Love for Arthur Lee and “Love”

Last month I contemplated doing some sort of Black History listicle showcasing black artists who meant a lot to me personally. But I quickly gave it up as a bad job, because it was silly and ill-conceived from the start. A short list is too short, and when you start adding others to make it more complete it’s impossible to stop, so I may as well just refer people to the 550 I’ve already written about, which is what I did. But it was an interesting exercise, trying to suss out who is really, genuinely important to me, and to what degree. And it occurred to me pretty rapidly that no black artist has ever meant as much to me as Arthur Lee (Arthur Porter Taylor, 1945-2006).

People often make the assumption that because I’m obsessed with vaudeville, I am constantly and deeply immersed in ragtime, hot jazz, Tin Pan Alley, swing, showtunes, or what have you, and while I certainly love all those kinds of music and they’re certainly a part of my life, the summit for me, my default musical genre, is the Psychedelic and Baroque Pop of the mid to late 1960s. That sort of music is also before my time, thank you (I was an infant while it was happening) but it has always been “my” music, even while most other kids of my age were marching in lockstep to disco and metal and funk and stadium rock and whatever else was in the Top 40 in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The music of my own time sounded mindless and monotonous to me. I was drawn to the kaleidoscopic, collage-like sounds of the earlier era, where the rhythms were constantly surprising and confounding (as opposed to “danceable”, which was what seemed to be what most other kids seemed to be looking for). And sixties music bore some relationship to the classic comedy I loved. (Mae West and W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy are on the cover of Sgt. Pepper!) The sounds of vaudeville were part of the greater musical tapestry. That’s still the way I look at it, and this blog has come to reflect that. I’m not focused on vaudeville to the exclusion of all else. It’s just the hub of the wheel.

For one brief, heady period Arthur Lee and Love were where it was all happening, and yet most people, including Baby Boomers, have never heard of him, them, or their music. Love was the top band in Los Angeles around 1966, essentially the reigning local act at the Whisky A Go Go in the window between The Byrds and The Doors. The top rock stars of the day came to see them play, critics lauded their albums, and they deeply influenced their vastly better known contemporaries as well as many more who came later. But you can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of them.

The short explanation for Love’s obscurity, both then and now, has to do with Arthur Lee’s animadversion to touring. His band got top dollar for playing in Los Angeles and L.A. was the capital of the show biz universe, so why go anywhere? And he was a local, from South Central. Apart from Memphis, where he was born and spent his first five years, Lee had no experience of anywhere else, and had a chip on his shoulder about traveling. But you have to tour to support record sales, at least you had to back then. By rights, Love should have played at all those pivotal sixties rock festivals (Monterey Pop, particularly), but though their status warranted it, they didn’t, so they were kind of written out of history, at least for a time. I also think that having so basic a name can’t possibly assist the project of being memorable. Try Googling “Love”. And I can’t imagine that people didn’t mix Lee up with The Crazy World of Arthur Brown back in the day. Arthur Lee, Arthur Brown, Arthur by the Kinks and George Harrison’s haircut. That’s way too many Arthurs to keep track of.

I first became aware of Love in the mid 1980s when a friend played one of their old LPs for me. That was over a decade since the last iteration of the original Love incarnation and nearly two decades since the band’s heyday. My initial introduction didn’t impress me for whatever reason. (I am normally pretty persnickety when people try to interest me in things; I prefer to do my own exploring). But a few years after Lee died, another friend whom I trust more than anyone else in the world when it comes to music, knowing what I like, zeroed in on the precise tracks he knew would do it for me, and the exact sections of songs, and that’s what made the sale. I was over 40 years old at the time, but I fell in love with this band the same way you do when you discover music as a young person. Kind of embarrassing really, to be bonding at this level with an archaic rock band at such an advanced age, but when I listened to this incredible music everything else in the world, what year it was, how old I was, just seemed to dissolve. (Don’t say “Don’t be embarrassed” — I threw my back out, dancing alone to it in my kitchen. “Dance like no one is watching, then call the paramedics!”) There’s something cosmic, profound, funny, tragic, sick, and all-encompassing to me about Love. I can’t explain it, it’s as though Walt Whitman had a garage band.

But that’s selling them short, because Love’s music is far more intelligent than the typical 3 chord combo huffing the fumes of the British invasion. They mix elements of jazz, folk, soul, country, surf music, Latin styles, classical music, and (like most of the greatest ’60s bands), vaudeville. One minute they’re channeling the Who, another, a lounge act with a flautist. The lyrics are inscrutable but suggestive and evocative like those of Bob Dylan and the Beat poets, and deal with things like war, race relations, violence, Apocalypse, and so forth far more, and more effectively, than many of their contemporaries of the time. Naturally, the fact that Lee was a black from South Central lay at the root of that. There are certain tracks that make your jaw drop, for you swear that, far more than the Beatles’ White Album you hear the Manson Family saga being foretold. You don’t hear echoes of, say, the Watts riots, in the music of The Byrds, but you sure hear it in Love’s music. So they’re dark, but also hilarious — one of their songs opens with the lyric, “O, the snot has caked against my pants”. Much like Dylan, Lee titled his songs like poems, and they often contain impressionistic phrases that don’t appear anywhere in the song (making them somewhat hard to remember oftimes). They’re full of nonsense and wordplay. They pioneered multipart songs, long before such Beatle excursions as “Happiness is a Warm Gun”. Arthur Lee sings about mortality and metaphysics like some kind of hybrid of The Monkees and Johnny Mathis.

You cannot IMAGINE how my mind was blown when the final episode of season one of Russian Doll (2019) ended on a Ralph Lee style puppet parade, accompanied by Love’s “Alone Again Or”. It was like some kind of convergence of everything meaningful and majestic in the universe (to me, at any rate).

Haha, but we’re deep into this and I haven’t given you a single fact or frame of reference. Arthur Lee was the son of a Memphis cornet player father and a schoolteacher mother. The pair split when the boy was quite small, and he moved with his mom to South Central. Lee was a good student, excelled at sports, and could have attended college on a scholarship. But music was happening in a big way the time, so he decided to pursue that instead. He re-connected with guitar player Johnny Echols, a childhood friend from Memphis, and formed various bands prior to starting Love, absorbing and reflecting all the musical styles that were going at the time, both black and white: soul, surf music, and, later, folk rock among them. An early song he penned “My Diary” was recorded by Rosa Lee Brooks in 1965, with a pre-Axis Jimi Hendrix on guitar. Lee and Echols and others formed Love that same year, out of the same ferment that spawned such contemporary local outfits as The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Electric Prunes, and The Seeds. You remember those ones, right? They all have memorable names and had major hit singles. Love had neither, yet was vastly more important. In terms of outsized influence, they can more readily be compared to the Velvet Underground orIggy and the Stooges. Both the Stooges and Love were signed to Elektra Records, the same label as The Doors, whose other acts included The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, MC5, and Tim Buckley. (Do you spot a trend? I do. Critical favorites at the fringes who never quite managed to cross over into mass popularity. Just putting it out there).

Love’s self-titled 1966 debut LP, included such notable tracks as a hard-edged version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Little Red Book”, which had originally been recoded by Manfred Mann for the soundtrack to the 1965 movie What’s New Pussycat?; as well as a frenetic cover of The Seeds “Hey Joe” (likely the version that inspired Hendrix to do his famous version), and an ominous instrumental called “Emotions” that was used on the soundtrack to one of my favorite movies, Haskell Wexler’s 1969 Medium Cool. Their second album Da Capo, released the same year, included “7 and 7 Is”, their only single to crack the top 40, and a 19 minute tune called “Revelation”, which occupied the entire second side of the album — a much longer song than such previous benchmarks as the Rolling Stones’ “Goin’ Home”, Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and The Doors’ “The End”, all of which were under 12 minutes. Forever Changes (1967) was the band’s masterpiece, and is today considered one of the best rock albums of the 1960s. This was followed by a single “Your Mind and We Belong Together” in Fall 1968. It didn’t chart.

After this, Lee disbanded his original group, and replaced them with other musicians. He recorded one more album for Elektra, Four Sail (1969), which is every bit as good as his earlier records, then moved to smaller independent labels for greater creative freedom. Out Here (1969), a two record set contained material generated from the Four Sail sessions. He was still kicking with False Start (1970), which features the song “The Everlasting First”, on which he is joined by Jimi Hendrix on guitar (the entire album reflects Hendrix’s influence). In 1971 he recorded an album’s worth of material for Columbia Records, but they rejected the material; it wasn’t released until 2009 as Love Lost. He then released a solo album called Vindicator (1972), followed by Black Beauty (1973, unreleased until 2012). His career was looking pretty bleak by this stage, but in 1974 he recorded the theme song to the movie Thomasine and Bushrod Gordon Parks’ follow up to his Blaxploitation triumph Superfly. This provided Lee with the impetus to record one last LP of this original period Reel to Real (1974), which reflected a commercial funk sound in keeping with the times. After it failed to chart, he basically dropped out, only emerging sporadically to attempt comebacks in later decades.

But unlike, for example, Iggy or Lou Reed, Lee was never able to later parlay his legend into something greater in the ’70s and beyond. Did race play a role? I suspect at least partially. Because the ’70s was the age of musical re-segregation, when radio was divided into “formats” and the public divided into “markets”, and whites and blacks were culturally encouraged to identify with certain musical styles, and so there were disco people and funk people and metal people and punk people and country people and later rap and hip hop people, and there seemed to be little energy directed toward just trying to reach people, in general, all of them. I feel like that mindset has contributed to the fragmentation of the country, now worse than ever.

In 1996, Lee was sentenced to 12 years in prison for recklessly shooting off a firearm. It was his third strike, having run afoul of the law on previous occasions. He served over five years of the sentence before being released in late 2001. I’m no fan of guns, so I’m never going to claim that guys like him, James Brown and Phil Spector oughtn’t to have gone to jail for fooling around with them, which is how many people seem to roll. It’s just sad. Drugs come into it of course. He’d only been out a few years when cancer killed him at age 61.

We spoke of influence earlier. Like all garage bands, Love was a major influence on punk. You hear it in their very first single “Little Red Book” — a Burt Bachrach tune, I remind you! They were also rock’s first interracial act — before either The Jimi Hendrix Experience or Sly and the Family Stone. Also, much more than Hendrix, I have to say that Lee’s dandyish, flamboyant persona was an absolute direct precursor to that of Prince. And not to shortchange the talented Minnesotan, but well, I don’t think he could hold a candle to Arthur Lee. Better musician? Probably. Better songwriter? Not a chance. And writers are just gonna love writers.

Now here’s an appalling fact: Arthur Lee and Love have not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Contemplate some of the people who HAVE and let that sink that in.