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January 1989 Summer Of LOve show Universal Amphitheatre

An Undying Love: Love's False Start and Out Here

An Undying Love: Love's False Start and Out Here
[18 July 2008]

Two new reissues portray Arthur Lee's complicated life after "Forever".
by Charles A. Hohman


“Once I had a singing group
Singing group done gone
Now, I’ve got another group
Didn’t take too long”.
—Arthur Lee, “Doggone”

What happens when the life you expected to end continues? Such was the predicament facing Love frontman Arthur Lee, who famously recorded his mortality-obsessed 1967 masterpiece Forever Changes under the impression he’d been worm food within a year. While Forever did not mark the end of Lee, it did mark the end of Love, at least its original line-up. By 1969, the still-very-alive Lee had assembled an entirely new band under the same moniker: players who, unlike Bryan MacLean (author of Love classics like “Alone Again Or” and “Softly to Me”), wouldn’t question or infringe upon Lee’s often dictatorial leadership. Indeed, these Phase 2 Love albums often play like Arthur Lee solo discs, with new musicians offering backup rather than additional (possibly competing) perspectives.


False Start
(COLLECTORS' CHOICE; US: 10 JUN 2008; UK: 26 MAY 2008)
AMAZON

Out Here
(COLLECTORS' CHOICE; US: 10 JUN 2008; UK: 26 MAY 2008)
AMAZON
After Four Sail, Love’s final Elektra album, the band moved to Blue Thumb Records, and promptly released the double album Out Here in 1969, and the ten-track False Start a year later. These first two Blue Thumb albums have recently been reissued on Collector’s Choice, and both illustrate Lee’s concerted efforts to distance himself from his old band, his old music, his old life, and his old self.

Culled mainly from the Four Sail sessions (a more cohesive, though not superior, album), Out Here is, like many two-discers of its time, messy, indulgent, sporadically brilliant and often infuriating. For example, “Doggone” is a lilting tune of loss, until it unravels on an eight-minute (!) drum solo. Many good tracks end too soon to feel complete, and many bad tracks squander early promise on meandering jams.

Like many of his contemporaries, Lee was consuming drugs pretty liberally at this point, and the music reflects this. “Signed D.C.”, a tender acoustic plea to Love’s drug-addled first drummer from the group’s debut, is reworked as a blistering rocker. Where on the original, Lee seemed distant and preachy when inhabiting the first-person perspective, he now seems to be living the drug fiend’s life. It’s a tacit there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-went-I moment: he demonically repeats the word “dealer” and omits the title entirely, thereby leaving the viewpoint unshifted. In essence, Lee has become D.C.

Out Here is full of stellar highlights: two brief and funny country songs (“Abalony”, “Car Lights on in the Daytime Blues”), two gospel-inflected ravers (“I’ll Pray for You”, “Run to the Top”), trippy drug songs (“I Still Wonder”, “You Are Something”) and some righteous throwaways, including “Discharged”, an obvious yet amusing anti-army rant that semi-blasphemously quotes “America the Beautiful”. Lee contributes his share of pretty tunes, but where Forever was meticulous and timeless, Out Here is often tossed off and dated. It has more in common with the garage-psychedelia of Love’s earlier albums than the folk-pop beauty of Forever. There’s little to impress those who adore Forever: Lee’s vocals are more forceful hard-rock strutter than stoic prophet, and his lyrics eschew epigrammatic wisdom for uninspired bromides.

This is even more evident on False Start. Love’s most blatantly commercial album since their 1966 self-titled debut. Less than half the length of Out Here, False ditches the psychedelic excesses for terse, cowbell-happy pub-rock. Supposedly, the album’s marquee track is “The Everlasting First”, which lacks any discernible hooks or insight but does feature some wah-wah wanking from one Jimi Hendrix, a phoned-in performance that, if uncredited, would be unidentifiable. And its lyrics are pretty puzzling: Lee begins with a love song, and ends up talking about the unjust persecutions of Jesus, Lincoln, and MLK.

As a no-frills rock album, False Start is perfectly serviceable, diverse even. But as a Love album, it falls short, due more in part to lyrical superficiality than radio-ready concessions. Lee’s more pessimistic inclinations are masked, or chemically suppressed, with a hollow, up-with-people mentality. The man who once warned of water turning to blood and shooting bluebirds now sings of riding vibrations and sunshine. “Open up your heart and let the sun come shining in”, he suggests, a far cry from the fire-and-brimstone sermons he once recited. For finger-wagging sage advice, Lee can do no better than “You’re gonna reap just what you sow / I’m here to let everybody know / If you don’t do your best, you’re gonna find yourself in an awful mess”. “Stand Out”, a lesser track from Out Here, is duplicated in a rudimentary and no more impressive live version, and jaunty goofs like the immaturely titled “Slick Dick” (where Lee even admits “I know what it sounds like but it ain’t”) and “Gimi a Little Break” (note the Hendrix-fied spelling) further trivialize the album.

However, only in their weakest moments do these albums prove difficult, unpleasant listens: the band is tight and funky, the melodies are generous, and Lee is a versatile pop singer, probably more versatile than Hendrix even. It’s just that Lee is or was capable of so much more than these simplistic exercises. The double meaning of Love (hey, it’s an emotion, and it’s also the band name) is toyed with repeatedly, as on the eleven-minute “Love is More Than Words or Better Late Than Never” and “Love is Coming”, which might as well be a Monkees-esque self-referential theme song. At the end of “Keep on Shining”, Lee repeatedly shouts the word “love”, as though it’s imprisoning him, keeping him from shining, in fact.

And perhaps that’s the lesson of these albums. Forever Changes is a work not simply of prophecy, but finality, digging the grave for ‘60s idealism before the movement even peaked. In its aftermath, both Love the band and love the concept are debunked myths and irrelevant jokes. The man who once proclaimed “the things that I must do consist of more than style” is now prizing style over substance. On Out Here and False Start, Lee has become a casualty of that which he once railed against: it’s a sad, harrowing portrait of one more artist harnessed by the shadow of his own masterpiece, and the certainty of his own convictions. In that respect, these albums represent the shortcomings of peace-love utopianism every bit as much as Lee’s more regularly heralded work.

:: The Playlist ::: Arthur Lee Documentary "Love Story' Due July 29 On DVD

Arthur Lee Documentary "Love Story' Due July 29 On DVD



Via one of my fave new reads "The Playlist"

"The feature-length documentary about mercurial frontman Arthur Lee and his proto-psychedelic rock band Love, will finally see a release on DVD later this summer on July 29."

"Produced and directed by first-time film makers Chris Hall & Mike Kerry, "Love Story," the film was originally shot in 2005 and '06 and had its world premiere at the 50th London Film Festival in October 2006 (its US premiere came in 2007 at the Los Angeles Film Festival, but never did find a regular theatrical release.

http://bedazzled.blogs.com/bedazzled/2008/05/arthur-lee-docu.html



:: The Playlist ::: Arthur Lee Documentary "Love Story' Due July 29 On DVD





thankful to Torben for Mojo review
http://love.torbenskott.dk/default.asp

ARTHUR LEE DOCUMENTARY COMING TO DVD

ARTHUR LEE/LOVE DOC COMING THIS JULY TO DVD
By Liz Lawson on May 20, 2008 1:12 PM
Categories: Film & TV, Music, News
On July 29, much to the relief of Haddaway, we will all finally know for sure what Love is. For the first time, Love Story, the feature length documentary about seminal Arthur Lee-fronted Los Angeles rock band Love, will be released on DVD in the States.
One of the first interracial pop bands in the United States, Love boasted musicians Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix as fans, but never found commercial success, due in part to the mentally and physically unstable lead singer Lee. It also likely had something to do with the fact that all of the band's members but Lee were heroin addicts, and that Lee refused to tour and consistently turned down festival appearances. The frontman eventually spent many of the last years of his life in prison for possession of firearms, before passing away in 2006 from acute myeloid leukemia.

Regardless of the bands personal strife, Love made some incredible music, and the band's third album, Forever Changes, stands today as one of the crowning achievements of rock music. (Look forward to a review of the Deluxe Edition in Paste's July issue!)

The documentary features interview time with Lee shortly before his death, as well as the other original members of the band, and footage of Love guitarist Bryan McLean, who died of a heart attack on Christmas day in 1998. Considering the colorful history that the members of the band have, Love Story should be well worth watching.





Love Documentary Coming to DVD, Late LPs Reissued

Last year, Pitchfork reported about Love Story, a documentary about the legendary psychedelic folk/pop band Love, as well as reissues of a couple Love albums that came after their 1967 classic Forever Changes. Now, the movie is coming to DVD, and those records are getting a wider reissue on a different label.

Start Productions will release Love Story on DVD July 29. The documentary delves into the legacies of Love and bandleader/frontman Arthur Lee, who died of leukemia in 2006. In addition to interview footage with Lee himself, the movie contains interviews with all of the original band's surviving members, Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie and Mani, the Doors' John Densmore, Elektra Records' Jac Holzman, and Lord Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, among others.

Love Story also features rare footage of Love and previously unreleased footage of late band member Bryan MacLean. The DVD includes an hour of bonus material, and Bobby Gillespie wrote the package's liner notes.
As for the reissues, they are of 1969 double album Out Here and 1970's False Start, both originally recorded for the Blue Thumb label and reissued last year in a limited edition box set called Love: The Blue Thumb Recordings. These new reissues come out June 10 on Collectors' Choice and give the albums separate, less limited releases.

Out Here and False Start are notable for a more electric sound than Forever Changes, due to the fact that Lee almost entirely reassembled Love's lineup following Forever Changes' release. False Start even kicks off with "The Everlasting First", a song co-written by Lee with Jimi Hendrix and featuring Hendrix on guitar.


Posted by Dave Maher in dvd, reissue on Fri: 05-16-08: 11:30 AM CDT


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Thanks for the news Torben & Diane