VANITY FAIR

VANITY FAIR
by Bruce Handy 12:30 PM, AUGUST 26 2011



Love is one of those great 1960s bands that rock critics rhapsodize about and not nearly enough normal people have heard. And yet, unlike the Incredible String Band or the Shaggs, say, or even the late-period Monkees, Love is actually a pleasure to listen to. A fixture on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, the group released several terrific albums and, in 1967, one absolute masterpiece, Forever Changes, which if you’ve never heard you must listen to right away: no album better distills the weird mix of paranoia and exaltation that marked the 60s, and Love did it simply, with gorgeous melodies and compelling musicianship—and nary a phased guitar, backwards tape loop, trippy sound effect, cod raga, or reference to gnomes.

Love went through numerous roster changes, rivaling Fleetwood Mac in that regard, but the constant was Arthur Lee, the group’s lead songwriter and singer, and one of the few African-Americans then or since fronting a band in what had become a “white” idiom—rock. Lee was one of the era’s most singular songwriters and performers, as original as Dylan or Lennon-McCartney. Maybe more so: few lyricists can be as simultaneously obtuse and evocative. (Though, of more recent vintage, Steven Malkmus comes to mind.)

Oh the snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal
There’s a bluebird sitting on a branch
Guess I’ll take my pistol
I’ve got it in my hand
Because he’s on my land

That reverie—one of my all-time favorite openings to a song—is from “Live and Let Live,” off Forever Changes. As you might have just surmised, Lee would have trouble with drugs and the law in later life and, as was the case with a lot of 60s artists, his muse would become more elusive in the 70s. He hopped around between labels, making records with diminishing artistic and financial returns, tried a solo album, and then, in 1972, put together a new incarnation of Love and set about recording what might have been a memorable comeback album but for the fact that the new label Lee had signed with, Buffalo Records (funded by one of the producers of Hair), folded. Aside from a handful of recordings, Lee wasn’t much heard from across the next three decades, until he was released from prison in 2001 after serving five and a half years on charges of illegally possessing a firearm. He spent the last five years of his life touring with a reformed Love to enthusiastic audiences and critical acclaim before dying of leukemia in 2006.

This brief episode of Behind the Music has been preface to the news that the aforementioned Love comeback album, Black Beauty, is finally getting an official release on High Moon Records (and with much better sound quality than the many bootleg versions). This is not the first coming of Smile or even Chinese Democracy, but it’s an excellent album and a welcome addition to the Love discography, occupying a kind of compromise between the fluid psychedelia of Forever Changes and the heavier, Hendrix-influenced sound of latter-day Love.

Here is an exclusive preview from the album, the aptly named “Product of the Times.” It’s a live cut from 1970 that Lee intended as the album’s coda. In this critic’s carefully considered opinion, it rocks.

BLACK BEAUTY NPR

Arthur Lee: Freed From The Vaults
by MARC SILVER


Herbert Worthington
From a 1973 album that was never released, psychedelic rocker Arthur Lee offers a bit of homespun philosophy in "Beep Beep."


CD: Black Beauty

Genre: Rock

April 26, 2011
The club of African-American psychedelic rockers is pretty small, with Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee serving as two charter members. Hendrix, as everyone knows, rose to great fame. Lee had a brief spell of celebrity with his group Love and his 1967 album Forever Changes, kept on making music but never broke through again, served six years in jail on firearm-related charges and died of leukemia in 2006 at age 61.

In 1973, while still in his prime, Lee recorded an album called Black Beauty that was never released. Now, the music has been freed from the vaults, and it reveals an Arthur Lee who could not only rock hard, but also had other offbeat musical personalities. Consider "Beep, Beep" — psychedelic rock it is not. The rhythm veers between reggae and calypso, while a neighborhood guy contributes a lilting steel-drum line. Lee is on the harpsichord and at the mic, singing in a faux island accent and offering the kind of homespun advice you'd expect to hear from a back-porch philosopher: "Slow down, man, 'cause you're going too fast." Later in this cheery and charming song, Lee declares, "I'm going to be what I want," and it's clear that what he wanted to be was a musician who could break down barriers — and who was perfectly at ease stretching the boundaries of his music to encompass the sounds of the world at large.

BETWEEN CLARK AND HILLDALE

LOVE LA's Best Band

THE DOORS? BLACK FLAG? THE CHILI PEPPERS? NOPE. L.A.'S BEST BAND WAS LOVE.
The more things change . . .
BY JEFF WEISS
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 - 12:00 pm
Let’s talk greatest Los Angeles bands for a second. Depending how you’re wired, there are roughly a dozen candidates for the throne. If you tend to spend a small but significant minority of your time swallowing spoonfuls of liquid acid on Venice rooftops, the Doors, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield/CSNY and maybe even Sublime make your shortlist. If you’ve rocked a green Mohawk and/or owned a Henry Rollins spoken-word record, you’d probably lean toward Black Flag, X, the Minutemen or the Germs. If your personal hairspray use has emitted enough CO2 to wreak serious havoc on the ozone layer, there’s Van Halen or Guns N’ Roses; if you’re inclined toward Latin music, Los Lobos looms, and if you’re into being wrong, there’s always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.


Love accurately rendered everything that makes L.A. wonderful and everything that makes it warped.


Love accurately rendered everything that makes L.A. wonderful and everything that makes it warped.
Then there’s Love, the least commercially successful and arguably the greatest of the bunch, a band whose reputation rests largely on the strength of one perfect document: 1967’s Forever Changes, perhaps the most quintessentially Los Angeles record there is, a seamless summation of the town’s fun-house angles and myriad complexities. Unlike the aforementioned groups, whose masterpieces tended to be manifestations of particular Angeleno subcultures, Love’s picture of Los Angelesis very much a native vision. Frontman Arthur Lee divines dark prophecies that pull from the pulse of L.A.’s noirish underworld; its Hispanic heritage emerges in plangent pinpoint trumpet blasts from a Tijuana brass band. The sepia tones of the old Sunset Strip spring to life: California blonds in sundresses and flatironed hair, hippies in Day-Globeads and kaleidoscopic color, flailing in long-forgotten nightclubs, starkly contrasting with images of the riots in the streets and the flatfooted fury of the crewcut, pug-nosed Parker police force.

Love’s third effort contained multitudes precisely because the band’s geographically scattered and racially diverse composition mirrored the city of a million scenes. Lee and lead guitarist Johnny Echols grew up in South L.A., attended Dorsey High, developed a Booker T. & the MGs fixation and were well-known in the local club scene by the time they formed Love in their early 20s. Rhythm guitarist-vocalist Bryan MacLean, the author of “Alone Again Or” and “Old Man,” grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of an architect to the stars. He liked show tunes and counted Liza Minnelli as his first girlfriend (apparently, the two of them used to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” together while sunning themselves poolside). Meanwhile, despite a Sarasota upbringing, Love bassist Ken Forssi had already played on the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out,” the seminal West Coast surf-guitar song. With such inherent tension built in, the only possible outcome was disaster, particularly considering the ravages of heroin addiction, Lee’s megalomaniacal genius and an ill-fated idea to cohabitate a hilltop Los Feliz mansion nicknamed “the Castle,” previously owned by Bela Lugosi.

Sure enough, the initial June ’67 sessions for Forever Changes infamously flamed out when the band’s disarray forced Elektra to recruit session men to record “Andmoreagain” and the Neil Young–arranged “The Daily Planet.” But when they regrouped that September, something changed. According to legend, stirred by the realization of their own expendability, Love played with a newfound sense of urgency and hunger. The quote most frequently cited about Forever Changes is that Lee thought he’d die immediately upon its completion; it’s difficult not to interpret it as an early requiem for the troubled singer-songwriter, who passed away last year from leukemia. Just 22 years old, Lee seemed spooked by revelation. On “A House Is Not a Motel,” he foresees “the news of today [being] the movies of tomorrow.” On “The Red Telephone,” he blithely croons about “sitting on a hillside watching all the people die,” before finishing with a flourish about getting locked up with the key thrown away, foreshadowing the legal struggles that would haunt his future.

But other than the winking homage to the strip of land adjacent to the Whisky a GoGo on “Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale,” Love veered away from any concrete evocation of Los Angeles. Instead, Forever Changes captures the way the city feels,the cadences of its sunny, stuttering locomotion, the halcyon sand-and-surf California of the imagination clashing with smog, stripped resources and stark realities. The undercurrent of fear and alienation sluicing through a city where the stakes seem so high and the odds so stacked. Its timelessness stems from the notion that as much as L.A. changes, it will always retain certain immutable qualities that Love’s music captures: the baroque excess evidenced in the airy strings that buoy Lee’s celestial wail, the furious fusion of styles and sounds, the laidback folk-rock melodies and the latent, orchestral anger.

That’s why Rhino can reissue Forever Changes for the second time this decade, with the only new material on this latest edition a few unreleased acoustic demos, a half-assed cover of “Wooly Bully” and a much-vaunted alternate mix practically indistinguishable from the original. It really doesn’t matter. What does is the accuracy with which Love rendered everything that makes this city wonderful and everything that makes it warped. So that even today, with their Los Angeles a faded memory, few greater joys exist than slipping Forever Changes into your CD player on a bright spring morning after a cold, clean rain, when Los Angeles glows with a gold and green tint.

Start at the intersection of Sunset and César Chávez, let the rich metal rain of “Alone Again Or” dazzle you, horns scattering in synchronicity with the Mariachi strains buzzing off of Olvera Street; angle past the band’s old stomping grounds in Los Feliz. Let the album loop through Beverly Hills, the platinum light flooding your car, careening past the salmon-colored walls of the Beverly Hills Hotel, only blocks away from MacLean’s childhood home. Ride this strange bullet out all the way to the beach, where if you’ve looped it just right and the traffic gods have smiled on you, you might just hear the fragile fatalism of “You Set the Scene” slap up against the roaring waves of Sunset Beach — with the tacit understanding that not everything changes.

A GOOD READ

Son of the source
Jonathan Wilson and California as muse
Kandia Crazy Horse


California my way: Pacifica in all her roaring glory; "Bluebird"; Gene Clark suffering for his art at the Troubadour; Arthur Lee perched atop Laurel Canyon as dark magus of the Sunset Strip; "Free Huey!"; George Hunter and the Charlatans giving birth to the '60s in Frisco and Virginia City; redbones holding it down at Alcatraz; Barry White's boudoir epics vs. War's low rider country-funk; r.i.p. Nudie Cohn; surf-and-skate as spiritual practice and Third World coalition builder at street level; "We'll Get By"; Mary Ellen Pleasants; Sly Stone's pop hoodoo; "¡Viva Cesar Chavez!"; the Watts Towers as organic temple and pan-African signifier; Iron Eyes Cody; the impenetrable alien secrets of Joshua Tree; Citizen Kane; Country Joe McDonald in a helmet ripping "Section 43" at Monterey; Jack London's and Charles Manson's erudite racism; rebellions yielding the "black Woodstock," Wattstax; Skid Row tacos; alas, poor Ishi; is Mount Shasta really an Atlantean portal?; "Snakes on Everything"; RTX; a great big wave looming to wash away Neil Young and his spindly wood home from Topanga Canyon; Chet Helms, my hero; really tall red trees — and the glossy harmonies of the Mamas & the Papas, much beloved favorites of my mother before she left upon her starship. Their masterpiece "California Dreamin'" was on my mind as Indian summer gave way to autumn and the 40th anniversaries of polarized cosmic events such as the man on the moon, Woodstock, the Manson murders, the late Michael Jackson's pop debut unfolded apace.
Harvey Kubernik, a keenly clued-in and cosmically sensitive Pisces born in Hollywood, just dropped this season's key entry chronicling that era and its ever-lingering aftereffects: the fine Laurel Canyon study Canyon of Dreams (Sterling, 384 pages, $29.95). Much of what made California north and south such a prime destination to escape the limits and cruel lacunae of Manifest Destiny in the 1960s went down in the postwar boomtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles and their ex-urban satellites. Kubernik focuses on the tall tales of L.A . He reveals how the creativity, social experimentation, and mystery yearning of the denizens of canyons on L.A.'s west side changed America as it was teleported on the airwaves and on the backs of freaky-deak human hosts. The elite and cult acts that largely power Kubernik's fables — Gene Clark; Arthurly; Gram Parsons; Lowell George; John and Michelle Phillips; the magicians of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — have left towering sonic, sartorial, and spiritual legacies. Yet Kubernik is not mired in the misty mountain-hopping of yesteryear — he's keen enough to close Canyon of Dreams with a portrait of one of that halcyon era's most important heirs: Jonathan Wilson.

Y'all can ken whether Wilson deserves to be the coda of Kubernik's book when his Emerald Triangle Tour featuring Jonathan Rice, Farmer Dave Scher, and local light Andy Cabic rolls into town. Yet the evidence is there in his extant albums — 1998's The Ballad of Hope Nicholls (by his former band, North Carolina's Muscadine); 2007's Frankie Ray, and 2008's Gentle Spirit — and his myriad contributions to the projects of friends. I can hear, see, and most important, feel some measure of all that makes California utopian, the South home, and America an ideal worth fighting for, despite their respective horrors, in Wilson's music.

New York, N.Y., with its epic filth, noise, and madding crowds, was not so kind to Wilson when he made the inevitable leap from North Cackalack. Still, he excavated a great artifact of the artist-as-young-man from the experience: Frankie Ray.

With the move to California, that recording's odes to heartbreak and alienation gave way to shimmering hymns to nature arrayed across no less than four unreleased song cycles and counting. Gentle Spirit simply displays Wilson as revelation, but it was his cover of an innocuous Madonna hit (first offered to Michael Jackson) from the mid-1980s that truly convinced me of his indelible gifts. He transfigures "La Isla Bonita" beyond recognition — it starts out as an Allman Brothers outtake and slowly, steadily evolves into a 3-D spaghetti western, then a metallic, mountain-ringing treatise of electric guitar evangelism. His forthcoming covers album, I'm Covered, OK?, should make plain the wonders of his rare gift for interpretation.
To quote the once-mighty Pointer Sisters as they backed Wilson's fellow underrated North Carolina maverick Betty Davis: "Y'all got to believe, believe in sumthin' ... Why not believe in me?" This grandbaby of a Southern Baptist preacher from southwest Georgia would never steer your ears or asses wrong. I was once accused by a former editor of dancing around my keyboard as I wrote (and what's wrong with that?). I don't; I have "spells" like Harriet Tubman, like Joseph Smith in the upstate New York woods, or Edgar Cayce's automatic writing — as with this piece. Yes, I want to convert you, get you onboard the underground smellroad to Glory. I follow the Spirit and my black ass — and the loose booty's hollerin': make pilgrimage with Jonathan Wilson and 'nem up the coast if you're magical and mystical friends of the road.

THE EMERALD TRIANGLE TOUR

Mon/2, 8 p.m. (doors at 7:30 p.m.), $15

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.independentsf.com

AUGUST 1970