Arthur Lee (musician)
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Arthur Lee (March 7, 1945 – August 3, 2006) was the enigmatic and volatile frontman, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist of the legendary Los Angeles psychedelic band Love, best known for the critically revered 1967 album, Forever Changes.
Lee was born either Arthur Lee Porter or Arthur Taylor Porter in Memphis, Tennessee. The family moved to Los Angeles, California when Lee was young. Lee said he was exposed to and inspired by all kinds of music.
He has often been compared to Syd Barrett and Roky Erickson. Barrett, early on in the brief pop star phase of his life, freely let it be known that Love was an influence on his band, Pink Floyd.
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[edit] Pre-Love
His first known recording is from 1963; The Ninth Wave by his first band, the instrumental outfit called The LAGs, a Booker T & The MG's type of unit which included Johnny Echols, the future co-founder, guitarist and vocalist of Love. The LAGs also included Lee (organ), Allan Talbert (saxophone) and Roland Davis (drums).
As a songwriter Lee composed the surf songs White Caps and Ski Surfin' Sanctuary. My Diary is the first Lee composition that came near to being a hit. It was written for the R&B singer Rosa Lee Brooks, who performed and recorded it. This recording included Jimi Hendrix on electric guitar. Lee had seen Jimi as a session man backing up the Isley Brothers. It is possible that this is the first appearance of Hendrix on vinyl and, indeed, the first known Hendrix recording session.
I've Been Tryin' was written for Little Ray. Luci Baines, about President Lyndon Johnson's daughter, was performed and recorded with Lee's new band, The American Four. He composed Everybody Jerk and Slow Jerk for Ronnie And The Pomona Casuals, a band that put out an LP on the Donna label featuring lead vocals by Lee.
These early recordings are very rare but have been collected on a 1997 bootleg CD that contains very little information.
[edit] Love
Lee said when he first heard The Byrds, he felt vindicated since he'd already been writing music that had a similar folk rock sound. In 1965, The Grass Roots, his folk rock unit, eventually turned into Love because there was already a signed act called the Grass Roots. Several other names were considered, including Summer's Children, The Asylum Choir, Dr Strangelove and Poetic Justice. The name Love was chosen after a club audience voted it as the best choice. According to Barney Hoskyns' 2001 book Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or, Manson Family member and sometime Love guitarist Bobby Beausoleil claimed that Arthur had named the band Love in honor of one of Bobby's nicknames, Cupid.
Love's music is difficult to categorize, and has been described as a mixture of folk-rock, psychedelic rock, baroque pop, Spanish-tinged pop, R&B, garage rock, even protopunk. Though Lee's vocals have garnered some comparisons to Johnny Mathis, his lyrics often dwell on matters dark and vexing — though often with a wry humor matched by few. The group's cover of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition "My Little Red Book" (first recorded by Manfred Mann for the soundtrack of "What's New, Pussycat?") received a thumbs-down from Bacharach: Love had altered the former Marlene Dietrich bandleader's chord changes. Nonetheless, the record was a Southern California hit and won Lee and Love a spot on American Bandstand.
Love released three albums with their core members Johnny Echols (lead guitar, vocals), Bryan MacLean (guitar, vocals, composer of a few of Love's tunes and a former Byrds roadie), Ken Forssi (bass) and Michael Stuart (drums), although Stuart did not appear on the first record.
Love (1966), the hardest rocking album, included their punky cover of My Little Red Book. The B-side of Da Capo (1967) featured just one song — Revelation, criticised by some as a weary jam. The first half, however, contains six gems, including the ground-breaking single (and their only one to achieve any success in the Billboard Top 40 chart) Seven & Seven Is, with its furious drumming and thunderous bass riff. Its B-side was titled, of course, "Number Fourteen." The last album released by the original line-up was Forever Changes (1967). Love went through several changes of personnel, and recorded two tracks on that album with the help of studio musicians.
Forever Changes is regarded by critics and fans alike as Love's finest recording. Despite this acclaim, the LP sold poorly in its time, although it reached the top 30 in the UK. Nonetheless, its cult status grew.
Soon after, the band's music became somewhat eclipsed by Arthur Lee's behavior. His frail physical and mental health fueled a rock myth which, like those of Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett, possibly served to keep the memory alive.
After Forever Changes, Arthur Lee split up the band, only to reform it, this time with a new lineup and a harder-edged sound. This version of the band released three albums: Four Sail in September 1969, and the two-record set Out Here in December of the same year. Neither record made the top 100 in the US, though Out Here hit #29 in the UK in May of 1970.
December, 1970, saw the release of the album False Start, which charted in the bottom regions of the top 200, but is notable for featuring a track with Jimi Hendrix on guitar entitled The Everlasting First. The song bemoaned the losses of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr. in a more straightforward, if no less emotional, fashion than that heard in other Lee lyrics.
[edit] Solo career
In July 1972, Lee released his first solo album Vindicator on A&M Records, featuring a new group of musicians called Band-Aid, a name originally suggested by Jimi Hendrix for a briefly considered lineup of himself, Lee, and Steve Winwood. This album failed to chart. Lee recorded a second solo album in 1973 entitled Black Beauty for Buffalo Records, but the label folded before the album was released.
Lee's next move was to create yet another Love lineup for the Reel to Real album which was released on RSO Records in December 1974. Once again, the album went nearly unnoticed.
A new Lee solo album — called just Arthur Lee — appeared on Rhino Records in 1981, featuring covers of The Bobbettes' Mr Lee, and Jimmy Cliff's Many Rivers to Cross.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there were various attempts to reunite the original Love lineup. One such show from 1978 featuring Lee and Bryan Maclean was released as a live album entitled Love Live on Rhino Records in 1982. Also in 1982, MCA released Studio/Live, which was a collection of tracks from the early 1970s incarnation of Love.
The 1980s were a mostly fallow period for Lee. According to him: "I was gone for a decade. I went back to my old neighbourhood to take care of my father, who was dying of cancer. I was tired of signing autographs. I was tired of being BS'd out of my money....I just got tired."
Lee didn't re-emerge until 1992 with a new album entitled Arthur Lee & Love on the French New Rose label.
In 1993 he played his first shows in New York and England in nearly 20 years. The next year saw the release of a 45rpm single — Girl on Fire, backed with Midnight Sun — on Distortions Records. He began to tour regularly with a backup band comprising former members of Das Damen, and LA group Baby Lemonade.
In 1995, Rhino Records released the compilation, Love Story, a two-disc set with extensive liner notes which chronicled the period 1966-1972, and reignited interest in the band. In fact, the original Love planned to reform and tour in promotion of the compilation, but Arthur's legal troubles got in the way.
[edit] Prison
In the fall of 1996, Arthur Lee was jailed for 12 years for illegal possession of a firearm. Lee had apparently threatened a neighbor with a gun.[citation needed] No one was injured and no property destroyed, but California's three strikes law meant Lee was forced to serve a prison term, having previously been convicted on "a couple of assault and drug charges" in the 1980s.[citation needed] While in prison Lee refused visitors and interviews. Former bandmates Bryan Maclean and Ken Forssi both died while Lee was incarcerated. Some people believe that Arthur Lee was a victim of racism towards African-Americans and that this racism was the real reason that he was sent to prison.
On December 12, 2001, Lee was released from prison, having served six years of his original sentence. Happily for Lee and his fans, a federal appeals court in California reversed the charge of negligent discharge of a firearm as they found the prosecutor at Lee's trial was guilty of misconduct. After Lee was freed, he toured with a new incarnation of Love in 2002, playing all of Forever Changes. Over the next few years he continued to perform, receiving such accolades as a Living Legend Award at the 2004 NME Awards.
[edit] Final years
In 2002, Arthur Lee began touring in earnest under the name "Love with Arthur Lee". This new phase of his career met great success, and he performed to enthusiastic audiences and critical acclaim throughout Europe, North America and Australia. The band began to perform the Forever Changes album in its entirety, often with a string and horn section. A live CD and DVD of this material was released in 2003. Two Love tracks, "My Little Red Book" and "Always See Your Face" (from "Four Sail"), appeared on the soundtrack of the John Cusack adaptation of Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity."
Arthur Lee left the members of Baby Lemonade who, after prison, had backed him as Love in August 2005. The remaining members continued the tour as The Love Band. Lee carried the band name forward, putting together a new lineup in Memphis, which was to include Jack "Oblivian" Yarber and Alicja Trout.
It became known in April 2006 that Lee was being treated for acute myeloid leukemia. A tribute fund was set up shortly after the announcement, with a series of benefit concerts to be performed to help pay medical bills.
Later in 2006, despite aggressive treatment, including three bouts of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant using stem cells from an umbilical cord -- which made him the first adult patient in Tennessee to receive this treatment -- his condition worsened, and Lee passed away on August 3, 2006, at Memphis, TN's Methodist University Hospital with his wife Diane at his side.
[edit] Discography
[edit] With Love
- Love (1966)
- Da Capo (1967)
- Forever Changes (1967)
- Four Sail (1969)
- Out Here (1969)
- False Start (1970)
- Reel to Real (1974)
- Love Live (1982)
- Studio/Live (1982)
- Arthur Lee & Love (1992)
- Love Story (1995)
- The Best of Love (2003)
- The Forever Changes Concert (2003)
[edit] Solo albums
- Vindicator (1972)
- Black Beauty (1973)
- Arthur Lee (1981)
