from most of what was around it at this point. This album has so much space. When the mariachi brass kicks in whole careers are born. Belle & Sebastian's for starters.
Forever Changes seems completely different now to how it must have when it came out. The whole '50s to '80s dream of Rock music as a vital force for change, a politically driven process has been consumed, chewed, swallowed, gestasted, digested, flushed and emitted out of the other end of the system and then sold on to ensure the whole process remains a going concern. It's been a tragic process for committed punters and potential activists to observe. The fact that music might be about more than just something nice to listen to. There are still folks waiting to dispense their gullible pennies. There always will be.
This doesn't make the product as something to listen to any less diverting. A product without the meaning it originally intended to convey can still be a beautiful even powerful object. Worth adoring in itself. A case in point is the second song on Forever Changes. A House is not a Motel . It's one of the best things I've ever heard. A thing of beauty.
'To listen to Forever Changes is to relive the moment when the spiritual tectonics of Los Angeles shifted under the weight of the Great Collapse. The record conjures up an image of this city quite similar in parts to Nathaniel West's conception of L.A. as a place perpetually teetering on the brink of infernal apocalypse.'
A House is not a Motel has everything for me. A great gloomy, eerie melodic guitar intro. Drums kick in. Then the vocals. Such a beautifully compressed twelve seconds of life. 'At my house I've got no shackles. You can come and look if you want to.' Lines written by a black man living in a castle. In the hills above LA with his band. Scared of being shipped out to Vietnam at any moment. 'Through the halls you'll see the mantles. Where the light shines dim all around you. And the streets are paved with gold and if someone asks you, you can call my name.'
Love had already lost it by the time they came round to recording Forever Changes through varying fears, addictions and compulsions. In the demoing stage it became evident that at least a couple of band members were too strung out to play their parts properly. Session musicians were drafted in. Eventually band members got their acts together and made it to the final mix. But you can hear the pained, agonised withdrawal process within the spaces on the record.
This song is a huge haunted house. Lee's vocals are in a space of their own as are the guitars and the drums. 'More confusions. Blood transfusions. The news today will be the movies for tomorrow. And the water's turned to blood. And if you don't think so. Go turn on your tub.' After two minutes drums quicken, Lee's vocals intensify. And the mostly acoustic guitars become fully electric ones. That sound like Hendrix coming in from both speakers. Echoing asylum laughter. Perhaps a cliché at this distance. The guitars shudder away. Then you hear an effect that sounds like electric noise gurgling down a plughole. Then it's done.
'We were obsessed by Love. Forever Changes is very elegant, but very dark - maybe LA has always been an evil place and [lead singer] Arthur Lee picked up on that before anyone else. Like Johnny Rotten, he could see beyond the version of reality sold to us and could describe things as they are in poetic terms.' Bobby Gillespie
To be fair to Rubinstein, he might have been onto something with his ill established opinion on Love when it comes to Forever Changes third track Andmoreagain. Good job he never heard it. I've always shut my ears to it over almost thirty years of listening to it because I knew what was coming next. Sure it's beautiful. But at the same time it's a dreadfully sentimental slice of cod medieval whimsy with orchestration straight out of the Da Capo sessions. That was five months ago Love! You've developed completely different narcotic addictions now. Get with the programme!
'In the morning we arise and start the day the same old way. As yesterday the day before and
All in all it's just a day like. All the rest so do your best with. chewing gum and it is oh so
repetitious. Waiting on the sun.'
All in all it's just a day like. All the rest so do your best with. chewing gum and it is oh so
repetitious. Waiting on the sun.'
Fourth track The Daily Planet is the programme. 'In the morning we arise and start the day the same old way,' have been thirteen of the wisest words on earth to me on dark weekday, workday mornings for at least the last ten years. It's strange how it took me twice as long as Arthur Lee to realise how meaningless life is. He worked it out between 21 and 22. Still, he was mightily talented, in control of a fat record contract and living in a castle in the LA hills. He was also gobbling LSD (allegedly) and convinced he was about to die (that bit comes from the horses mouth). Well, I'll catch up eventually. Though I'll have to give the intake a miss. Great cyclical drum pattern on this song and echoed double tracked vocals. The Plastic Nancy character in the song is a typical hippy-ism which places the song in its year. Nevertheless, a great pop moment.
The Daily Planet was pivotal to the recording of the album and the shape it would end up taking. The first song of the sessions, Neil Young sitting in as he was pencilled in to co-produce before commitments with Buffalo Springfield made the idea untenable. Given the general unhinged condition of several of the group Phil Spector's 'Wrecking Crew' backing band, (Hal Blaine, Billy Strange and Carol Kaye) were brought in. The rest of Love protested tearfully and were re-assigned and the tracks were remixed with them playing the following day . The sessions preceded as true collaborations from this point on.
'He's chucked his band out. Because they weren't cutting it. They got them back in. And they've played a blinder.' John Head, Shack
Next song Old Man is MacLean's second and final writer's contribution to the album. It's potentially even more winsome than Andmoreagain but unlike that song for me it's such a thing of beauty that it transcends potential hippy trappings and endures. I've had it spinning round my head for a couple of days while I've taken time off from reviewing this. It's about trying to understand the nature of love and life's eternities from what I can understand. Forever Changes is such an object of wonder partly because it's arranged so well and the contrast it offers from song to song. Old Man is nothing like the song that precedes or succeeds it and works perfectly within its context for that reason.
“Arthur had this big house right on top of Mulholland Drive,” recalled Ken Forssi, “and we’d look down over the city from there. Arthur would sit up there staring out and wondering about all the ambulances.” On few other ’60s albums is the Vietnam war hovering so obviously in the background.'
Griffith Park
'Sitting on the hillside. Watching all the people die. I feel much better on the other side.' This is a pretty creepy way to start any song, made particularly eerie and unsettling when accompanied by sweet circling acoustic guitars. Forever Changes appeals and endures because of its beauty, its songs but also because of its prescient quality. It predicts the end of the LA hippy dream and also goes further to soundtrack some basic, eternal human truths. It sees the ugliness. Bobby Beausoleil was an early hanger on at the fringes of the Love circle. When MacLean replaced him on guitar he drifted off and attached himself to Charles Manson's Family. A couple of years later with the Tate-La Bianca murders there was blood and paranoia all over the Hollywood hillsides that Love inhabited and wrote about. The murders don't reflect on Love themselves in any way even though Beausoleil was involved but with this album and the track The Red Telephone especially they saw it coming. They were living through the madness themselves.
More than any other song I know The Red Telephone hovers for the course of its five minutes between polar opposite states. Light and darkness, sanity and madness, heaven and hell, peace and war, freedom and incarceration, life and death. Lee famously thought he was about to die at any moment during the making of the record between 21 and 22 and this was his final statement. He nearly did die a couple of years later and lived a dark, threatened but nevertheless charmed life over the succeeding decades.
'Arthur overdosed in his Mullholland Drive house. ' Some friends of mine found me dead,' he recalled later. 'Luckily they were paramedic types who knew what to do to save my life. I mean I was lying in the bathtub blue.'
'Arthur overdosed in his Mullholland Drive house. ' Some friends of mine found me dead,' he recalled later. 'Luckily they were paramedic types who knew what to do to save my life. I mean I was lying in the bathtub blue.'
'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'
The Red Telephone is the album's great act of non-compliance, of studying the entirety of the American system and wanting to step outside its machinery once and for all. The work of art it compares most closely to is probably One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which came to the same conclusions; that the machinery would probably endure but still needed to be rattled and challenged.
Lee himself was imprisoned in the 1990s for possession and firing of a firearm. The case against him was sketchy in the extreme and a long term prison sentence was enforced on California's scandalous three strikes and you're out jurisdiction policy. Lee saw it coming figuratively if not in real terms. He understood the way the system operated and the place he occupied within it. The track is a great beautiful creepy, cautionary statement. A masterpiece within a masterpiece. The centre point of the album itself. The end of Side One.
The Whisky a Go Go - 'Here they always play my song'
Between Clark and Hilldale, between The Byrds and The Doors, between '65 and '67 Love were kings of LA's Sunset Strip. Arthur Lee never let future interviewers forget the fact.
"We had the West Coast sewn up. I didn't trust nobody. I wasn't going on the road and play for $20 when I could play at the Fillmore for thousands. I had it made in one place, and I was kind of leery of going to a place I'd never been. I think I definitely made a few wrong decisions."
The place to have seen them would have been the Whisky a Go Go, the location of which Love chronicle on Side 2 Track 1, Maybe the People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark and Hilldale. It's the most upbeat thing on the whole record. The only time along with possibly Bummer In The Summer that Lee takes himself and his band outside the confines of the Bela Lugosi mansion and down onto the streets of LA itself.
It's a breeze. The most apparently joyous moment on the whole record. The trick it's built around, to start each line with the final word of the last is sustained throughout. It swings. It flies. A great hit single that never was. And possibly it never was because beneath its shiny, joyous surface, lurks Lee's trademark melancholy. It's lyrics are about the glamour, colour and life on the scene but also about the fakery, the essential phoniness of the Strip's whole façade and Lee removing himself from it. The lyrics could be quoted as further evidence of his death fixation.
'When I leave now don't you weep for me
I'll be back, just save a seat for me
But if you just can't make the room
Look up and see me on the...
I'll be back, just save a seat for me
But if you just can't make the room
Look up and see me on the...
Moon's a common scene around my town
Yeah where everyone is painted brown
And if we do get stuck away
Let's go paint everybody grey
Yeah, grey, yeah.'
Yeah where everyone is painted brown
And if we do get stuck away
Let's go paint everybody grey
Yeah, grey, yeah.'
'Though acid may seem revelatory for the first two or three trips it starts to become a hall of mirrors thereafter... Forever Changes is exquisitely arranged but everything is slightly out of place. When the Manson Gang wanted to unsettle Beach Boy Dennis Wilson they broke into his house, moved three or four things around the living room, then left. Forever Changes is similarly intimidating. It's certainly mind altering'
'Oh the snot has caked against my pants. It has turned into crystal. There's a bluebird sitting on the branch. I think I'll take my pistol. Love - Live and Let Live.'
By this point you realise you're in the company of one of the best albums ever made. I bow to no-one in that judgement. Sorry Rubenstein. Live And Let Live, changes the pace again. Along with The Red Telephone and album closer You Set The Scene it's one of Forever Changes three great set pieces.
That doesn't make them the record's best tracks necessarily. The standard throughout is so consistently high that I'd find that quite impossible to rank in any real way. Andmoreagain, is always the only moment when my attention drops slightly. But these three songs depart completely from pop music in terms of structure and sentiment and the expansive mood they set allow Lee to properly get things off his chest.
This whole album comments on such basic central, important themes that we all recognise and feel deeply in a way that few other albums I know of have. In a way it's the ying against the yang of The Velvet Underground & Nico which was being made on the other coast of America at round about the same time. Except that Forever Changes was blessed with daylight whereas the Velvet Underground album played out entirely at night.
Live And Let Live moves from the snot caked against Arthur's pants to the bluebird to the couch to the bigger picture very quickly. 'Served my time. Served it well. You made my soul a cell'. And then from there to 'Write the rules. In the sky. Ask your leaders why!' From there we go back to the snot caked against Arthur's pants and the searing guitar that brings the track to the end.
Forever Changes is a deeply political album in a quite removed, uninvolved way. Because it's involved very directly with personal rather than political consciousness. It's involved with changing people one by one rather than systems at first remove the way bands like the MC5 and The Clash tried to. It makes a lot of the rhetoric seem quite foolish. Perhaps it was right. What after all has changed in the American political system since 1967, with the exception of voting in a black president, in comparison with the changes each and every one of us go through every day? Forever Changes.
I'm currently listening to a vinyl copy of Sergeant Pepper which a friend kindly gave me. it's better than I remember. If it had four of five A Day In The Lifes it might come some way to living up to Forever Changes. But it doesn't. So much of it is vaudeville, music hall. It says so much less about the human condition than Love's album to me and as a result resides firmly in its shadow.
'Ace "Good Humor" ice cream salesman Biff Jones, while on his peddling route, is attacked by three thugs chasing a platinum blonde, Bonnie Conroy. They leave after stuffing Biff into the freezer compartment of his delivery vehicle. Biff loses his job. Bonnie shows up and asks Biff to spend the night in her living-room as protection against the gang. He agrees but awakens to find Bonnie a cold corpse. Biff thinks he has killed her but when he returns with the police the corpse has disappeared. Biff is implicated in a murder and robbery at a factory where he was seen making his rounds on the night of the crime. His girlfriend, Margie Bellew, secretary to Stuart Nagel, special investigator for the Peerless Insurance Company, warns Biff he is the prime suspect. Together, they hunt for the missing blonde in order to establish his alibi. Johnny, Margie's kid brother, and fellow-members of "The Captain Marvel Club" save Biff and Margie in a schoolhouse where they have been cornered by the gang. ' Summary of The Good Humor Man, comedy, crime caper made in 1950
I've never been to California and I probably never will. But The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This gives me the sensation that it's a realm of illusory, indescribable beauty above dark seams of sadness. As I said Forever Changes is played out in daylight never more so than in this song. I don't know whether the film described above has any relationship with the Love song halfway through the second side of Forever Changes. Probably not. Good Humor is an American brand of ice creams. Apparently the film summarised above is a comedy. You wouldn't really know it. The lyrics of the song below are apparently an ode to beauty. It's certainly another beautiful song. Again, it's not quite clear if this really tells the whole story. Disquiet and unease hum with the hummingbirds
'Hummingbirds hum, why do they hum, little girls wearing
Pigtails in the morning, in the morning
La da da, da da da da
Merry-go-rounds are going around in and all over
The town in the morning, in the morning
La da da, da da da da
Summertime's here and look over there, flowers every-
Where in the morning, in the morning
La da da, da da da da'
Pigtails in the morning, in the morning
La da da, da da da da
Merry-go-rounds are going around in and all over
The town in the morning, in the morning
La da da, da da da da
Summertime's here and look over there, flowers every-
Where in the morning, in the morning
La da da, da da da da'
'It didn't avert the demons banging at the door of Love's mansion, but Forever Changes serves as an eternal reminder of the other side of idealism's coin.'
Bummer In The Summer dips into recognisable territory for once. It's a Dylanesque putdown, very much in the vein of Like A Rolling Stone or Positively 4th Street but still distinctively Love. It's quite an odd artefact for the so called Summer of Love .
'In the middle of the summer I had a job bein' a plumber
Just to pass till the fall it was you I wanna ball all day
Ah-we were walkin' along, honey, hand in hand
I'm a-thinkin' of you, mama, when you're thinkin' of another man
But you can go ahead if you want to
'Cause I ain't got no papers on you
(No, I ain't got no papers on myself)''
Just to pass till the fall it was you I wanna ball all day
Ah-we were walkin' along, honey, hand in hand
I'm a-thinkin' of you, mama, when you're thinkin' of another man
But you can go ahead if you want to
'Cause I ain't got no papers on you
(No, I ain't got no papers on myself)''
It's sour but all the more likeable for that. It's Lee seeing through the hippie façade. They're heading back into the garage but taking their acoustic guitars along with them. It's pretty much the most concise (less than two and a half minutes) and direct thing on the record. The riff is a slightly mutated , extended take on classic early Kinks or Troggs. It sounds great loud.
And so to You Set The Scene the album closer and Lee's big statement on a record of big statements. It's a song with at least five separate phases. It's got such a sure grasp on melody and dynamics. Barely anybody could match them this is such a peak and this was an era of truly great bands and artists. It says something all of its own. The production and arrangements are peerless. The horn and string sections take it to a whole new plateau of beauty and poignancy than the band could have achieved on their own. It touches on so many things. It seems to me to be focussed on the very process of living with all it's contradictions. It never draws conclusions.
Everything I see needs re-arranging
The album is quite demented, soaked in acid but utterly beautiful. It remains out there in a space of its own. Though the original band split up pretty much directly after this they made a record that will last as long as anyone ever wishes to cup an ear to this kind of thing. This will be a long, long time. It's had a phenomenal influence. Ask Julian Cope. Ask Bobby Gillespie. Ask the Stone Roses. Lee fortunately, lived to see his vision, talent and sheer bravery vindicated. For the last few years he toured his record to adoring audiences. It's rare that these stories have such an ending. Ian Rubinstein wherever you are I hope you've heard this record and recognise it now for the untouchable masterpiece it surely is.
