WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF LOVE Arthur Lee
Jul 08, 2010
Searching for Self in the middle of the night: a new book chronicles the life, times and masterpiece - Forever Changes - of the late Love auteur.
BY RICK ALLEN
1967 saw some of the best, most memorable albums in rock and roll history - Are You Experienced, The Velvet Underground and Nico, John Wesley Harding and, of course, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band among others. Within a year on either side came Astral Weeks, Pet Sounds and Beggars Banquet. But Love's Forever Changes is right up there with any of those, high on any number of lists of the best rock and roll albums of all time. There have been multiple re-packagings and re-releases bought by longtime fans, people who were there and people who missed it the first time around, as well as an ever-growing number of music lovers who were born decades after its initial release.
With Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book Of Love (Jawbone Press), Canadian music writer John Einarson has done a remarkable job of telling the story of the album, the people who were involved in making it, and Arthur Lee - the visionary genius behind it.
The book is a mesmerizing read. Its revelations unfold like the elements of a good mystery novel, yet in this case, knowing the end, you turn page after page to find out not what happened but how. Einarson mines information from almost every musician, living or dead, who was associated with Love, from members of Lee's high school band to the players who toured with him in the last years of his life (he passed away in 2006 from leukemia) with his acclaimed live recreation of the album Einarson rightfully calls a masterpiece. Einarson, who has previously written books on Neil Young, the Buffalo Springfield, Gene Clark and the Flying Burrito Brothers, also had the immeasurable benefit of being granted the right to excerpt portions of Lee's unfinished autobiography.
Einarson calls Love, formed in 1966, the first integrated (black and white) rock band. If you count The American Breed (which morphed into Rufus) as a pop band, The Checkmates Ltd. as a show band and Lee's heroes, Booker T, and the MGs as an R&B band, he's probably right. In any case, Love was certainly one of the first integrated outfits to operate in the same arena as contemporaries like The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield. Love only registered on the singles charts with any real impact with their first single, 1966's "My Little Red Book" (a rocked up reworking of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song done by Manfred Mann for the soundtrack for the Peter Sellers film What's New Pussycat) and "7&7 Is" which hit #33, also in '66.
Where they really shined was as the kings of the Los Angeles club scene. They were the envy of other bands around at the time with a heavy influence on ones as diverse as The Byrds, The Velvet Underground, The MC5 and The Doors. Ray Manzerek is quoted as saying "we wanted to be like Love" and that Jim Morrison, who used to hang around Lee's house like a smitten groupie, used to say that if the Doors could be as "big as Love, man, my life would be complete." Love's influence extended even to established groups like the Rolling Stones. Lee insisted that the chorus of "Ruby Tuesday" is a blatant lifting of Love's "She Comes In Colors" from their album <Da Capo. The Stones' single and Da Capo were both released in January of 1967 but Lee always said the Stones got the idea after seeing Love perform in L.A. when they were already doing the song that original Love guitarist John Echols says was inspired by a friend and fan who came to the band's L.A. shows in "outrageous gypsy clothes." Considering the Stones' history it's a very plausible argument; just ask Robert Johnson.
Robert Plant was a huge fan. So was Eric Clapton. Certainly "The Rain Song" and "Battle Of Evermore" have at least some inspirational connection to Love's music. Eric Clapton was almost singlehandedly responsible for getting Robert Stigwood to sign Arthur Lee to his RSO label, giving him his last shot with a major label. The connection with RSO and Stigwood would be one more burned bridge Lee would leave behind him.
Reading the things their devoted L.A. following has to say about them and, most important, listening to Forever Changes, if nothing else, it's extremely hard to believe the band didn't hit the big time. Certainly a hard slog was in store for a rock and roll band that not only had two black members but was also led by one of them. And some bad decisions by Lee (he turned down a booking for Love at The Monterey Pop Festival and at Woodstock), his reluctance to travel, and being the first rock and roll band on a label with no experience with that type of music (Elektra's next rock act, The Doors, would benefit from the mistakes that hindered Love) had something to do with it.
Still, that music was so great and the band was the epitome of cool. The book has a wonderful photo of them onstage at L.A.'s Hullabaloo. In it a rail-thin Lee stands at the mic in leather pants and cowboy boots and playing harmonica while guitarist Echols, impossibly handsome in a pin-striped bell bottomed suit and flowered tie (looking like a rock and roll Johnny Mathis), plays his double neck guitar, out Brian Jones-ing Brian Jones.
But they were an American band, and in America race was (and still is) the 300 pound gorilla in the national portrait. So often, when it comes to race, people see what they have been conditioned to see. That's what prejudice is. It's not the same as racism and it's certainly not the same as bigotry and it's not necessarily malevolent. If it is, it's not always consciously or purposely so. Even people close to each other see things filtered through their own conditioning. When Elektra engineer Bruce Botnick (who did a hell of a job co-producing the album with Arthur) says that Lee "never sounded black" and that Lee never listened to rhythm and blues, he's off the mark in several ways. For one thing, what does it mean to "sound black?" All black people, even all black Americans, don't speak or sound the same. As for Lee not listening to rhythm and blues, well that's a gross inaccuracy. One of Arthur's first bands was called the L.A.G's, after the integrated Booker T. and the MG's, and Love was known for doing a spectacular extended version of Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" at their live shows. What Botnick may have had trouble with is the notion that an ethnic group in America, any ethnic group, can have comprehensive, far reaching tastes, tastes that reach outside of those things commonly associated with their own particular group.
But that type of thinking is not what made Arthur Lee hesitant to tour the States. There was a very real bigotry that he was almost certain to encounter on the road. It was a bigotry that would be set off not just because of his race but because he was in a mixed raced group. In Florida, with a later incarnation of Love, Arthur would duck down below sight level and tell the others to pretend he wasn't there every time the band's car pulled up next to a vehicle with a white driver. Drug fueled paranoia? Maybe. But as the old joke goes: just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean somebody's not out to get you. And it could happen anywhere - though it probably wasn't actual bigotry behind the fact that after a Love show in New York, an article in Variety, the "show business bible," referred to Arthur as Love's "Negro lead singer" and to John Echols as a "second Negro."
Still, Lee didn't always have to look too far to find reason to always keep one eye open. While in New York the band was unhappy with their instruments and equipment, and with an advance on future royalty payments Lee financed new ones and a van to transport them. The band's road manager at the time, Neil Rappaport (a trusted friend handpicked by Arthur for the job) reported the van stolen with the instruments inside and Lee paid for another set. Years later, in an effort to clear his conscience before going into surgery, Echols confessed to Lee that he, Rappaport and the rest of the band had actually sold the van and the equipment in order to get money to feed their heroin habits.
Einarson tells his tale so well that any music fan can enjoy it (despite the book's frustratingly sketchy index), and fans of Lee and of Love will find their affection undiminished, maybe even increased, by the clear honest portrait of both.
Arthur Lee was a rock and roll version of a figure out of an O. Henry or Frank Norris novel who found contentment just out of reach, maybe even nudged there by his own hand. He was a black man sometimes accused of not being black enough because he played music that black people were largely responsible for creating in the first place. He wanted the spotlight of fame but often pulled the plug on it himself. He craved freedom but did things, seemingly on purpose, to deflect it. He was a genius who made decisions that were bafflingly wrong-headed. And despite all the answers and detail Einarson provides, there are still some ‘whys' that will never be cleared up.
Musician John York does relate a story, equal parts tragic, comic and surreal that provides a small clue: When he was living in Laurel Canyon, Lee had a dog that used to like to go wandering after dark. The dog's name was "Self," and when he ran off, York and other neighbors could hear Arthur as he walked the canyon calling out the dog's name - searching for "Self" in the middle of the night.
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