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Posted - 18/08/2005 : 19:14:02
Guardian Friday Pages
Interview by Will Hodgkinson Photograph by Pete Millson
1,085 words
6 February 2004
The Guardian
22
English
© Copyright 2004. The Guardian. All rights reserved.
Love were the hippest band in 1960s Los Angeles. They were also the most wayward. Led by Arthur Lee, Love made a folk-rock sound with a snarling punk attitude, and with their third album, 1967's Forever Changes, they created one of the most beautiful records of the decade; a string-laden epic combining lush melodies with dark, poetic lyrics which hinted at the dissolution of the hippy dream. Lee was writing about his own reality: during the making of the album he was on LSD pretty much all the time while other band members were developing a love affair with heroin; guitarist Johnny Echols and bassist Ken Forssi celebrated the release of Forever Changes by holding up a string of doughnut stands.
Love dissolved soon after. Lee released a series of albums in the years since that offered diminishing returns, but the legacy of the great Love albums lived on: last year a bemused Lee was received in the House of Commons after three Labour MPs declared Forever Changes to be the best rock album of all time, and when he came to England to perform the album in its entirety, he discovered a huge groundswell of support he didn't know existed.
"I never realised that I was popular in England, and that was why I never came here in the 60s," says Lee, who has just flown in from LA to do another tour of Europe - and the rehabilitated Echols will join him on stage for the first time since 1967. Lee stayed up late to watch the Superbowl the night before and his mind is, he says, is "full of cobwebs. People didn't understand Forever Changes when it came out, so doing this feels like the completion of the process. Finally the icing is on the cake."
Lee cuts an intimidating, cadaverous figure. Dressed head to toe in black, he moves slowly, and despite his polite, considered manner, you feel that his mood could turn at any moment. An anodyne opening question about the music he was listening to when he formed Love inspires silence, followed by a stare from piercing blue eyes that peer out over a pair of Ray-Bans under a black sombrero. This from a man who is rumoured to have killed his road manager (not true), and who responded to a neighbour's request to turn his music down by going round to the neighbour's house and firing a gun in the air (true, and he served five-and-a-half years for it).
After a while, Lee relaxes enough to talk openly about the music that has inspired him. "When I formed Love, I liked Nat King Cole, Jackie Wilson and Elvis Presley, who is from my home town of Memphis. The Isley Brothers were also very important, and I would say that Shout is just about the best rock'n'roll song ever made because it was way ahead of its time. But are you asking me where my music came from?"
I mutter something about primary influences, and Lee leans forward over the table to fix me with those cold blue eyes once more. "Listen. I was just gifted, man. When I was three or four years old, I used to hear the marching bands in Memphis: from then on I was banging on boxes and singing in the bathroom. But who made me what I am today, musically speaking? Nobody. My purpose on this earth is to leave a mark, brother, that will never be forgotten."
If the music came from within, the career opportunities came from a less sanctified source. The other hip band in 60s LA were the Byrds; Lee would go and watch them play live before he formed Love, and he saw the impact their folk-rock sound was making. He also noticed that one of their roadies, a good-looking young man called Bryan MacLean, was getting more attention from girls than the band themselves. So Lee drafted him in. "I realised that I could do something with this guy in my band, and as it turned out, Bryan came to make up an important part of my music, but I had similar songs in my head to what the Byrds were doing before I even heard them, as I did with the Beatles. So when I heard those two bands, it clicked: there were three of us, all thinking along the same lines."
Love didn't have much time for their contemporaries. Living communally in a house of legendary degeneracy called the Castle, the band forged its own ideas about the hippy lifestyle while staying well away from the rest of the LA scene. "We were the original hippies, and we were also the first racially integrated band, which people weren't used to back then. The Byrds looked like hippies but then you talked to David Crosby and realised what their reality was; Sonny and Cher were the biggest phoneys of all. They were singing about bangles and beads, but I was writing about life as I saw it. And my goal was to retire at the age of 21. I nearly succeeded." Lee studiously avoids listening to rock music other than his own; he prefers jazz and classical. "Beethoven stands out more than anyone else because I feel we're on the same page - when I first heard Beethoven, I felt that he could be my brother. I've been trying to create my own thing, you see, while accepting that there is nothing new under the sun."
Charlie Parker is Lee's other favourite musician. "I've always really liked jazz, and when I was a teenager, I used to paint on moustaches so that I could go and see people like John Coltrane and Elvin Jones play live, and I thought those guys were the **** until I heard Charlie Parker. There is no comparison between his saxophone playing and any other musician who has played or is playing today. His talent was so incredible that it was a shame he had to live and die in the way that he did, but everybody has hard times. It is the creativity and the musicianship that counts, and that's what we'll remember people by. Not the hard times."
Lee . . . 'When I first heard Beethoven, I felt that he could be my brother'
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