Arthur Lee - R.I.P.

[Jon Abbey]

not being reported in the mainstream media yet:

http://love.torbenskott.dk/forum/top...?TOPIC_ID=1125

[Jon Abbey]

this thread should also have links once the mainstream media pick it up:

http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=7215646

[Gentle Giant]

Shame. I know there was a benefit concert for him recently. Ian Hunter was involved.

Leukemia's a bitch.

[Chris D]

Bummer in the Summer.

[jazzy mary]

I got to see Arthur Lee & LOVE a couple of years ago in a double bill w/ the Zombies. We originally went to see the Zombies, but then I started asking all you guys about Arthur Lee & LOVE and remember how everyone at JC totally hipped me!!!?? Once I got hipped, I couldn't believe I didn't know about his music!

Well, long story short, my daughter Liz and I became huge Arthur Lee & Love fans and I wrote all about him on JC. I also was a poster on the bbs that is linked above. This is really sad.

Leon Thomas died of leukemia too.

[Dr Dave]

This is sad news. In the weird world of '60s Psychedelic Los Angeles, Arthur Lee was the weirdest of them all. He sure wrote the weirdest song:

SEVEN AND SEVEN IS

When I was a boy I thought about the times I'd be a man
I'd sit inside a bottle and pretend I was in a can
In my lonely room I'd sit my mind in an ice cream cone
You can throw me if you wanna 'cause I'm a bone and I go
Oop-ip-ip, oop-ip-ip, yeah!

If I don’t stop crying it’s because that I’ve got no eyes
My dad’s in a fireplace and my dog lies hypnotized
Through a crack of light I was able to find my way
Trapped inside a night but I'm a day and I go
Oop-ip-ip, oop-ip-ip, yeah!

[Ron Thorne]

Well, Dave, your reference to psychedelia should provide a clue for some weird, off-the-wall lyrics.

What a truly original and gifted band Love was, but without Arthur Lee we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.

R.I.P., Arthur Lee~

[Surfer]

Shame.

Did you know Arthur Rhodes' middle name is Lee?

[Surfer]

One of my lasting memories of Arthur was the Invisible Jukebox he did for the Wire several years ago when he went OFFFFF on a Frank Zappa tune. Was it "Who Needs The Peace Corps?"?

I wish they had that online over at the site but they dont.


Sitting on a hill-
siiiiide
Watching all the people
die.

I'll feel much better on the other
side.

[jazzy mary]

Originally Posted by Ron Thorne

Well, Dave, your reference to psychedelia should provide a clue for some weird, off-the-wall lyrics.

What a truly original and gifted band Love was, but without Arthur Lee we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.

R.I.P., Arthur Lee~

I love, love, love Arthur Lee. But don't forget the enormous part (maybe even bigger than Arthur) Johnny Echols played. He's the fabulous guitarist and did many of the arrangments and songs, actually, I believe.

[Ron Thorne]

Originally Posted by jazzy mary

I love, love, love Arthur Lee. But don't forget the enormous part (maybe even bigger than Arthur) Johnny Echols played. He's the fabulous guitarist and did many of the arrangments and songs, actually, I believe.

Point well-taken. I'm not discounting the contributions of any group member, jm. Just focusing on the man who provided the genesis and much of the genius for Love.



From Rolling Stone online:

Arthur Lee (1945-2006)

The mastermind behind pioneering psychedelic-pop outfit Love succumbs to leukemia at age sixty-one

JAMES SULLIVAN
Hear a selection of essential Arthur Lee tracks.
Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were avowed fans of Love's Arthur Lee, one of the key figures in West Coast psychedelia during the 1960s. The legendarily wayward Lee, who improbably outlasted many of his peers, died yesterday afternoon in Memphis after a prolonged bout with leukemia. He was sixty-one. After his diagnosis became public, several artists -- including former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, the New York Dolls' David Johansen and Ryan Adams -- took part in a benefit show for Lee at New York's Beacon Theatre on June 23rd. Though never a great commercial success -- the band made the Top Forty just once, with the tough 1966 single "7 and 7 Is" -- Love was at the very center of the fertile Sunset Strip scene of the mid-Sixties. The group's ambitious third album, 1968's Forever Changes, still a critical favorite, stands among that era's seminal records. Lee was Love's driving force, hiring and firing collaborators at will and pushing them to explore their various musical inclinations. Love's first four albums ranged wildly, from prototypical garage-punk and jazzy experimentation to Spanish guitar, Broadway-style melodicism and deceptively "easy" listening. In later years, as he struggled with mental and physical issues and his own missed opportunities, Lee often complained about getting less than his due. "Without me there'd be no Jimi Hendrix, no Sly Stone," he once said. "I was the first so-called black hippie."
Arthur Lee Porter was born in Memphis on May 7th, 1945. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was a child. By his teen years, he was forming local bands. One of them, Arthur Lee and the LAGs (named in tribute to Booker T and the MGs), recorded an instrumental single for Capitol Records in 1963. The following year, Lee engineered what was perhaps Hendrix's first studio session, hiring the young guitarist to play on "My Diary," a song Lee wrote and produced for R&B singer Rosa Lee Brooks.
Although many of his models were black soul singers -- Sam Cooke, James Brown, Jackie Wilson -- Lee began to head in another direction when he recognized an affinity for Beatlesque pop and the folk-rock of fellow Angelenos the Byrds. Forming a band he named the Grass Roots, he recruited fellow Memphis-born guitarist Johnny Echols, bassist Johnny Fleckenstein and drummer Don Conka and began playing such L.A. fixtures as Brave New World and the Whisky A Go Go. Bryan MacLean, road manager for the Byrds, soon asked to join; he would became the group's second songwriter.
Beaten to the name the Grass Roots by another Los Angeles act that went on to some success, Lee rechristened his band Love. Bobby Beausoleil, a friend and future member of the Manson Family, would claim that the name was drawn from his own nickname, Cupid.
With its fearless innovation and flamboyant stage presence, Love quickly became the toast of the Strip. Their residency at Brave New World attracted a celebrity clientele -- "the Yardbirds, Mick Jagger, Sal Mineo," according to Lee. Morrison would later claim that the Doors' original goal was to be as big as Love. Lee and his band became the first rock group to sign to Jac Holtzman's folkie Elektra label, releasing a self-titled debut in April 1966. The album featured an early take on "Hey Joe," recorded almost simultaneously with the hit version by another L.A. group, the Leaves, and a raw adaptation of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "My Little Red Book." Bacharach was reportedly furious with Love's hard-edged rendition.
The debut reached No. 57 on the charts, selling 150,000 copies. The band, already contending with the hard drug habits that would plague it for years, moved into a communal home in Laurel Canyon, a house once belonging to Bela Lugosi. Bassist Ken Forssi, a former member of the Surfaris, replaced Fleckenstein, who would go on to join the Standells. Drummer Alban "Snoopy" Pfisterer replaced Conka, later moving to keyboards with the addition of drummer Michael Stuart.
Love's second album, Da Capo, notable for the success of "7 and 7 Is" and the eighteen-minute jam of "Revelation" (one of the first rock tracks to span an entire album side), came out in early 1967. Neil Young was briefly enlisted to co-produce the next record, 1968's Forever Changes, though that association, like much of the session, was problematic. With the band increasingly unreliable, Elektra brought in several session men, including drummer Hal Blaine. The band took the move as a wake-up call, and the result was a unique creative outburst, marked by complex song structures, archly mannered singing and dark, obtuse lyrical material.
Forever Changes was not a success; the dramatic, flamenco-style single "Along Again Or" barely cracked the Top 100. Much of the failure was attributed to Lee's refusal to tour. Holtzman, in his Elektra memoir, speculated that the singer wanted to be near his drug connections. (Lee had already declined to perfom at the Monterey Pop Festival.) Shortly after the release, Lee parted with his band mates, beginning a long cycle of rotating band members. Four Sail was Love's last record for Elektra; subsequent releases found Lee flailing to retrieve the sound of his original band. In England, he cut lengthy jams with Hendrix, but the tapes were bogged down in legal disputes. One track from those sessions, "The Everlasting First," eventually appeared on Love's "False Start" album.
Meanwhile, past band mates were struggling. Forssi and Echols were rumored to have fallen into lives of petty crime, holding up a series of coffee shops, for which they were dubbed the "Doughnut Bandits." Maclean suffered a nervous breakdown and became a Christian, occasionally performing with his half-sister, Maria McKee of Lone Justice. He died of a heart attack on Christmas Day 1999.
After dropping out of sight in the 1980s, Lee attempted several comebacks, beginning with the release of "Arthur Lee and Love" on the French New Rose label in 1992. A conviction for unlawful possession of a firearm resulted in a prison sentence; upon his release in 2001, he toured accompanied by the Los Angeles group Baby Lemonade.
Despite Love's enduring status as a cult act with little commercial success, the band cast a long shadow. Syd Barrett called Love a defining inspiration for early Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant specifically mentioned Lee at the 1995 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. A film company in London is currently finishing work on a documentary entitled Love Story.
And it was Arthur Lee's headling rush into a fantastic variety of music that defined the group. "I'd love to hear Johnny Mathis do 'Foxey Lady,'" he once said, "or Howlin' Wolf do 'Turn! Turn! Turn!'"
Hear a playlist of Love songs.
Love "Can't Explain"


Love "My Little Red Book"


Love "Hey Joe"


Love "Stephanie Knows Who"


Love "The Castle"


Love "Alone Again Or"


Love "Andmoreagain"


Love "The Red Telephone"

Hear a playlist of Love songs.

Posted Aug 04, 2006 9:58 AM

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...r_lee_19452006

[Dr Dave]

Here's a short sample of "7 and 7 Is"

LOVE.

[Rob Damen]

Sad news to read, indeed.

I always kind of thought Kurt Cobain had some elements of Love in his music, but I didn't hear it mentioned very often as being an influence, if at all.

Here's a good article I found today.

The author should be familiar to many.

The Everlasting ’Forever’ of Arthur Lee

By Tim Page
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Arthur Lee and his off-again-on-again rock group Love made only one great album — a brooding, opulent and improbable dream called “Forever Changes,” released in the fall of 1967. Still, such devotion has this single disc inspired over the decades that the news of Lee’s death from leukemia — on Thursday, in Memphis, at age 61 — affected his more ardent listeners as a personal loss.

"Forever Changes” is one of those works of art that are not for everybody but are very much for some people, along the same lines as Malcolm Lowry’s novel “Under the Volcano” (which generally bores and annoys those it fails to bowl over) or Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad” (which is regularly chosen as both one of the best and one of the worst films ever made). It was never a “hit” — there were dozens of records in 1967 that outsold “Forever Changes” many times over. But it never quite went out of print, either, and, year after year, devotees passed on copies to new listeners with evangelical fervor, with the result that its legion of fans is notably multi-generational. And so my 19-year-old son and his musician friends love “Forever Changes” just as much as I did at their age, and for many of the same reasons, few of which have anything to do with nostalgia.

What does it sound like? Well, imagine taking one of the most tuneful and adventurous pop albums by the Byrds (“Younger Than Yesterday” maybe, or “Notorious Byrd Brothers”) and allowing it to marinate for a year or two in the most decadent and exotic spices. Then toss in some of the unhinged paranoia of Syd Barrett and the early Pink Floyd, the reclusive melancholy of post-surf Brian Wilson, the cotton-candy orchestration of ’60s arrangers such as Paul Mauriat (“Love Is Blue”) or Joshua Rifkin (who fashioned Judy Collins’s hit version of “Both Sides Now”) and set it all to dark and prophetic lyrics that seem to mean much more than they dare to say. “Forever Changes” combines a seductive surface prettiness with a sense that something is desperately wrong. It is psychedelia at its edgiest.

Lee was a genuine prodigy. Born in Memphis in 1945 and raised in the Crenshaw-Adams district of Los Angeles, he made his first recording at 18 and had formed the initial lineup of Love by the time he was 20. The group was unusual not only because it was multiracial (a real rarity in 1966) but because Lee, an African American and Love’s unquestioned leader, was largely uninterested in the more traditional expressions of mid-’60s black musical culture — namely, soul and rhythm and blues.

The first album, titled, simply, “Love,” was an energetic but mostly conventional set of short songs — one highlight was a taut, punked-out rendition of Burt Bacharach’s “My Little Red Book” that would have done credit to the Ramones. Their second disc, “Da Capo,” was more venturesome, but marred by one side devoted entirely to the interminable “Revelation,” a not-especially-inspired jam session that grew.

And then there was “Forever Changes.” As Andrew Hultkrans observes in a 130-page book (one of several published to date) about the record’s history: ” ’Forever Changes’ is notable for its relative sonic austerity, with folk and classical influences dominant and not a Mellotron in ear shot. At its core, the record could be the product of an extremely inventive acoustic duo, with bass, drums, and tasteful orchestration providing unobtrusive but essential support. When a wailing electric guitar arrives, which happens only twice, it cuts across the pastoral-Gothic soundscape like a strafing fighter plane, making its point far more effectively than it would in a typical psych-rock context.”

Contrary to popular belief, “Forever Changes” did not exhaust Lee’s creativity. Such albums as “Four Sail,” “Out Here” (both 1969), “False Start” (1970) and even an atypical and much neglected exploration of mid-’70s funk, “Reel to Real” (1974), have their inspired moments. But Lee had drug and alcohol problems and, it seems, a violent temper, as well. In 1996, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison after threatening a neighbor with a gun. He was released in 2001.

In 2002, a new version of Love played more than 60 concerts around Europe and the United States, culminating in a recorded performance of “Forever Changes” at the Royal Festival Hall in London before an overwhelmingly youthful audience. Unlike such hideous disappointments as Brian Wilson’s Vegas-style solo rendition of “Pet Sounds,” most of this new album sounded terrific. The rhythm section was tight and muscular, the bullfight trumpets and swooping strings rang out as incongruously as ever, and Lee threw himself into his vocals with a desperate and exhilarating urgency. And if it wasn’t quite “Forever Changes,” that was all right, too. Nothing else is, either.

[Chris D]

Love on American Bandstand

[jazzy mary]

Chris D, thanks for posting that. There are a bunch of amazing LOVE videos on that site!

[phlppo]

Arthur Lee is a special guest on Chico Hamilton's 2006 release Juniflip, performing "What's Your story, Morning Glory?"

Not to everyone's taste at Jazz Corner, maybe, but I admire Chico, and I miss Arthur Lee.

Forever Changes. Without Love (Nothing Matters).