Time passages

Love's Forever Changes

by Jonathan Perry

There were five perfect albums released during, or immediately after, the "Summer of Love" of 1967: the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced; the Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico; the Doors' The Doors; and Love's Forever Changes. Summer of Love? Perhaps. But what made all those albums great were darker emotions and conditions: chaos and doubt, turmoil and altered perceptions. And in no case is this truer than on Forever Changes, which has just been reissued by Rhino in a deluxe edition that includes seven bonus tracks. The mystique surrounding the disc seems only to have deepened with time.

It's worth noting that whereas Hendrix, the Doors, and the Velvets were all launching their debuts that year, the art-damaged Love, an acid-pop group from the Sunset Strip led by eccentric songwriter Arthur Lee, were teetering on the verge of collapse. Yet the well-documented tensions and internal dissensions inspired the most ambitious album of the band's short-lived career. Although Lee would soldier on with various Love incarnations, the core line-up of Lee, guitarist/vocalist Bryan MacLean, guitarist Johnny Echols, bassist Ken Forssi, and drummer Michael Stuart would dissolve less than six months later, after the album was released.

Love were supposed to be as big as the Doors subsequently became. Lee, in fact, was so convinced of the Doors' potential for stardom that he's said to have persuaded the head of Love's label, Elektra president Jac Holzman, to check out a Doors gig. Within a year, the Doors' "Light My Fire" was everywhere and Love were struggling to stay together. Love's relegation to cult status, however, was due in no small part to Lee's refusal to tour -- his "penchant for isolation and not doing what was necessary to bring his music to the audience," as Holzman recalls in essayist Ben Edmonds's notes accompanying the Rhino reissue. "His isolation cost him a career. Which was a shame, because he was one of the few geniuses I have met -- in all of rock 'n' rolldom."

Although Lee -- who is currently in prison serving an eight-year sentence on weapons-related charges -- has groused over the years that the album didn't turn out the way he wanted it to, the material on Forever Changes bears out Holzman's assessment of his special gifts as a songwriter and musician. Almost in spite of its mostly stripped-down acoustic arrangements, mariachi horns, and tasteful Bacharach-esque orchestral touches (Love's first single was a radically rearranged garage-psych cover of Burt's "My Little Red Book"), Forever Changes comes on like a hit of symphonic blotter acid. Even after 34 years, the music still exudes surrealism, unspooling outward at odd, off-kilter angles. Meanwhile, Lee's fever-dream imagination manifests itself in peculiar and frequently deranged lyrics that veer from tender to ominous in the span of a couplet. He opens "Live and Let Live" with this disquieting (and portentous) bit of stream-of-consciousness: "Oh, the snot has caked against my pants/It has turned into crystal/There's a bluebird sitting on a branch/I guess I'll take my pistol/I've got it in my hand/Because he's on my land."

More than anything, though, Lee sounds haunted and a little lost, plagued by a lurking paranoia and the unsettling conviction that he would soon die. As the comforting strum of acoustic guitar opens "The Red Telephone," he coos: "Sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die/I'll feel much better on the other side . . . Life goes on here, day after day/I don't know if I'm living, or if I'm supposed to be/Sometimes, my life is so eerie/And if you think I'm happy, paint me yellow." The ominous warning at the end of the tune seems prescient in light of Lee's present predicament: "They're locking them up today, and throwing away the key/I wonder who it will be tomorrow/You or me?"

The disc's seven bonus tracks don't offer any major musical revelations. The tracking-session outtake of "Your Mind and We Belong Together" does offer a window into Lee's tense relationship with his bandmates: a bit of fly-on-the-wall studio banter finds him chastising Echols for an allegedly subpar guitar solo. For the most part, though, the new version of Forever Changes is much the same as old -- an inspiring, confusing, enigmatic, and thoroughly fascinating product of a time that was all of that as well.