Love
Written in the hills above Hollywood by a twenty-two-year-old who sensed death at the height of the Summer of Love, the most beautiful and uneasy album of the 1960s.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and associates ⏳🌊
- MemberArthur Lee
The leader, singer and songwriter, he was the very name of the band from the beginning of Love to its end.
- MemberBryan MacLean
A former Byrds road manager turned guitarist and the band's second songwriter, he left behind “Alone Again Or.”
- MemberJohnny Echols
A lead guitarist born in Memphis like Lee, he led the guitar sound of the original band.
- MemberKen Forssi
A bassist who joined after playing with the Surfaris, he anchored the rhythm of the original Love.
- ProducerJac Holzman
As head of the Elektra label, he signed Love and produced their debut album, and on Lee's recommendation he discovered the Doors.
- FriendshipJimi Hendrix
In 1964, while still unknown, he played guitar on a recording of one of Lee's songs, and in 1970 he recorded with Lee again in London.
I. Boys from Memphis · 1945–1965
(Roots) The band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California. Its roots, however, reach back to Memphis, Tennessee, in the South. Its leader, Arthur Lee, was born there in March 1945 as Arthur Porter Taylor. His mother, Agnes, was a schoolteacher, and his father is said to have been a jazz cornetist. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother to Los Angeles at around the age of five. When his mother remarried and her new husband, Clinton Lee, adopted him, he took the name Arthur Lee. (Hometown) Johnny Echols, who would play lead guitar, was also born in Memphis. The two grew up together in a Black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. As a teenager, Lee led bands such as the LAGs and the American Four, playing rhythm and blues and instrumentals. In the mid-1960s Lee was credited as the songwriter of “My Diary,” recorded by the singer Rosa Lee Brooks, and the guitarist on that session was a still-unknown Jimi Hendrix. Their paths would cross again six years later in London. (Folk) The band's other pillar, Bryan MacLean, was born in 1946 into a family of artists in Los Angeles and grew up on the edges of Beverly Hills. Smitten with folk music, he worked as a road manager for the Byrds (a crew member who hauls equipment and sets up the stage), learning the club world of the Sunset Strip. MacLean met Lee in the Byrds' orbit, and when he joined, Black rhythm and blues and white folk came face to face within a single band. (The times) Los Angeles in 1965 was the city where the Byrds played Bob Dylan's songs on electric guitars and set off folk rock. Listening to the Rolling Stones and the Byrds alike, Lee was sketching a picture rarely seen in America at the time: a racially mixed rock band led by a Black man.
II. Nights at Bido Lito's · 1965–1966
(Lineup) The band was first called the Grass Roots, but since a group by that name already existed, they changed it to Love. Lee handled vocals and songwriting, MacLean rhythm guitar and vocals, and Echols lead guitar. Ken Forssi, formerly of the surf rock band the Surfaris, played bass, and Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer played drums. Two Black members and three white: one of the earliest racially mixed bands in American rock. (The club) Their home base was Bido Lito's, a small club in Hollywood. The young crowd of the Sunset Strip flocked to see Lee in his mismatched shoes and tinted glasses. Jac Holzman, head of the folk label Elektra, saw them there and signed the band in early 1966. Love became the first rock band Elektra seriously set out to build. (Debut) In March 1966 the debut album Love was released. The single “My Little Red Book,” a Burt Bacharach film song hammered out as roughly as if by a teenage band rehearsing in a garage, reached No. 52 on the chart. That raw sound is now counted a classic of garage rock (rough, simple rock in the manner of garage bands). The album also included “Hey Joe,” a few months before Hendrix made his debut in Britain with the same song. (Full speed) That summer “7 and 7 Is” climbed to No. 33, becoming the band's biggest hit. Around the same time Lee recommended the Doors, whom he had seen at a club, to Holzman, and Jim Morrison is said to have declared that his goal was to become as big as Love. (Influence) The debut single reached across the Atlantic as well. Peter Jenner, Pink Floyd's manager, recalled humming one of Love's songs to Syd Barrett, and that the piece Barrett came up with while trying to work it out on guitar was “Interstellar Overdrive.” The song is commonly identified as “My Little Red Book.”
A debut single that tore up Bacharach's polished film song with the rough energy of the club stage, sowing seeds as far away as Pink Floyd's improvisations across the sea.
- Listen from the very opening for the short phrase (riff) that the bass and guitar repeat in unison. It is the very figure Syd Barrett is said to have turned into “Interstellar Overdrive.”
- Compared with the breezy pop of the original Manfred Mann version, the drums here drive the beat forward with a far stronger sense of speed.
- Lee's vocal is less singing than a way of hurling words, as if snapping at someone. It sounds close to the defiance of a person jilted in love.
- Its form — a little over two minutes long, with no drawn-out solo, pushing ahead on the force of repetition — is why the song is counted a garage rock classic.
The band's biggest hit, compressing the seething energy of the Bido Lito's days into just over two minutes, and often cited as a prototype of 1960s punk.
- The drums' relentless pounding, never letting up from start to finish, is the song's engine. Recollections have it that the recording took dozens of takes.
- Lee sings by spitting out short phrases breathlessly. It is a vocal that puts rhythm ahead of melody, in a tone mixing anxiety and rage.
- Near the end, a sound effect like an explosion goes off and the mood changes completely. The languid guitar tail (coda) that follows makes an uncanny contrast with the frenzy before it.
- The guitar is not clean but scratchy and distorted, making it sound far rougher than other pop hits of the same year.
III. Da Capo · 1966–1967
(Expansion) Ahead of the second album, the lineup changed. Pfisterer moved over to harpsichord (an old keyboard instrument whose keys pluck the strings to make sound) and organ, and Michael Stuart-Ware took the drum stool. The jazz musician Tjay Cantrelli joined on saxophone and flute, bringing the band to seven. Lee already heard in his head a sound wider than the frame of a rock band. (Two faces) Da Capo came out in November 1966. Side one held “Stephanie Knows Who,” drawing in jazz triple meter and Latin rhythms; MacLean's gentle ballad “Orange Skies”; and the short, intricate “¡Que Vida!” All of side two was a single track, “Revelation,” a nineteen-minute improvised ensemble (jam). It is counted an early example of a rock album giving a whole side to one track, though Lee later thought little of it. (The Castle) The members lived together in a castle-like mansion in the Los Feliz hills known as “the Castle.” Lee kept putting off national tours that would take him out of Los Angeles, and the band did not appear at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. While the outside world seethed with the fever of psychedelic rock (rock that tried to render hallucinatory experience in sound), Love stayed inside the city and became a local legend. (Cracks) Sales did not grow as hoped. Cantrelli and Pfisterer left one after the other. Lee was deep into LSD, and tensions mounted over who controlled the songs. MacLean resented that his songs were limited to one or two per album. That tension and isolation became the atmosphere of the next album.
An album on which the band, grown to seven, drew jazz, Latin and baroque colors into rock, the intricacy of side one and the nineteen-minute jam of side two showing Lee's ambition and turmoil together.
- Listen to the first track, “Stephanie Knows Who.” The video on this card is that song. It sways in a jazzy triple meter (waltz time) until Lee breaks in as if shouting — a vivid contrast.
- In the same song, Cantrelli's saxophone and Pfisterer's harpsichord take turns. It was rare at the time for the harpsichord's jangling sound to step this far forward in a rock band.
- MacLean's “Orange Skies” has an entirely different grain from Lee's songs. The mild feeling created by flute and soft vocals lets you hear the difference between the band's two songwriters.
- On side two, “Revelation” is a nineteen-minute track that transfers the band's club blues jams straight to record. Heard after the short, meticulous songs of side one, it reveals the two faces of the same band.
IV. Forever Changes · 1967
(Premonition) In 1967 the twenty-two-year-old Lee was haunted, he said in many interviews, by a premonition that he would soon die. The city he looked down on from the hill sang of the Summer of Love, but what he saw first was the Vietnam War, violence and racial tension. He recalled writing the songs on this album as though they were last words to leave the world. (Sessions) Recording began at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. The engineer Bruce Botnick tried to bring in Neil Young of Buffalo Springfield as co-producer, but Young soon dropped out. There were reports that Young arranged “The Daily Planet,” but Young himself denied any involvement. Because the band seldom even showed up for rehearsals, the first two songs, “Andmoreagain” and “The Daily Planet,” were played by session musicians (professional players hired for studio work) such as Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye. Shocked at the thought of losing their places, the members pulled themselves together and recorded the rest of the songs themselves. (Arrangements) The arranger David Angel wrote the string and horn parts. The sound of strings and trumpet laid over acoustic guitars was the very opposite of psychedelic roar. Beneath that calm sound, the lyrics spoke of anxiety, madness and war. This tension, beauty pitted against foreboding, is the heart of the album. (Release) Released in November 1967, Forever Changes stalled at No. 154 on the American chart but reached No. 24 in Britain. Over time its reputation was completely reversed. Today the album never fails to appear on lists of the best albums of the 1960s.
MacLean's song that opens Forever Changes, the most famous song left by the man who was always the band's second songwriter.
- The opening acoustic guitar strums rapidly, like Spanish flamenco. Over it, the strings arranged by David Angel slowly settle in.
- The trumpet solo in the middle has a tone that recalls a Mexican mariachi band. The bold stroke of giving a brass instrument the solo in a rock single became the song's signature.
- MacLean and Lee sing together, but in the final mix Lee's voice came to the front. Many recollections record that MacLean regretted this. Try following the higher of the two voices on its own.
- The song confides waiting and loneliness in the tone of someone talking to himself. This doubleness, bright brass layered over a forlorn feeling, announces the keynote of the entire album.
An album Lee is said to have written as if it were his last words, sensing that death was near — a 1960s masterpiece that hides the unease of war and madness beneath serene strings.
- Listen to “A House Is Not a Motel.” The video on this card is that song. It begins calmly on acoustic guitar, but at the end Echols's distorted electric guitar solo bursts out, turning images of war into sound.
- Throughout the album, the strings and horns are not background filling in behind a rock band but move as if in dialogue with the main melody. “The Daily Planet” and “Andmoreagain” were played by session musicians, so compare their texture with the songs the band played itself.
- In “The Red Telephone,” Lee depicts confinement and madness in an even, composed voice. The passage near the song's end where several voices overlap in a murmur is chilling.
- The closing track, “You Set the Scene,” runs nearly seven minutes, its structure shifting as if in several movements. In the second half, as the brass swells majestically, the whole album arrives at a single conclusion.
V. The new Love · 1968–1971
(Breakup) After Forever Changes, relations among the original members never recovered. In 1968 Lee disbanded the group and filled every seat but his own with new faces. MacLean left to find his way as a solo artist, and Echols and Forssi left the band as well. Love was now, in effect, the name of one man: Arthur Lee. (Blues) The new Love was built around Jay Donnellan on guitar, Frank Fayad on bass and George Suranovich on drums. In place of delicate strings came blues rock, heavy and driven by long guitar solos. In 1969 they released Four Sail, their final album for Elektra, and that same year the double album Out Here on the Blue Thumb label. In a single year they had poured out three albums' worth of music. (Reunion) In 1970 Lee met Jimi Hendrix again in London and recorded with him, their first session since “My Diary” in 1964, 6 years earlier. The result, “The Everlasting First,” became the opening track of the album False Start (1970). Hendrix died that September, and for Lee the song remained his last work with an old friend. (Final act) In 1970 Love toured Europe for the first time, and in Britain they were welcomed more warmly than in America. But sales were falling and the lineup kept changing. By around 1971 the band had effectively stopped, and in 1972 Lee released the solo album Vindicator on A&M.
The last album of the Elektra years, made with the new members, it lets you hear the sound of the second Love, with heavy guitar in place of strings.
- Listen to the opening track, “August” — the video on this card is that song. Jay Donnellan's guitar coils on and on, and it sounds like hard-edged blues rock, nothing like the delicacy of Forever Changes.
- Frank Fayad's bass and George Suranovich's drums lay down a heavier floor than the original members did — a weight close to that of British hard rock bands of the same period.
- Lee's voice has grown lower and rougher. His tone, a mix of cynicism and resignation, seems to echo the situation of a leader left alone after breaking up his original band.
A song left by Lee and Hendrix — who had first recorded together in 1964, when both were unknown — after they met again in London in 1970; a record made a few months before Hendrix's death.
- Hendrix plays the guitar. Listen for the short, supple guitar replies that fill the spaces between Lee's lines.
- The rhythm sounds closer to rhythm and blues and soul than to blues rock — a moment where the grain of the Black music both men had been rooted in as teenagers comes through.
- Lee eases off and sings without hurry. Compared with the shouted vocals elsewhere, it carries the comfort of recording with an old friend.
VI. The long shadow · 1972–2006
(Silence) In 1974 Lee revived the Love name and released Reel to Real, but the response was faint. For some 20 years afterward he took the stage only now and then, and was all but forgotten even in Los Angeles, the city he had made his home. Meanwhile, musicians and critics in Britain and Europe kept calling Forever Changes back into the light. (Loss) In the 1970s MacLean became a born-again Christian and wrote songs of faith. His “Don't Toss Us Away” was recorded by Lone Justice, the band fronted by his half-sister Maria McKee. In January 1998 Forssi died of a brain tumor, and on December 25 of that same year MacLean died of a heart attack. (Prison) In 1996 Lee was convicted of negligently discharging a firearm and, under California's so-called three-strikes law, sentenced to 12 years. In December 2001 a federal appeals court found prosecutorial misconduct at his trial, and he was released. (Return) Out of prison, Lee set out with the Los Angeles band Baby Lemonade and a group of string·brass players to perform Forever Changes in its entirety. Their 2003 concert at London's Royal Festival Hall was released as a live album, and Johnny Echols joined them for some shows, beginning with a Los Angeles concert that spring. After 35 years, Lee met the audience the album should have reached. (Farewell) In 2006 Lee was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. That June, at a benefit concert in New York to raise money for his treatment, musicians including Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant took the stage. Lee died on August 3 in Memphis, the city of his birth, at 61.
Lesser-known stories
“Alone Again Or” was a song MacLean had already written around 1965, around the time Love was formed. His 1960s demo recordings lay buried for years until they were finally released in 1997 as the album ifyoubelievein. The 2001 expanded edition of Forever Changes included an alternate mix that brought MacLean's voice further forward. Only after his death, it turned out, could listeners hear the song as he had first wanted it heard. The relationship between Lee and Hendrix is usually remembered only through the single 1970 London session. But their bond goes back to the 1964 recording of “My Diary” in Los Angeles, when both were still unknown. Lee later claimed that Hendrix's flamboyant way of dressing had been influenced by his own. Along with the fact that Love recorded “Hey Joe” first, this story has been less often told, lost in the shadow of the Hendrix legend. On its release, Forever Changes sold far better in Britain than in America. It was chiefly British critics and musicians, too, who kept the album's reputation alive. It was no accident that when Lee began performing the album in full after his release in 2002, his main stage was London, and the live album was recorded there as well. Here was the masterpiece of a band forgotten at home that entered the canon first across the ocean.
Glossary 📚🔎
Garage rock
(The word) Garage means just that — a garage. The name comes from the teenage amateur bands who moved their instruments into the family garage to rehearse. (In rock) Rock that was popular in the United States in the mid-1960s, charging ahead with simple chords and raw sound. Energy and attitude matter more than technique. Think of friends rehearsing in a corner of the school auditorium before the festival, never stopping when they slip up but pushing through, loud, to the very end — that drive is the spirit of garage rock. Love's “My Little Red Book” and “7 and 7 Is” are often cited as prime examples.
Riff
(In rock) A short, memorable phrase repeated several times within a song. Usually played on guitar or bass, it serves as the song's face. Picture the short chant a cheering section repeats in time at a game: after a few hearings you can join in, and the moment you hear it you know which team it belongs to. A good riff works the same way — a few bars are enough to tell you what song it is.
Psychedelic rock
(The word) Psychedelic joins the Greek psyche (mind·soul) and delos (manifest), and means 'revealing the mind.' The word was coined in the 1950s to describe the mental states induced by hallucinogens. (In rock) Rock of the mid-to-late 1960s that tried to carry hallucinatory experience and dreamlike sensation into sound. It favored long, sprawling improvisation, unfamiliar instruments and echoing sound effects. Ask someone to paint the strangely jumbled dreams that come just before sleep, and they will draw swirling colors and melting shapes. Psychedelic rock is music that paints such pictures in sound.
Jam
(In rock) Playing that musicians trade back and forth on the spot, listening to one another, with no score set in advance. Over a single fixed rhythm or chord, each adds whatever comes to mind. It's like the game where friends build a story together, each adding one sentence, and no one knows where it will go. Love's 19-minute “Revelation” is a recording of just such a jam. (Elsewhere) In everyday life, jam is fruit cooked down with sugar, and the word can also mean being packed tight and stuck, as in a traffic jam.
Session musician
(In rock) A professional musician who is not a full member of any particular band but is hired by the studio to play on recordings for many singers and bands. They can read an unfamiliar song off the page and play it accurately in no time. In 1960s Los Angeles, session players such as Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye quietly played on countless hits. Think of the dependable understudy in a school play who learns the script in a flash and fills the stage when the lead is too sick to go on. In the early sessions for Forever Changes, Love nearly lost their places to players like these.
Waltz time
(The word) Waltz comes from the German walzen, meaning 'to turn, to roll.' The name of a dance in which couples spin round and round came to mean its music and its meter. (In rock) A meter in which three beats — strong–weak–weak — repeat as a unit. Since most rock moves in four, one–two–three–four, a song in three gives a distinctive feeling of swaying and turning. On a swing, count the motion of rising back, sweeping down and soaring forward as one–two–three: that sway is the feel of triple time. Love's “Stephanie Knows Who” sways in this meter.
Coda
(The word) Coda is Italian for 'tail.' It is so called because it is the tail added after the body of the piece ends. (In rock) The ending attached to round off a song after its last verse and chorus. It may sum up what came before, or, as in “7 and 7 Is,” abruptly change the mood and end on an entirely different feeling. Think of the short post-credits scene that appears after a film's end credits roll. In leaving a lingering echo with a scene that connects to the main story yet has a different texture, it resembles a coda.