A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 161: “Alone Again Or” by Love

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Episode one hundred and sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Alone Again Or”, the career of Love, and the making of Forever Changes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “Susan” by the Buckinghams Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Hake Episode 161 Alone Again Or By Love Before I start I should say that this episode involves some discussion of drug addiction

mental illness and racism In this episode and the next one We're taking what is almost our final look at the LA pop music scene of the 60s The story over the last 10 episodes or so has been about how the Monterey Pop Festival precipitated an end to LA's dominance of music on the West Coast of the US

and how it was replaced by San Francisco. There will of course be LA artists turning up over the next 30-odd episodes, especially as we see the Laurel Canyon scene, which is a separate but connected thing to the pop scene, take off towards the end of the 60s. We haven't seen the last of several of the artists, from LA we've already looked at,

but here and in the next episode, we're going to look at the last gasps of the scene that had built up around Sunset Strip and the Hollywood Recording Studios, the one that encompassed photopunk garage rock, jangly folk rock, and modern jazz-style harmonies.

The influence of that scene would reverberate for decades to come, but the scene itself was largely at an end by the middle of 1967. This episode is an unusual one in some respects, because we'll looking at a band who we have seen previously, but who haven't had an episode to themselves. Normally, when we've seen a band before, I'd just do a, when we last saw X, intro.

But while about half an hour in the middle of the episode on Hey Joe was devoted to love, and to how the band formed, we left the group before they'd even made their first album, and the story was being told in the context specifically of their relationship with that song. So I'm going to do a brief recap of what we covered there, so some of this may sound a little familiar to you. It'll be a much briefer version of the story that I told there, but will include different details. The core of the band that became love was two black men born in Memphis, Arthur Lee and Johnny Eccles. Both had been neighbours in their very early childhood, but Lee's family had moved away to L.A. when he was small. But then Eccles' family had also happened to move to L.A.

and the two had reconnected when Lee was seven and Eccles was eight. They both grew up surrounded by musicians. Eccles was neighbours with Ray Brown, Ella Fitzgerald and Ornette Coleman, and Adolphus Jacobs of the Coasters taught him guitar, while Lee was one of the kids who Johnny Otis involved in his pigeon breeding club, leading to a lifelong love of the hobby in Lee's case. Eccles formed a group as a teenager, and when Lee joined, it was renamed Arthur Lee and the L-A-Gs,

in homage to Booker T and the MGs. Lee would say later, I was playing the organ at these gigs. Johnny Eccles was playing the guitar, and he was playing some of the best R&B guitar I ever heard. Not only was to playing the best, but he was upstaging all the other guitar players in town too. Johnny was playing behind his back,

through his legs, behind his head, and even with his teeth, talk about putting on a show, and this was before Jimmy Hendricks made it big doing all that. and here Lee used an expletive. That was Mr. Eccles, a man with the guitar. I really did admire him. The L.A.G. has released one single, Rumble Stillskins.

After that, Lee and Eccles started to work a lot of sessions for small record labels. Lee would write and produce, while Eccles played guitar, though Eccles has claimed later that he deserves a co-writing credit on many of the tracks. They would produce pastiche as of Phil Spectre hits, and of records by Curtis Mayfield, one of Lee's idols, like this track by Rosalie Brooks. The Mayfield impression on guitar there is by Jimmy Hendricks, and the track is often claimed as the first Hendricks ever played on,

though that's disputed, and there's good reason to believe he played on a few before that. Then Eccles was taken by their school friend Billy Preston, with whom he would sometimes play gigs, to see a show at the Hollywood Bowl, by a band Preston had got to know in Germany. Within a few days, Ackles and Lee had bought themselves wigs to make themselves look like they had long hair

and formed a new band with a white rhythm section who were variously called the Weirdos and the American Four. Instead of trying to sing R&B, Lee was now trying to sing in the style of white singers, especially Mick Jagger. Originally as a joke, but as he later said, what started out as a put-on materialised as something real and positive.

The American Four also put out one single, which very much wore its influences on its sleeve. At this point, the group consisted of Lee and Eccles on guitars and vocals, John Fleckenstein on bass, and Don Conker on drums. Incidentally, pretty much every book on the group spells Conker's name C-O-N-K-A, but I recently read an online article about him, which stated that his name was spelled C-O-N-C-A, and that it has been persistently misspelled over the decades,

because Lee spelled it wrong, and nobody ever checked with Conker. As Conker's now dead, and this is just something I've seen on a single website, with no way to check either way. I've spelled his name the standard way in the transcript of this episode, but thought it worth noting. Lee was never a very good guitarist. He'd started out on keyboards and only learned the rudiments of guitar, and they decided that they needed to let him just be the frontman

and get in a second guitarist, copying the line-up of the Rolling Stones and also of the Birds, whose style the group had now decided to emulate. They also changed their name, this time to the grassroots. This change in style was partly because there was another multivacial band on the scene

doing Stones-type material, and rather than compete with the rising suns they wanted to stand out, but also because the birds had a large crowded followers, who would attend all their gigs, the same crowd of hipsters led by Franzoni and Vito, who also followed the mothers of invention,

and it would be a good idea to appeal to a devoted fan base like that. Lee also thought they needed a good-looking white man up front, and so they decided to get in someone from the circle around Vito and Franzoni. Initially, they got in a good-looking young man who Lee quickly nicknamed Bummer Bob, but Bobby Bousselaet was soon out of the band,

and instead they got in Bram, McLean, a former Rodi for the Birds, who had been performing a bit with people like Taj Mahal. McLean had a bit of a reputation as a spoiled brat. He was from a very privileged background, and, for example, Liza Manelli was his childhood girlfriend. But he was also a good rhythm guitarist and singer. He looked a little like Brian Jones. He was a talented songwriter, though his writing was always more inspired by show tunes and by the music the rest of the band were playing, and he was friends with the whole Vito and Franzoni crowd, and he could get them to come along to the group's shows. The new group was soon the hottest thing on the sunset

strip scene, and started looking around for a record deal. They recorded some demos with, of all people, Book Ram, the manager of the Platters and the Penguins, who we last talked about exactly 130 episodes ago. A demo of Lee's song, You I'll Be Following, recorded in Ram's home studio in 1965, shows the sound this group had, a sound that seems to combine the jungle and block harmonies of the birds, with the stomping rhythms of the Rolling Stones and a jagger-like vocal. Soon the group had to change their name again, this time because another band was using their name. According to Johnny Eccles, this was not a mere accident. The group had annoyed

Lou Adler by not showing him the proper respect in front of a woman he was trying to impress, and Adler had started yelling about how you'll never work in this town again. Soon after that, a studio group put together by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barry, on Adler's Dunhill label, were releasing singles under the name The Grassroots. As Sloan and Barry's studio group started having hits, the group were resigned to changing their name. Lee had worked for a time at a bra shop named Love Brassiers, and the rest of the group thought this was hilarious, and decided to name themselves after it.

The newly renamed Love were now playing regularly at Bidolitos, a small venue where they were so popular that the crowds overflowed into the street. Luckily, the venue was on a side street, and so part of the road would be closed off, and speakers placed outside, so those who couldn't get in could at least hear the music. The group would always open with a version of Howling Wolves' blues classics

Smokestack Lightning, which would extend into a long improvised jam, of which Lee later said, it would go into a lot of jazz feelings like John Coltrane. It could get really far out, expressing what the person playing was feeling in the song. With a steady beat going, we used to improvise, everyone changing the music to what he wanted,

but somehow making it fit with what the others were playing. We'd play that song until it hypnotised the audience. Sadly, none of those shows were recorded, but we can get some idea of what it might have sounded like from a live recording from 2003, when Lee, Eccles and Conquer were reunited on stage for one song and chose to play their old opener,

though that track only lasts about eight minutes rather than the 40 it would sometimes stretch to in the 60s, and so doesn't have much of the improvisational aspect. By this point, the group had a clearly defined dynamic. Arthur Lee was the undisputed leader, he was the lead singer, the frontman, and a pioneer of the LA freak scene, wearing multicolored glasses and a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other.

He also wrote most of the group's original material, dope precisely who contributed what to the arrangements of some songs, and to what extent they should be considered co-writers, has been a matter of some dispute. Then on either side of him were his two lieutenant. Johnny Eccles, his oldest friend, a supremely tarned to blues and jazz guitarist, good-looking, people said he looked like Johnny Mathis,

and regarded by many as the group's secret weapon. the Keith Richards to Lee's Jagger, and Brian McLean, a blonde surfer boy with a completely different look, who played jangly guitar and wrote sweet ballads and knew everyone on the scene. Behind them were a rhythm section who were as good as any around, but for different reasons would soon exit the group. The first to go was John Fleckenstein, who quit the band because he had a chance to join the cameraman's guild and get into the film industry. He would later briefly play bass with the Standells, as on their close. classic garage rock track, Riot on Sunset's Trip.

But for the most part he worked in film, later going on to be a cameraman on films like E.T. His replacement was Ken Forsy, who had previously played bass with a late lineup of the Surfares. While Forsey was originally just playing the parts Fleckenstein had previously played, Eccles has nothing but praise for him, saying later, he was a real Renaissance man,

his bass playing was the underpinning of our sound. He was perfect for. us. He was able to pick up our stuff quickly and was able to fit in, so he hired him right on the spot. The first recordings by Love actually didn't feature Arthur Lee at all. The group had a friend, Vince Flaherty, who would sometimes sit in with them on vocals and harmonica. Like about half the people in the LA scene, it seems, Flaherty had been a child actor, but now wanted to be a musician, and he got the four instrumentalists from Love to back him on demos. Flarety's music career went nowhere, however, even though later demos over the next couple of years

would feature, as well as Eccles Forsy and MacLean, Jimmy Hendricks, Jean Clark, and Daryl Dragon of the Captain and Sineal. He returned to acting and later also stood unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for the House of Representatives. Those tracks are the only studio recordings in existence of love with Don Conquer on drums, though. Conker was, by all accounts, one of the first of the best drummers around, and people compare his playing at the time with Buddy Rich. He would often take extended drum solos which were considered highlights of the group's shows, and he had his own fan base among the audience. The problem was that Conker was using heroin. This would later become a problem for almost every member of the band, but at this time they were all

relatively straight with the exception of Conker. They were using a bit of dope and psychedelics, but Conker was a heroin addict, and as heroin addicts will, he said, started missing work. More and more often, Ken Forsey's flatmate was called on to sit in with the group instead. Album Fistera, who went by the name Snoopy, was younger than the band, and a trained keyboard player who could play the drums reasonably well. He was no Don Conker, and neither Eccles nor MacLean liked him as a person. Maclean later said, I didn't feel he was homogenous with what we were doing.

He seemed like this straight kid. He wasn't hip and didn't look right, while Fistaira said, said, I didn't like Brian and the feeling was mutual. He mistreated me more than any of them. He was really nasty to me. He thought I was square and he was hip, and I wasn't the drummer he wanted. Also, Arthur liked me. But Lee took him on as something of a mascot. He didn't become a full member of the group. Whenever they signed union contracts for gig bookings, Conker's name would be on the contract, and Snoopy would just be given a token payment rather than an equal share. There's some disputes as to whether this was because they were still holding out hope for Conker's return,

or it was just because the other band members disliked him and didn't want to give him an equal share. But when Conker didn't turn up for the sessions for the group's first album, Snoopy ended up on that too, though perhaps appropriately, there were no drums at all on the album's highlight, signed DC, a rewrite of House of the Rising Sun, with lyrics about Conker's heroin addiction. to the dealer He keeps my mind

is where I play the part of the leecher No The album came about through Herb Cohen Who we've seen before As the manager of the Mothers of Invention And the Modern Folk Quartet, among others. Cohen apparently at this point

had a personal management contract with Arthur Lee, though no contract with the rest of the band. Cohen was soon replaced. He got a woman named Ronnie Haran to start a fan club for the group, and as she told the story, I called Arthur up and said, Hi Arthur, my name is Ronnie Haran.

Herbie Cohen suggested I call you about running your fan club. This was Arthur's response. Oh yeah, well, how'd you like to fire Herbie Cohen for me? That was my introduction to Arthur Lee. Haram became the group's manager instead, though her gender caused some problems at a time when misogyny was even more rampant than it is now, and she would sometimes have to deal with overzealous security guards,

who assumed she was a groupie and wouldn't believe she could be their manager. But Cohen was still around in some capacity for a while, and he introduced the group to Jack Holtzman of Elektra Records, who at this point was starting to get interested in signing Rockbands. Love agreed to sign to Electra, in part because Electra were the only label they spoke to who had let them keep their own publishing rights. Every other label had wanted to grab their publishing,

but Eccles and Lee were friendly with the older generation of R&B performers, people like Little Richard, who had told them that that was where the money was and giving it up would be a big mistake. Love set up their own publishing company, grassroots music, but they didn't fully understand what they were doing, and while they owned grassroots, the way the contract was set up,

it was administered by third story music, the publishing company owned by Cohen and his brother, who took a percentage off the top for their trouble. This is actually fairly standard for artists who own their own publishing. Very few of them want the bother of doing all the boring admin that comes with music publishing, but it wasn't properly explained to the group, and they didn't realise this was happening for literally decades. According to Eccles, we thought we had no relationship with Herb whatsoever.

We had signed nothing with him. He'd introduced us to Jack Holtzman, nothing more as far as I know. Here we were thinking we were smarter than those guys that came before us, like little Richard, who were all ripped off. We thought we had all the eyes dotted and tees crossed, when in fact we were just as naive and stupid as they were. We didn't have the savvy or the business sense to have somebody look at the contracts.

That was our own naivety, but it was also because Arthur thought he knew everything. In the 90s, Arthur was looking to sell grassroots music till Iber and stole his trio music. That's when I found out that third story had been collecting part of the publishing on the songs for all those years. we thought we had all the bases covered and didn't see the signs.

They signed the contract, including a clause saying all cheques shall be made to Arthur Lee on behalf of the group on the 3rd of January 1966. Conker's name was included on the contract, but he didn't sign. Snoopies wasn't, and he only got $100 of the $5,000 advance. Lee kept the rest of his share, keeping 1900, while the other three got $1,000 each. As a result, Snoopy only got session fees for the records he played on, no royalties, though he was pictured as an equal band member on the first two albums. Three weeks after signing to Electra, they were in the studio.

The plan had originally been to use Paul Rothschild as the producer, but he was in prison after a drug bust, and so the album was produced by Holtzman and Elektra staff producer Mark Abramson, with assistance from Bruce Botnick, who was engineering and who did the final mix himself. Botnick and Sunset Sound Studios where he worked had been recommended to Haltzman by another electro artist and Herb Cohen act Tim Buckley

Love's first album was a classic of garage rock taking the jangly sound of the birds and mixing it with the aggression of the rolling stones and coming out with something spiky and harsh punk a decade before punk was a thing the song that most obviously shows the group's influences is Can't Explain which takes a melodic fragment from the stones as What a Shame gives it the title of a Who song and marries it with the bird's jangle to come up with something that doesn't sound quite like any of them. The album contains seven songs credited solely to Lee as a writer, though again there has been some dispute as to how much the other band members, especially McLean and Eccles, contributed.

Plus two songs credited to Lee and Eccles alone, one to the two of them with Fleckenstein and one to all of the band except Snoopy. McLean also got a single solo composition on the album, Softly to Me. Orange sugar chocolate, hot cinnamon and lovely things in you. And darling, you know there was really nothing else that I could do. But dancing, sing my life away, I've been laughing with you. My darling, softly to me. And my darling, you will never know how elegant you'll always be to me. That song quite handily shows up exactly why a fault line was already starting to appear in the group.

MacLean thought of himself as at least as talented as Lee, and he was, to be clear, an excellent songwriter in his own right. He wanted the group to record more of his songs than they did, but as Eccles put it, Arthur and I talked about that, and we both felt that, while Brian wrote very nice songs, you could only put maybe one or two on an album. He wrote the his learner and low show tune kind of songs, as part of a whole album they can work, but not on their own.

They would never have been played on the radio. Nowadays they might, but back then you had to have something the kids could relate to. Brian's stuff was a bit too soft, too many chocolate-covered rainbows. He saw everything through rose-tinted glasses. There was always conflict about us doing more of his songs. Lee always said that what he would have actually liked to do was to co-write more with McLean and to collaborate more equally, but that had never worked out.

But McLean insisted all his life that the main reason he only got one or two songs per album was that Lee knew that songwriting was where the money was and wanted to keep it to himself. The obvious choice for a lead-off single for the album was the group's version of Hey Joe, which might have made McLean feel better as it was his big live showcase

and a song he brought to the group. But as we discussed in the episode on Hendricks' version of the song, by this point it had been released by half a dozen other bands, so instead they went for the other cover version on the album. My Little Red Book was a song by Burt Bacharack and Hal David, which had originally been recorded by Manfred Mann for the film What's New Pussycat? Lee and Eccles had been to the cinema to see that film, and had started rehearsing a version as soon as they got home. Eccles had forgotten some of the chords, having only heard the song once, and even after they

learned the lyrics properly from Manfred Man's record, they kept Eccles as misremembered chord sequence, much to the later disgust of the song's composer, who never liked their version. My Little Red Book only made number 52 on the charts, but up to that point, that was the best any record released on Elektra had ever done. When Jack Holtzman heard the track on the radio for the first time while driving, he had to pull his car over to the side of the road and cry, because he had never believed he would hear an Elektra record on the radio at all. And while it wasn't a massive hit, it was an influential record. Stirling Morrison of the Velvet Underground,

who were just starting up in New York at the time the record came out, would talk later about how his group would listen to My Little Red Book over and over on repeat, trying to figure out how love got their sound. As the group were now having a little success, they decided to move in together into a huge mansion which had formerly been owned by the silent film director Maurice Tuner,

and which they nicknamed the castle. The mansion was dilapidated at the time, and the group were allowed to move in for a rent which just covered the cost of the property taxes. Or at least, all of the group except Snoopy moved in. As he later put it, I'm the only one who did not live in the castle. I didn't want to live with them.

I didn't like those guys and the feeling was mutual. The only person I got along with was Arthur. The group started promotions for my little red book, but things were already moving forward. Lee had written a song about his high school sweetheart, Anita, who like him was born on the seventh. of March, and had titled it Seven and Seven Is.

Originally, this had been a fokey acoustic number, but Ken Fawcy had been given a new Fuzzbox, one of the first bass fuzz boxes on the market, and he had started using it on the song, playing a sliding bass line in octaves. The song soon spread up to accommodate the new tone,

though in the studio Fawcy had to turn the fuzz off, as the recording equipment simply couldn't cope with it, but he was playing a semi-acoustic bass and managed to get a similar tone through feedback, The song wasn't without its problems in the studio though. As you can hear, the drum part is intense and frenetic, and took a lot of work to get right.

Fistre later said, The session was a nightmare. I had blisters on my fingers. I don't know how many times I tried to play that damn thing and it just wasn't coming out. Arthur would try it, then I'd try it. Finally, I got it. He couldn't do it.

By the 20th take I got it. Everything before that was basically rehearsal. Lee would sometimes later claim it was him playing on the final record but Eccles concurred saying That is Albin Snoopy Pistera And he did a hell of a job too He really played his little heart out on that song And he deserves credit for it

It's the best he ever played It was a very physically demanding song It took about four hours to get it down And back then four hours for one song was a long time But at the end they managed to get the track recorded and it's a blistering ball of energy. The song proper ends with the sound of an explosion and then a slow guitar instrumental.

While the only songwriter credited is Lee, both Eccles and McLean at different times have claimed to have written this coda. I believe Eccles for what it's worth, and he says it's an attempt at copying the sound of the instrumental hit, Sleepwalk, by Santo and Johnny. At the same session, they recorded the B-side for 7-and-7-Is, number 14,

a demo for a song they would pick up on several months later. The group had become good friends with the Buffalo Springfield, and Lee had been inspired by their record, Nowadays Clancy can't even sing, and especially the guitar part. And he'd come up on that happiness thing, who's trying to tune all the bells that he called. And he'd come up with a similar sounding instrumental, which for now was titled Hummingbirds. Track 16. Are we rolling? One, two, three, four. But for now, that was put to one side,

as seven and seven is became a top 40 hit, and the group had to start promoting it. Or at least, if they'd been any other group, they would have started promoting the record. But Arthur Lee refused to tour. This is often portrayed as him being a prima donnaish diva, and no doubt there was an element of that. Nobody has ever said that Arthur Lee was the one.

world's easiest person to work with. But there was more than just that. In L.A., Lee could be at home in his own bed every night, and for all that he was a big face on the scene, he was also someone who needed a lot of time by himself, out of the public eye, and who liked being in familiar surroundings. He was also able to make good money playing as many gigs as he wanted in L.A. If they could play for adoring crowds night after night just on the sunset strip, and get more money than they needed, why go anywhere? else. Not only that, but every time they ventured any further than San Francisco, they ended up dealing with dodgy promoters, people they'd never worked with before and never would again,

so there was no long-term relationship there, and no way to build up trust that they'd pay what they owed, or that the PA would work. There was also the fact that Electra were a very new label in the rock market, and didn't have great distribution outside major cities. When the group did play elsewhere, they'd find that nobody had any of their records. That would later be fixed by the time Electra signed their next rock act, the Doors, but Love with the band who they made all their mistakes with, mistakes they learned from. And that meant that Love were also not going to get the same spot on bills outside of California. In L.A., they would headline with acts like the Buffalo Springfield and the Doors as their support act, because everyone knew Love were the top of the heap

as far as live acts went. When they had offers elsewhere, it was to play third on the bill to the strawberry alarm clock. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, one thing that both Lee and Eccles have mentioned at interviews over the years as a reason they didn't tour,

but which none of their white business associates ever bring up. Love were an integrated band with two black members and three white ones, and with a white woman as their manager. There were large swathes of the US in the mid-60s, where black men travelling

with a white woman would be in danger of their lives, and very few venues where an integrated band could get booked. As Eccles put it, a black group could play the Chitland circuit and places like that in the south, and a white group could go anywhere in the south, but it was different for an integrated group. We could play the west or east coasts, but the Midwest and the south were never big markets for us. It wasn't that we were lazy, we needed to earn a living and we needed to play. Haran did start getting the group occasional gigs elsewhere, but they were few and far between, and when she did get them a big showcase gig in Dallas, with a huge amount of effort on her part, Brian McLean complained that she was getting the same money as the band members,

and she started to back away from love and concentrate on the doors, who she had also started doing managerial work for. The doors, indeed, desperately wanted to be like love. Ray Manzarek later said, Morrison turned to me and said You know Ray, if we could be as big as love man My life would be complete I thought love was one of the hottest things I ever saw

They were the most influential band in Los Angeles at that time And we all thought it was just a matter of time Before Love conquered America Johnny was the first guy I ever saw playing guitar behind his head Before Hendricks Love was also the first band I ever saw Playing long improvisational songs

Out of that came Doors songs like The End when the music's over, and the long instrumental parts in light my fire. Arthur Lee and Love, they were in charge. We wanted to be like Love. Arthur himself was enigmatic, very intense, and sort of possessed by darker forces. Arthur Lee, in turn, did like the doors and helped them get signed. But as he put it, I would see Jim Morrison from time to time, and now Pam was with him.

I thought nothing of it until Jim's death. Then I noticed that on a poster of Jim he was standing with him. a black Labrador retriever just like my dog. Later a book came out about the doors, in which Jim Morrison said that what he wanted to be was as big as love. I thought that was such a nice compliment, but I couldn't help thinking that Pam had been my girlfriend, then she was his girlfriend.

I had a Black Labrador, and then he had a Black Labrador. I was on Elektra Records, and so was he. It seemed to me that not only did Jim Morrison want to be as big as love, he also wanted to be like me. Jim never bothered me, but he did kind of copy me. Instead of touring, the group started work on their second album, titled De Capo. The title was originally a reference to the idea that they were going to go back to their roots.

They were going to stop doing garage rock and start doing Booker T in the M.G's style soul, like Leon Eccles had done in the LAGs. Instead, as rehearsals began, that started to change. To start with, they got in J.K. who had played sax with Lee and Eccles in some of their early groups several years earlier. Cantrelli had now become an accomplished jazz saxon flute player, and they started to rework their arrangements to incorporate more of his jazz style. And then the ongoing arguments about Snoopy reached something of a resolution. Everyone was agreed that even though he played fantastically

on Seven and Seven Is, he wasn't a natural drummer and was something of a wooden player. But Lee still wanted him in the band. as he was actually a fairly accomplished keyboard player it was decided to move him to piano on stage and harpsichord and organ in the studio in his place on drums they brought him Michael Stewart Ware who had previously been the drummer in The Sons of Adam a group we talked about briefly in the Hay Joe and Buffalo Springfield episodes

and who had recorded one of Lee's songs, Feathered Fish The music this new line-up of the group started performing was characterised by everyone who heard it at the time as jazz rock though by this they didn't mean the genre we now know as jazz rock, which hadn't yet become a thing. But while everyone involved in making it talks about it as being influenced by jazz, especially Coltrane,

and that influence is definitely audible at point. In truth, the jazz influence seems to have been something that mostly showed up in the group's live performance. Certainly, you can hear some jazz, in Cantrelli's solos especially, but other than the crashing garage rock of Seven and Seven Is, recorded by the smaller lineup. The primary styles I hear in DeCapo

are Baroque Pop, folk rock, boss and over, and more than a little influence from Bert Baccarac. Just as the group's first single was a cover of a song from Bacarack's What's New Pussy Cat soundtrack, compared the title track from that film, Pussy Cat, New Pussy Cat,

I've got flowers and lots of hours to spend with you. So go and Pussy Cat, no. with Stephanie Knows Who is also a good example to the song and arrangement could differ not only from song to song but within the same song everyone has agreed that the chords melody line and lyrics to Stephanie Knows Who are all Arthur Lee's. his work, though often the band would change the chord sequences if Lee wrote a song on guitar because he only knew a handful of chords, so they'd figure out what he meant and rework his simple

triads into more complex chords. But according to Michael Stuart Ware, the instrumental break by Cantrellian Eccles, the most obviously jazz-influenced thing on the whole album, was entirely their work with no input from Lee. But on the other hand, Fistera has said that the harpsichord party played on the track, was dictated note for note by Lee, which is entirely believable, given that by all accounts, Fistera was an excellent technical keyboard player, but had no aptitude whatsoever for improvisation. That track, like much of DeCapo, was the work of a new production team. Paul Rothschild had now got out of prison, and so after he produced the Doar's first album, he moved on to producing Love. Five of the six songs on Side One of the album were also required

recorded at RCA Studios with Dave Hassinger, who engineered for the Rolling Stones when they recorded there, as the group wanted to get the sound he got with them, though Bruce Botnick, who had engineered Seven and Seven Is and Side Two, mixed the whole album to give it a consistent feel. Around this time, Lee also moved out of the group's communal castle and into a house that became known as the Trip House, because it had been used in a cheap exploitation film called The Trip, put out by American International Pictures, starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and written by Jack Nicholson.

Oh, it gives off an orange cloud of light that just blows right out of the sea. Beauty, you cannot believe, inundate you. Your world, the people world, is fragmented. Distorted. Passion is a rainbow of ecstasy. The first thing that he did there was to build, cages for his pigeons. Part of the reason for him moving out

can be seen in Stephanie Knows Who and in another song on DeCapo, The Castle. That line, A.M. I'm living in a boat, The Plano Rifted, had dated both A, Arthur, and B, Brian, and she'd chosen B, which upset Lee enormously. It caused a rift between the two that would never fully heal, and they would start the serious problems within the band that would soon cause it to split.

According to Stuart Ware, in the beginning, Arthur and Brian were great friends. They loved to be around each other and did things socially together. They were funny. After the Stephanie thing, that began to deteriorate. It got to the point where they didn't hang together at all. Arthur was trying to organise it so that Brian was no longer in the group. The rest of us kind of vetoed that. The other most notable song on DeCapo is She Comes in Colours.

As well as being a live favourite for the rest of Lee's career, that also had a line that was picked up by the Rolling Stones. You might think that turn about his fair play, given what Lee did with Can't Explain and what a shame, but he was furious when he heard the Stones She's a Rainbow, recorded about six months after DeCapo came out. Da Cappo is half a great album. Unfortunately, it's kept from true greatness

by the decision to turn the entire second side over to a single track, Revelation. The idea was apparently not a bad one in principle. The song, originally titled John Lee Hooker, was a highlight of their live sets. It had started out as an extended version of Gloria by them, but they'd turned it into a lengthy, largely instrumental, excuse for every band member to get multiple solos and show off their instrumental abilities. But the session took place at sunset rather than at RCA, which the group didn't like. Eccles has said, it wasn't uptight at RCA as it was at sunset sound.

several times we had fist fights at Sunset Sound, because it was a small kind of claustrophobic type of place. The atmosphere in the people, Bruce and all that, just was not as conductive in the way RCA was with Dave Hassinger. According to Lee, the group were in a foul mood for the session and played the song worse than they had ever played it before as a result, with no feeling. But they did play the track for the full 45 minutes they normally played it.

Obviously, that was too long for an album side. but they expected Rothschild to just fade the track out after 19 minutes, but leave the performance as it was until then. Instead, according to Eccles, it sounded so different live compared to what we got on the album. What Paul Rothschild did was record 45 minutes of this jam, but instead of leaving it alone and just cutting the end off, he hacked the song up into this mishmash,

so you can't get the feeling for what we were trying to do. If it had been done the way we performed it live, it would have been a whole different song, a whole different feel. Rothschild took this Frankenstein version of Revelation, and because Snoopy wasn't an improvisational player and was largely not on the main track, he took the jig from Bach's Partita No. 1 in B-flat minor, here played by Glenn Gould,

and got Snoopy to play that on the harpsichord at the beginning and end, creating a truly bizarre juxtaposition. Literally everyone, involved agrees that Revelation is by far the worst thing the original version of love were ever involved in, and DeCapo became one of that small number of albums where people play side one to death, but never play side two a second time. But even though the album was only a qualified success, the seven-piece line-up of love was getting more praise than ever in the clubs. This was a band that had already been one of the most versatile bands on the strip, ranging from psychedelic freakouts to sharp

protopunk to folk rock jangle. And now they were performing garage rock with jazz flute, songs that sounded like Johnny Mathis singing the birds, and songs that were being covered by hip British bands like the move, and even ripped off by the Rolling Stones. But then the riot on Sunset's Drip happened. We've already talked about this in the episode on for what it's worth, so I won't go over it again, but the important thing is that this meant that half of the nightclubs on Sunset's drip closed down pretty much overnight. This devastated LA's nightlife, but while every other band that played those clubs was also playing all over the country or the world, Love weren't playing anywhere else. The gigs dried up, the band weren't making enough money, and they had no choice but to sack Snoopy and Cantrelli.

Cantrelli was fine with this. He was a jazz musician, and jazz musicians are always moving between bands. But Snoopy was understandably bitter, and has had very few good words to say about his erstwhile bandmates. in the decades since. These changes seem to have thrown Lee into a depression, and that came out on what would become the group's last album as an actual group, Forever Changers. Lee said later, At the time I wrote those songs,

I thought this might be the last album I'd ever make. The words on Forever Changers represented the last words I would say about this planet. The album was made after I thought there was no hope left in the world. I thought I was going to die. I used to sit there in my house on the hillside and think of all the things that had happened or were happening all around

in my life as well as to others. I would write them the way I saw them. Lee had big ideas for the new album. They were going to record a double album and it would have songs by Lee and Eccles and McLean, all fully orchestrated. They weren't going to do the thing that rock bands normally did, of playing as a band and then getting some strings to embellish things. Lee especially was going to write songs with the orchestration as an integral part.

Bruce Botnick suggested Lee work with an arranger, David Angel, who had been an assistant to Nelson Riddle, for whom Botnick's mother worked as a music copyist. Angel spent three weeks working intently with Lee, transcribing Lee's ideas. Lee was not a trained musician, or even a particularly good guitarist or pianist, and as Angel said,

Arthur communicated with me without words and without instruction. He knew some things, but he didn't know how to express them and had no training. He would refer to a string instrument, a cello or violinsé, and I got the idea finally that he was referring to any stringed instrument. he would use general words like strings or brass.

Sometimes he'd play a note on the piano and look at me, so I would make a mental note to make sure that note got in there. It was a largely non-verbal communication. Nonetheless, Angel credited Lee with the final arrangements, insisting on only being given the credit of Orchestrator on Lee's songs, because he was just implementing Lee's ideas. He took an arranger credit on Brian McLean's songs, because McLean gave him more of a free hand.

Neil Young was brought in as the producer for the album, although he soon dropped out. Reports differ on quite what happened. According to Botnick, Young worked with Lee on the songs until shortly before the first session, and then said, Man, I can't do it.

I'm hearing too much of my own head for me to immerse myself in someone else's music. According to Eccles, meanwhile, we were contemporaries and very good friends with the guys in Buffalo Springfield. If we were playing a club and Neil came in, he'd jump up on stage and play with us. Bruce said he had a friend who needed some money

and would come in and maybe produce a few of the songs on Forever Changes. He didn't tell us it was Neil. I guess Neil told Bruce not to tell us it was him. When he showed up we all started laughing and said, Come on, this won't work. We're not going to listen to Neil.

We did maybe one song together and that was it. He got some money for that day because he desperately needed it. It was eventually decided that Liam Botnick would co-produce without an outside producer getting involved. If Young did produce one song, it was likely an early take of

The Daily Planet, which he often gets credited for arranging, though he's always denied having anything to do with it. But The Daily Planet, the first song recorded for the new album, was where things started to fall apart. By this point, all of the band had severe drug problems,

and that's often blamed for the first session going horribly wrong. But in fact there were a whole host of problems. The first was the new way of writing with an orchestrator. The problem was that in the past, what had always happened was that Lee would come to the band and play them the simplified versions of songs that he had worked up, and they would come up with their own parts, something like what he described.

But he'd already done that with David Angel, and now the band had to follow his inarticulate instructions, but also had to fit with the pre-written orchestral parts. They'd also not had a chance to play the new material live, because they'd hardly been playing any gigs. The only reason they had any money was that they had renegotiated their contract with Elektra. They'd got a $25,000 advance for the album,

but they had to pay the costs out of that. If they could keep the costs down, anything left over was theirs. And then they'd been told by Electra that they weren't going to be doing a double album after all. all. They were going to be doing a single album, and it would be all Arthur's songs, with two of Bryan's and none of Johnny's. Eccles was hurt by this, but put his songs to one side, hoping to put them on a future album, which he started referring to as Gethsemini, because that was where Judas betrayed Jesus, and he felt similarly betrayed by the label. But McLean and Forsey

hatched another plan. They were going to do a work to rule, and play sloppy on these songs. If they're playing on Lee's songs was barely competent, but on McLean's songs it was great, they reasoned, the label would ditch a few of Lee's songs and put in a few more of McLean's. So at the initial session, when they started recording the Daily Planet, there were two musicians, Eccles and Stuart Ware, who were trying their best put under a hearse, and two others who couldn't care less. As the recording dragged on and on, without a single decent take, using up valuable studio time and eating into that advance,

Lee and Botnick were in the control room and came up with a way to shake the instrumentalists up. They announced that the group weren't going to be playing on the sessions anymore. They were going to bring the wrecking crew in. So on the Daily Planet and Anne Moore again, instead of Brian McLean, Ken Forsey and Michael Stuart Ware, the musicians were Billy Strange, Carol Kay, Hal Blaine and Don Randy. Though Eccles still added Lee Guitar.

and, according to some reports, Carol Kay couldn't get the bass part down for The Daily Planet, forci showed her how it went, and Lee let him just play it. The tactic worked. The band was shaken, and Maclean was apparently in tears. The two tracks cut with the wrecking crew were kept on the album, but Botnick and Lee told the group they were going to postpone

the rest of the sessions two months. They had better be able to play the songs when they restarted. The group spent the summer of 19, Rehearsing the New Material, not playing gigs. They even turned down the Monterey Pop Festival in order to concentrate on learning the new material, though that may have had as much to do with it being organised by Lee's old Bet Noir Lou Adler,

and it not paying the artists, as it did their concentration on their work. Though as Jack Holtzman said, it was a sign of how respected they were that they were offered the slot at all, while a band like the doors weren't even invited to play. Of the 11 songs on the album, 9 were these,

and many of them combined dark, paranoid lyrics with almost nursery rhyme melodies. Even a more optimistic song, like the one that had originally been titled Hummingbirds, all about hummingbirds flying and little girls playing outside, was given the sardonic undercutting title, The Good Humour Man, He Sees Everything Like This. That's not the real world, it's just how the ice cream man sees things. Of course, everyone's happy when they're getting ice cream,

but the world's still going to end. This does, however, get resolved at the end of the album, with the magnificent You Set the Scene, which manages to turn that pessimism of imminent death into something positive. That track was placed at the end by Jack Holtzman, who sequenced the album, and so it was him who placed MacLean's song,

Alone Again Or, at the start. Possibly this was in part to placate McLean, but it's also the most obvious choice for an opener, being far more immediate than anything else on the album. The song had started as a fairly straightforward folk rock song, And listening to McLean's later solo demo recordings, it sounds like he probably intended it to be vaguely birds-like. But Eccles, as he did on the one or two songs McLean got per album,

tried to steer him into a more interesting direction. He said later, Brian started alone again awe as another one of his folks. songs. I started playing flamenco licks and flourishes in rehearsal, and it went from being a folk song to a Spanish influence song. We changed the cadence of it. I was just noodling around, trying to find different things that would complement what Brian was doing. I would always rearrange Brian's songs, trying to add something so as to pull them away from sounding like show tunes. It had that Spanish feel to me. There were probably two or three overdubs of mine where I'm playing inside the

chords of that song. And then, when Angel arranged the strings and horns, he picked up on Eccles' flamenco embellishments. As he put it, unlike Arthur, Brian didn't know what to tell me. He didn't have any idea what he wanted, so I had to ask him a lot of questions to draw out something that I could hold on to. In the end, I made all the suggestions, and he would always say that sounded very cool. With Brian's songs, the orchestration was completely an interpretation from my point of view. On Alone Again Orr, he just told me to take it where I wanted to take it. I heard this very strong Spanish guitar effect, and I went with that feeling more than the song. The song itself had no Spanish effect at all, but the rhythm of the guitar drew me into that

feel, and I just reacted to it. I suggested to him, what if we have a baroque background with a trumpet doing a kind of Spanish style? It's not mariachi, it's not Mexican. What makes it Spanish, is that the background is baroque in style, not polka. It's like bullfight music, because that's Spanish music. Alone Again Orr is one of only two tracks on Forever Changers, with little Arthur Lee involvement. Lee probably doesn't appear at all on MacLean's other song, Old Man, as while most issues of the album credit him as playing guitar on the record,

Johnny Eccles has always been insistent that Lee didn't play at all on Forever Changers, just sang and produced. On Alone Again Or, though, Lee is present. In the studio he sang harmony with McLean's lead, but when they were mixing it, it was decided that McLean's vocals were weak, and so Lee's vocal was raised in the mix, and his harmony became the lead, rather than what was intended to be the melody. McLean later accepted this was necessary, but at the time he was infuriated. That wasn't the only problem band members had with the mix of Forever Changers, either. both Maclean and Stuart Ware

thought that the mix was too light and didn't have enough of the rhythm section and Lee was never happy with how the intro of Alone Again Or faded in, saying it started too quietly. According to Eccles, this was because Maclean was using steel picks on his fingers and they were clattering against the guitar when he played and he wouldn't let Eccles,

who played with his fingers rather than picks, play it, so it had to be ducked in the mix at the beginning until the other instruments came in to cover up the noise. Bruce Botnick has later said that he thinks he could do a better job and wishes he had the opportunity to do a surround sound remix of the album, but sadly, almost all the multi-tracks and master tapes are lost and presumably destroyed. The album was originally to be titled The Third Coming of Love, but at the last minute Lee changed the title.

He'd split up with a girlfriend who had said to him, upset, you said you'd love me forever, and he'd replied, yeah, well, forever changes, and been so pleased with his cleverness that that became the album's title. The group went into the studio after Forever Changes to record two more tracks, which eventually became a single, but were intended for a fourth album. But by this point, everything was falling apart. All the group except Lee were using heroin.

Lee had his own drug problems, but heroin was never his drug of choice, and the riff between Lee and McLean had grown in Super Bowl. The final straw came when Elektra chose Alone Again Orr as the single from Forever Changes. Lee needed to be the leader of the group, and he couldn't cope with having someone else's song picked over any of his. And at the same time, McLean was making plans for a solo album, which Lee was vehemently against, telling him, you're either in love or you're not.

As it turned out, he was not. then one of the band's roadies died of a heroin overdose. The few gigs the band were playing, they were playing awfully. They were all addicts, they all hated each other. The group didn't formally split up, they just stopped talking to each other. MacLean would always blame Holtzman for the split, saying, it was facilitated by Jack Holtzman, he's actually responsible for the end of love. I might not have quit, but when they offered me a way out, I started thinking,

maybe I'm unhappy here. He left a group, got himself off heroin, and recorded some demos for the solo album Holtzman had been suggesting he could do. But Holtzman listened to... But Holtzman listened to the demos and turned him down. According to Haltzman, his best stuff turned out to be the songs he recorded with Love. The demos finally got a release in 1997, and McLean largely left a music business after

Love, going into real estate, though with occasional attempts at solo performances in the 80s, and becoming a born-again Christian. The rest of the band tried to struggle on for a while, but without McLean, the band simply didn't feel like love, and their addictions were making them flaky and unreliable. Eventually they heard through the grapevine that Lee had put together an entirely new band and was calling that love. Stuart Ware went on to play with Neil Diamond before retiring from music so that he could stay off drugs. He later wrote an autobiography about his time in love. Eccles went to New York, got himself clean, and got some session work and became a music teacher. Ken Forsey struggled for most of his life, finding himself unable to hold down a job because

because of his addiction issues. And Lee, he found another group, didn't take too long. But his new group, while it called itself love, was not love. The musicians in his new band looked at Lee's older music with contempt. They wanted to be heavy rockers,

not do things with acoustic guitars and harpsichords and mariachi trumpets. They wanted to show off their solos And it destroyed the music Like that song we just heard a snatch of Dogon, from Out Here The second album by that version of love It's a lovely little gentle ballad

And then it becomes this An eight-minute drum solo By a drummer who When the group toured the UK Went up to someone he thought was Ginger Baker And started boasting about how much better he was On drums than Baker These were not the most sympathetic musical campaign

for Lee. Their recordings did so badly that Lee's new label, Blue Thumb, insisted I'm trying to get the old version of Love, minus McLean, back together for a European tour. They played one gig together in the US, but that was a disaster, and so the new love continued to be the only love there was. During the 70s, Lee moved to smaller and smaller labels, and had an ever-changing lineup of musicians. He had his own drug problems now, mostly cocaine, and also some severe mental health issues. He would make albums with one or two new songs that sounded as good as anything he'd done and a bunch of terrible filler. There were moments of hope, like when he reconnected with his old friend Jimmy Hendricks, and Hendrix guested on a track on the latest album by a version

of love. According to Lee, Hendricks was considering putting together a new band with Lee and Steve but died before the group got together. Or there was the time when Eric Clapton and Robert Plant, two huge fans of love, persuaded Robert Stigwood to sign Lee to his label. Stigwood gave him a multi-album contract with a big budget for the first album and threw all his weight behind promoting the album, including getting Lee a support slot on Clapton's tour. And then, on the first night of the tour, with Stigwood and the audience, Lee started complaining on stage about how he'd been treated badly by every record label, about how all the label executives were racist, and about how he was still a slave, and Stigwood just his latest master. Stigwood would have

nothing further to do with him after that, and Lee never recorded for a major label again. He spent part of the late 70s caring for his term the ill stepfather, and then spent the 80s getting into legal trouble, and playing bad gigs with bad backing bands, and recording the odd bad album. By in 1993 he was a legendary casualty of rock music, so much so that Robin Hitchcock recorded a song called The Wreck of the Arthur Lee. But then something strange happened. A song from one of those bad albums, actually his last ever studio album from 1992, was covered by Mazistar on their 1993 Platinum Selling album, So Tonight That I Might See. Suddenly, people wanted to know Arthur Lee again, and bands that had been influenced by him started

talking about him. He played gigs in the UK, backed by the Liverpool band Shack, and by the chamber pop band, The High Lamas. And for the first time since the original band split up, he was being backed by musicians who actually cared about his music and had the skill to play it. The same thing happened in the US, where he hooked up with Baby Lemonade, a band who were part of a growing scene in L.A. in the 90s of experimental power pop bands that also included the WonderMints, the Negro problem, and others. These were serious musicians, serious fans of love, and, most importantly, they were a band in their own right. Lee had grown used to playing man games with his musicians and playing them off against each other, threatening to sack

individuals if they annoyed him. Baby Lemonade, because they were a band themselves and had been playing together already, had a one-for-all and all-for-one attitude that Lee couldn't bully them. Things were finally going well for Lee, and he even talked with the other original members of love about working with some of them again, though as far as he was concerned, baby lemonade with a new love. But then disaster struck. Lee was arrested for allegedly discharging a gun in the air. The details of what happened are murky, and he was later freed on appeal. But at the time, because he had two previous felony convictions, he was convicted under California's three-strikes law and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Graham McLean started corresponding with him in prison,

and the two had apparently patched up their friendship. But while Lee was in prison, both McLean Anne Forsy died, as did Lee's mother. When he got out of prison after serving five and a half years, he was a changed man. He reconnected with baby lemonade, and they started touring, mostly in the UK and Europe. The shows weren't always big or prestigious, at least at first. The second time I saw him, it was at the limelight clubbing crew, a small club venue with a capacity of 400, the pretty much exclusively hosted tribute act. And I remember chatting with the sound engineer before the show. Baby Lemonade had sound checked without Lee, as was their habit, and the sound engineer was complaining about them being one of these young bands who rely on

huge numbers of effects pedals and how you wouldn't get proper old-school musicians like Jimmy Hendricks doing that kind of thing. He looked suitably chastened when I explained that the singer with the band had actually sung with Hendricks. But Lee gave truly exceptional performances, even in venues like that, and he got a lot more appreciation than that would suggest. In June 2002, for example, nine MPs signed an early day motion in the House of Commons that this house pays tribute to the legendary Arthur Lee, also known as Arthur Lee, from Man and Inspiration of Love, the world's greatest rock band and creators of Forever Changes, the greatest album of all time, notes that following his release from jail,

he is currently touring Europe, and urges honourable and especially right honourable members to consider the potential benefit to their constituents if they were, with the indulgence of their whips, to lighten up and tune in to one of his forthcoming British gigs. This new version of Love, Arthur Lee and Baby Lemonade, played the main stage at Glastonbury, played the Royal Festival Hall, and performed a whole of Forever Changers live with string and horn sections.

In 2004, Johnny Eccles even rejoined the group, The two old friends reunited and playing their old classics together. But then, when the band got to the airport for their 2005 UK tour, they called Lee to find out where he was. He was at home. He wasn't coming. He wouldn't tell them why. He told them they couldn't go to the UK either.

He was behaving very erratically, but they were used to that. The band were faced with a dilemma. If they didn't make the trip, all the promoters, people who had supported them for years, and who in many cases were fans themselves working on shoestring budgets, would be out thousands. They ended up doing the tour with Eccles

and without Lee, giving audiences partial refunds if they stayed to watch the show even without its star, or full refunds if they didn't. Mike Randall, Baby Lemonade's guitarist, later said, We paid off the tour bus, and that was it. That was a very tough thing,

but what made it all right with the fans, They were wonderful. They were feeding us and bringing us groceries because we were dirt poor. We would stop the bus by the side of a road and barbecue whatever the fans had given us. Johnny was wonderful. His house was facing foreclosure. I was facing going to court because I was behind in my child support payments. But all we could do was play the music.

We did all this because we didn't want to stick anyone with the bills. We talked with Arthur every day, several times a day, asking him to come. over, but he wouldn't do it, and he wouldn't tell us why. Randall started blogging about what was happening in an understandably angry tone, so the fans would know that the situation wasn't the fault of him or his bandmates. This got back to Lee, and Lee decided he was never going to work with them again. He was going to get a new love. Except while he tried to do that, the new band never played a gig together, because what Lee hadn't told the members of baby lemonade was that he hadn't

gone to the airport because he was physically incapable of it. He was in too much pain. He'd been ill since he was in prison. I was amazed to discover later that the vibrant, active, charismatic person I saw on those UK tours between 2002 and 2004

was suffering from Parkinson's disease and he was also diabetic. But this was worse. He simply couldn't function anymore he was in so much pain, though he did manage to make one last record, a guest vocal appearance on a record by Chico Hamilton, singing the old standard, Watch your story Morning Glory.

Lee had been raised a Christian scientist and didn't like going to see doctors, even when he was in agony. When he finally did, he found out he had leukemia, and needed a stem cell transplant, though even then the prognosis wasn't good. He was told he had a 20% chance of survival if he had the operation, but no chance at all if he didn't.

He was uninsured, but the musicians he'd inspired rallied round, putting together a benefit concert in New York to raise funds for his treatment, featuring Ian Hunter, Nils Lofgren, Yola Tengo, Ryan Adams, and Robert Plant, who did a 12-song set,

including five love covers, performing with Johnny Eccles. But sadly, the transplant didn't take, and Arthur Lee died in August 2006. Johnny Eccles still tours, performing with Baby Lemonade, the musicians who played with Arthur Lee for longer than any other group of musicians, as either Love Revisited, or The Love Band. He's regularly talked about plans to finish up the songs he wrote for the follow-up to Forever Changes,

with the members of Baby Lemonade, and released them as Gethsemini, possibly with Michael Stuart Ware being involved too. And he's also said he's writing an autobiography. I've seen the band twice since Arthur Lee's death, and they put on a great show, devoted to songs from the first three classic love albums. The story of love is a story of heartbreak, self-sabotage, and missed opportunities. But then, aren't most stories?

They may never have had the commercial success their obvious tarned suggested they would, but they inspired artists as different as the Doors and the High Llamas, Robert Plant and Robin Hitchcock, and they leave behind three classic albums and a bunch of momentarily brilliant might-have-beens. The unfulfilled potential of those might-have-bins can sometimes make us forget the very real existing music that they made.

So I'll leave you with a final clip from Forever Changes. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on. Susan, by the Buckingham's. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar. a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favourite online bookstore, or visit the

links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-the-numbersongs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

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