Wrapped up with Love!

So after the previous entries about 'Love' and their seminal work 'Forever Changes and its 50th Anniversary someone asked for all the links to Arthur's extent work which frankly are all over at The Rockesteria anyway but still this gives me the opportunity to say the only other albums that really interested me were the eponymous first and Da Capo, Four Sail was ever a curio and the rest were pretty hard to like for me footnotes and a totally different band anyway.

It took Arthur to get Baby Lemonade behind him to do the 'Forever Changes' concerts and touring (Glastonbury anyone?) to make for a swan song and I hope his last years after his release from a six years of a 12 year prison sentence (Lee fell foul of the 'three strikes and you're out' draconian nonsense for negligent discharge of a firearm and allegedly shooting guns in your garden is never a good idea in my experience. However it wasn't even Arthur it would seem but a neighbour. That it was a false claim seems to have stood for nought and fully expecting to get off Lee was shocked to be sentenced. Hopelessly misrepresented in court and before a corrupt prosecutor later convicted himself of misconduct the charges were later over turned but not until Arthur had served over 5 and half years inside) I think judging by his activities afterward the years after seemed suitably joyous although short lived unfortunately. I have said earlier that I was due to see them at the local Zodiac venue here and only at the last minute did Arthur find he had to cancel due to ill health [acute myeloid leukemia] and foolishly in hindsight I wish I had gone to see what Baby Lemonade pulled off on their own but took my disgruntled money back instead. Inches away from a lifelong ambition right there . . . . . . . .Arthur passed away in 2006 aged 61

and way here's the rest from the best (links here)

1966  Love - Love (remaster and expanded) 

1967  Love - Da Capo (remaster and expanded)

1969  Love - Out Here (2008 remaster)

1971  Love - Lost Love (2009 Sundazed release)

1972  Arthur Lee With Band Aid - Vindicator (2008 expanded)

1973  Love - Black Beauty (2013 bonus tracks)

1974  Love - Reel to Real (2015 deluxe sdition)  

1992  Arthur Lee And Love ‎– Five String Serenade 

Arthur playing Glastonbury 2003

I've always got a song in my back pocket," Arthur Lee told me when I interviewed him in the early '70s, somewhere about the time his RSO album, Reel to Real, was about to be released. Indeed, for a legendry cult artist whose mood swings and erratic behaviors seemed to work at cross-purposes with the delicate arrangements and melodies of his best work (though his forays into Hendrix-influenced hard rock shouldn't be discounted), his discography is extensive and intriguing in its twistings and turn-turn-turnings.

Influenced by the Byrds (whose former road manager, Bryan Maclean, became his most important sidekick in Love), Lee had been an organ player in the Booker T. mold with his first instrumental band, the L.A.G.'s; but when long-haired musicians started infiltrating the Sunset Strip, he donned a pair of weirdly-shaped sunglasses, stepped out front vocally, and landed a deal with Elektra Records — one of their first non-folk signings. 

Love's first three albums with the label are classic examples of going-for-baroque: reinterpreting Burt Bacharach ("My Little Red Book") and Billy Roberts ("Hey Joe") in the guise of jingle-jangle folk-rock, taking on the Stones with an 18-minute track in "Da Capo," and practically templating garage-rock's drag-strip acceleration with "7 & 7 Is." Their third album, Forever Changes, orchestrated and flamenco'ed and filled with rhyme-of-consciousness lyricism, is one of rock's most star-crossed accomplishments; the last sight I had of Arthur Lee, on a stage in Williamsburg a year or so before his untimely passing, was performing that work with all its tremulous quaver intact. Love hardly ventured forth from LA during their glory era, and so it was doubly gratifying to hear Arthur sing himself across the years.

Some of those years were spent in prison, stretches seemingly self-destructed by Lee's short temper and paranoia. Judging from Five String Serenade, they were creatively lost to us as well. This was the last major album Arthur made before taking a called third strike and finishing out the century behind bars for waving a gun about in public. Recorded in Los Angeles in 1992, released on the French New Rose label the following year, it contains some of Lee's most affecting work, from the minuet stateliness and melancholy of the title track — which has been covered by Mazzy Star and the White Stripes — to such full-out rockers as "Seventeen," which attempts to overtake "7 & 7 Is" on the straightaways ("7" can't be beat, fueled as it is by nuclear power).

 "Somebody's Watching You" frames Lee's look over his shoulder in a setting that's two steps down the Strip from the Seeds; "Pass By" is blues in the Jimi 12-barroom mode, reminding of Lee and Hendrix crossing paths as black men in a white psychedelic garage scene. "You're the Prettiest Song" is the prettiest song, without the barbed hook Arthur usually planted in the second verse. His voice, like a lithe Sam Cooke or Johnny Mathis, slides from the back of his throat in slight vibrato.

Finally released from jail after seven years, reunited with Baby Lemonade, he returned to the fore and gave rapturously-received renditions of his body of work before he passed on in August of 2006. He was no stranger to comebacks. "I never went away," he told me when we met. And still hasn't.

by Lenny Kaye

1966-82  Bryan MacLean - Ifyoubelievein