The Psychedelic Singing Cowboy; the Enduring Legacy of Arthur Lee & Love

The name of this blog is inspired by the final track, ‘You Set The Scene’ on Arthur Lee & Love’s revered Forever Changes album.  I thought it was only right to pen a few words about one of the most underrated groups of the past 50 years and a legacy that still continues today. 

Imagine a world without the radical, otherworldly Stratocaster histrionics of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and The Doors’ mysterious beat poetry-set-to-music or Sly Stone’s dandified funk?  Or to bring things more up-to-date, none of the genre-defying musical chameleonry of OutKast and Anderson .Paak, or one of Mac Miller’s most recognisable songs?  Without the influence of Arthur Lee and his band Love, this might be the world we find ourselves living in today.

Love, for a short period in the mid-1960s were top dog in LA.  Not only were they the coolest band in Southern California (The Beach Boys were still pre-Pet Sounds at this point and considered a little passé, whilst The Byrds were less edgy) but they were also ground-breaking in the fact that they were America’s first racially-mixed psychedelic rock group.  

The group’s leader and singer Arthur Lee was born in Memphis in 1945 and moved to Los Angeles as a child, following his parents’ divorce.  Ironically, lead guitarist Johnny Echols’ (and Love’s only surviving original member) childhood followed a similar pattern with his parents also leaving Memphis for LA in the ‘50s, and the pair’s grandparents even being friends back in Tennessee.  Lee and Echols attended the same school, The Susan Miller Dorsey High School in the Crenshaw district of the city and the nascent seeds of the group Love were sown.  

By early 1965, the first incarnation of Love (Lee and Echols adding former Byrds acolyte Bryan MacLean to the line-up, as well as bassist Kenny Forsi and drummer Don Conka – later replaced by Alban ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer) were a regular on the West Hollywood circuit, playing hippie haunts such as Bido Lito’s, The Brave New World and The Whisky a Go Go.  Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records visited LA around this time, keen to find a new act after missing out on signing The Lovin’ Spoonful (best-known for their ‘66 hit ‘Summer in the City’).  After Holzman caught the band live at Bido Lito’s, Love soon landed a long-term recording contract with Elektra.  Ever-astute, belying his tender age, Lee insisted on retaining the rights to his songs, rather than handing them over to the label – providing him with a valuable additional income stream for the rest of his life.

Originally a talented basketball player, Lee was a marvellous mass of contradictions.  He was known as a street-smart hustler and for not shying away from confrontation, but he also was blessed with an angelic voice, wrote deep, poetic and existential lyrics (“He should be the Poet Laureate for this country”, suggested his bandmate Echols) and had an affectionate love of animals (he was known to own several dogs at any one time).  His signature look in the mid-60s was tasselled leather jackets, silk scarves and hippy beads – teamed with triangular shades and cowboy boots. He enthusiastically bent Holzman and Elektra’s ear about taking a chance on signing one of their contemporaries from the underground LA scene, a then-unknown group called The Doors, essentially kick-starting their career.

In the years prior to Love taking off, Arthur tried his hand at being a songwriter and wrote the simple yet soulful pop tune’ ‘My Diary’ for an emerging singer from Louisiana, Rosa Lee Brooks.  He enlisted the help of a young guitarist for the recording session; a certain Jimi Hendrix.  ‘My Diary’ is one of the first-ever recordings to feature Hendrix, if not the very first.  Whilst the two were on friendly terms and Hendrix would play guitar on the 1970 Love track, ‘The Everlasting First’, Lee would criticise Hendrix for stealing his style and Jimi would even record and release ‘Hey Joe’ as a single, just one year after Love recorded their own version of the song for their debut album. 

The original line-up of Love released three landmark albums between 1965 and 1968; each one sonically very different.  1966’s eponymous debut Love was propelled by the success of the lead single, the band’s cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s ‘My Little Red Book’.  The original, recorded by Manfred Mann for the film ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ was given a complete makeover and transformed into an urgent-sounding two-minute garage rock stomp – and one that does not sound of place on radio today.  The rest of the album followed a similarly garagey vein with standout tracks such as ‘My Flash On You’, as well as more tender moments like ‘A Message to Pretty’ and the haunting ‘Signed DC’, an ode to former drummer Don Conka’s debilitating heroin problem that saw him depart the group. 

1966’s Da Capo was an altogether more optimistic affair, with the line-up now expanded to include flautist, saxophonist and percussionist Tjay Cantrelli and new drummer Michael Stuart, with ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer moving to organ and harpsichord duties.  On one hand, the group explored breezier Latino sounds on ‘Que Vida!’ and ‘Orange Skies’ but there was also the pioneering and abrasive ‘7 and 7 Is’ – widely cited as one of the first proto-punk songs and ending in a cacophony of sound – mimicking a nuclear explosion. 

It was around this period that the band also started living communally in a Spanish Colonial Revival-style villa in the Los Feliz district of LA dubbed ‘The Castle’.  The once-grand mansion (allegedly lived in by Errol Flynn in the 1930s) was in a considerable state of disrepair by 1966 and became one of the key hangouts for the Californian counterculture scene.  Janis Joplin, Hendrix and members of The Mamas and The Papas, Jefferson Airplane and The Doors were all regular visitors to The Castle and although the band only lived there for just over a year it became synonymous with their identity.  “Night after night, day after day, it was just one big party, with no maid!”, reminisced Lee many years later.

As the 1960s progressed, the mood in LA and America gradually shifted from one of positivity and optimism to gloom and foreboding.  The drugs of choice were no longer weed and acid but heroin and crack cocaine.  This change in atmosphere coincided with a number of significant events including the ongoing war in Vietnam (Lee and Echols had both faked mental illness in order to avoid conscription), which resulted in the deaths of almost 60,000 Americans and eventually on home soil in 1969, the killings committed by Charles Manson’s warped cult in Los Angeles and the murder of the black teenager Meredith Hunter at The Rolling Stones’ Altamont Free Concert.  For many, these events marked the end of the hippie era and the Flower Power movement.

Love’s iconic third album Forever Changes was in many ways the perfect record to accompany these ominous and uneasy times.  Although Arthur Lee was just 21 at the time of writing, several of his friends had succumbed to their vices and he became convinced that he would be next to die prematurely.  More of a punk than a hippie at heart, he retreated to a hilltop house in Laurel Canyon and began writing Forever Changes as his swansong to the world, with his lyrics addressing the precarious state of affairs in his country at that time and his own mortality, despite his young age.  In ‘A House Is Not A Motel’, he references the Vietnamese conflict by recalling the story a returning war veteran told him about how the “blood mixed with mud” to turn the soil “grey”.  In the eerie ‘The Red Telephone’, he unnervingly sings about “sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die / I’ll feel much better on the other side” and appears to predict his own future incarceration; “they’re locking them up today and throwing away the key / I wonder who it will be tomorrow, you or me?”.

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It isn’t all darkness on Forever Changes though.  Musically, the record is a joy; layered acoustic guitars complemented by subtle electric overdubs, lush orchestral strings, mariachi horns and flamenco flourishes.  On ‘Between Clark and Hilldale’, Lee namechecks the exact Sunset Strip location of the hallowed Whisky a Go Go club and ‘Alone Again Or’, written and sung by guitarist Bryan MacLean is a genuine ray of light and a bona fide classic. 

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Sadly, the release of Forever Changes in 1967 coincided with the group’s descent into heavy drug abuse.  In fact, on two of the album’s tracks ‘andmoreagain’ and ‘The Daily Planet’, LA’s supreme collective of session players The Wrecking Crew were called in as the members of Love were not deemed “with it enough” to take part in the recording session.  Arthur Lee became increasingly withdrawn and eccentric and the album was never properly toured, despite positive reviews from critics.  The success of bands like The Doors soon far outgrew their old peers and the original line-up of Love disbanded with most of its members spiralling into drug addiction.

Arthur kept Love going by recruiting a new band and 1969’s Four Sail actually has some great moments, namely ‘August’, ‘The Singing Cowboy’, ‘Good Times’ and ‘I’m With You’, however during the later years of the 1970s and 1980s his output became more sporadic and he fell into obscurity, becoming something of an enigmatic recluse.  

In 1996 Lee was imprisoned for 12 years at Pleasant Valley State Prison under California’s notoriously harsh three strikes rule following an incident outside his LA apartment and the alleged negligent discharge of a handgun (he already had previous convictions for arson, drug and driving offences and assault).  Lee refused all visitors and interviews during his time in prison and instead found God.  “He visited me and said ‘Love on Earth must be’”, claimed Lee in an interview for the 2006 documentary film Love Story.  He served half of his sentence and emerged with a renewed calling to share his music with the world.

Prior to his conviction, Arthur had been introduced to the neo-psychedelic LA band Baby Lemonade (former Love bandmates Bryan MacLean and Kenny Forsi had both died during his time in prison) and he began playing live with them in 1993.  The band were huge fans of Love’s music, as well as gifted musicians in their own right.  Upon Arthur’s release from jail in 2001, plans were quickly made for a Love reunion with Baby Lemonade as his backing band. The new-look Love’s comeback show was at Spaceland (now called The Satellite) in Silver Lake, Los Angeles in April 2002 and over the next few years Arthur made amends for his reluctance to tour in the ‘60s by gigging incessantly.  Two arguable highlights of the reunion tour were dates at London’s Royal Festival Hall and at Glastonbury 2003.

I was lucky enough to see the reformed Arthur Lee & Love twice in 2004 and 2005 – both at the same venue, The Brook in Southampton, UK (in ’05 he was also joined by Johnny Echols).  On the first occasion my friend Charlie and I met Arthur.  He was both warm and intimidating in equal measure; agreeing to sign the printed setlist I had commandeered from the stage after the gig but dismissing my sycophantic teenage claims that he was a “legend.”  He also demanded that I spelled my name to him, yet still wrote it as ‘Clyde’.  To this day and despite the typo, that signed setlist sits in a frame and is still one of my prized (and irreplaceable) possessions.

Arthur died in August 2006 after a leukemia diagnosis and exactly a month to the day after another pioneer of the psychedelic era, Syd Barrett.  Tributes flooded in from across the music world and in death, Arthur Lee achieved the widespread success that originally evaded him in the 1960s.  Indeed; more than 40 years after it was originally recorded, the late Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller recorded a cover of Lee’s ‘Everybody’s Gotta Live’ – a track that was included on his posthumous album Circles, introducing his music to an entirely new generation. 

Baby Lemonade still tour with Johnny Echols and their show at Islington Assembly Hall in July 2019 was one of the best gigs I’ve been to in a long time. They even played obscure ‘B’ sides such as the weird, yet equally brilliant ‘Laughing Stock’.

Baby Lemonade and Johnny Echols. Islington Assembly Hall, July 2019.

I will leave you with a clip of Love’s performance on The Other Stage at Glastonbury 2003 in the coveted ‘sunset’ slot, as early evening merges into night. Whilst I have been extremely fortunate to see Arthur and his band play live and to have been a regular at Worthy Farm over the past decade, this is still the one show I wish I was there for.

“For anyone who thinks that life is just a game, do you like the part you’re playing?“