Love - My Little Red Book
Love - You Set The Scene
Love - Your Mind and We Belong Together
Arthur Lee is no Dionne Warwick, which makes it all the more surprising that Love's first single was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. "My Little Red Book," first performed by Manfred Mann in a London discotheque scene in the film What's New Pussycat?, was originally almost a ballad, the somewhat self-pitying tale of a playboy brought to grief by unexpected romantic yearning. (It's no surprise that Woody Allen reportedly originally wrote the lead role in the film for notorious horndog Warren Beatty.) Manfred Mann's version, the one used as a template by Perry Como and other middle-of-the-road crooners, is a typically Bacharach-like piece of jazz-tinged sophistication. For Love's remake, which became a garage band classic for the ages, Lee and lead guitarist Johnny Echols simplified the chord sequence into a primeval garage band unison riff that they blasted out over a stomping, tambourine-fueled rhythm. Similarly, there's none of the playboy's unctuous charm to Lee's snarling delivery of the vocals, which seem only barely to mask a suppressed fury; based on the way he yells "All I did was talk, talk about you/Hear your name and I start to cry" in the chorus, one imagines that these nights tended to end abruptly, with Lee's dates fleeing the restaurants in a panic. In an unexpected second act for this song, "My Little Red Book" unwittingly inspired one of British psychedelia's most legendary songs: Pink Floyd's original manager, Peter Jenner, was trying to describe Love's song to Syd Barrett by humming the main riff, which he didn't get quite right. Barrett turned Jenner's misremembered riff into the centerpiece of Pink Floyd's early signature song, "Interstellar Overdrive." From: https://www.allmusic.com/song/my-little-red-book-mt0036975681#review
America raced heatedly westward, found Los Angeles waiting, and devoured itself. I think that’s what Arthur Lee was saying. Right?
1967 Forever Changes is a revelation. Echoing down the canyons and across the dusty, sun-baked pavement of the coast, Lee’s modern apocalypticism is arch but optimistic, the voice of a man eager to cultivate a new world but not before reducing everything to rubble.
In the melting pot of Southern California, Lee walked among the hippies and dwellers of the barrio. Briefly in the Summer of Love, he couldn’t decide whether to join or condemn them. Forever Changes is the sound of a man–a band–determinedly dismantling the achievements that had put him in that position. His band Love was pulling apart, and their refusal to tour imploded their success, but Lee was too autocratic and willful to let success get in the way of making the music he felt anyway.
The album is strung from one end to the other with a churning mixture of wavering resolve, apprehension, confusion, hope, and comaraderie among misfits. In angle and sentiment, it varies little from Love’s previous LP, Da Capo (also from ’67), but Forever Changes has the more deeply layered heart of a man recording his last will and testament. Indeed, Lee said of the album, “I thought I was going to die at that particular time, so those were my last words.” It is indeed a kind of last hurrah. The Love lineup that produced the sound of these classic albums would collapse soon after, and no Love LP would capture the same spark again.
Where “The Daily Planet” bemoans tedium, agitating for something, anything, new to move on to, Lee still boasts of his little community in “Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale.” Contradictions abound; condemnation is bred from understanding, though great comfort is found there too. Though society on the whole is burning to the ground (“The Red Telephone”), little pieces of joy still twinkle brightly (“The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This”).
Forever Changes is a sterling achievement because, like many other sterling achievements, it raises so many issues, so many problems, presents them from a singular point of view (well, most singular–there are two Bryan MacLean songs, which complement the rest amply), and practically relishes its inability to resolve anything. The end track, “You Set the Scene,” gathers everything from the preceding 36 minutes–the ups, the downs, the smiles, the freak-outs–and arrays them attractively by one another.
There’s an ascending feeling of resolution, a sense of realization, but ultimately Arthur Lee just walks off. He asks the requisite questions, makes a few observations, but in the end just throws up his hands. Toward the end of the song is a line as telling as anything on the album: I want to love you, but oh… It echoes into halting dissolution, with Lee longing to embrace his world but still dismayed by its failings. And then soon afterward the album is swept to a close by a pageantry of lush strings and horns. “You Set the Scene”–and by extension, Forever Changes–is traced by darkness but churning within with great wonder, presumably precisely as Arthur Lee felt it. From: https://rockoclock.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/love-you-set-the-scene/
Following the November 1967 release of Love’s Forever Changes album, Arthur Lee—Love’s lead singer and primary songwriter—was forced to reassess his situation.
Forever Changes had failed to sell on release and was not properly recognized in this country for more than a decade. (Elektra Records has never let it go out of print.) The album’s single, “Alone Again Or,” was, as expected, a hit in California but charted nowhere else.
It was now early 1968. Lee’s band, a once-kinetic ensemble now lazy, drugged out, rusty, and drained of confidence, was crumbling around him. Love was never a happy good-time group, instead choosing to anchor itself on the left coast in voluntary isolation, holing up and staying local as other Los Angeles bands traveled the globe.
Racially integrated at a time when such a thing was rare, the daringly eclectic band wore its alienation on its collective paisley sleeve. Some on the Sunset Strip felt that Love should have been called “Hate,” as the band put out strange, aggressive vibes on stage and in its interactions with writers and other musicians. Some of that might have been due to drugs; much was surely due to Lee’s volatile personality.
Now, with 1967 in the mist, Lee switched gears once again. Gone were the lovely string and horn arrangements of Forever Changes, and the jazzy experimentation of the album before, Da Capo, faded even further into memory.
Henceforth, Lee would compete with the harder rock sounds of the day. On January 30, 1968, the fivesome—Lee, Bryan MacLean, and John Echols on guitars, Ken Forssi on bass, and Michael Stuart on drums—gathered in L.A.’s Sunset Sound studio to record a new single.
You couldn’t call the two songs Love recorded that day “commercial.” “Laughing Stock,” which would be the b-side, quoted lyrics from the band’s first 45, “My Little Red Book,” and exaggerated its aggressive stop-start rhythm to an almost parodic level. The ending fade, in which the band literally falls apart, was far too close to the bone.
The a-side, “Your Mind and We Belong Together,” in some ways resembled Forever Changes: it had a typically odd Lee title, it combined several interesting fragments into a sort of suite, and was impossibly sad, as if written by a man watching a dream evaporate like water on a hot day.
I’d like to understand just why I feel like I’ve been through hell
and you tell me I haven’t even started yet.
To live here you’ve got to give more than you get—this I know.
So many people, they just seem to clutter up my mind
And if it’s mine, throw it away. Throw it again, once for my girlfriend.
After months of barely playing, the band wasn’t tight; it took 44 takes to get a perfect (?) recording of “Your Mind and We Belong Together.” Outtakes that Elektra released on its Forever Changes expanded CD indicate that Lee ran a tight ship in the studio and sometimes had to be unpleasant to urge a better performance.
The final product, though, is stunning, an extension of the high-art pop single in the tradition of “Good Vibrations,” “Paint it, Black,” “Whiter Shade of Pale,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever." Lee produced a minor masterpiece.
The multi-part paean to a lost love opens with a zippy folk-rock beat and odd time changes. After a couple of loopy but hypnotic verses, it stumbles into a gorgeous flamenco-like section, and just as suddenly veers back into catchy pop, but with an impossibly dark twist.
I’m locking my heart in the closet. I don’t need it anymore.
You find me behind the door and all of the far-out faces
From long ago, I can't erase this.
Echols’ gritty, sloppy guitar solo takes the record to the fadeout. Elektra’s decision to release this odd, winding, but riveting single, all 4:22 of it, might have been more about letting the notoriously chippy Lee have his way rather than any feeling that the song could actually be a hit. While the record got a bit of airplay on the west coast, it was not a hit in Los Angeles, San Diego, or anywhere in between.
Oddly enough, “Your Mind and We Belong Together” reached #11 on Toledo, Ohio’s top 40 station, an event that can be put down either to incredibly progressive listeners, an aggressive promotion man, a program director with nothing to lose, or pure lunacy.
From: https://tenrecords.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-song-day-love-your-mind-and-we-belong.html
America raced heatedly westward, found Los Angeles waiting, and devoured itself. I think that’s what Arthur Lee was saying. Right?
1967 Forever Changes is a revelation. Echoing down the canyons and across the dusty, sun-baked pavement of the coast, Lee’s modern apocalypticism is arch but optimistic, the voice of a man eager to cultivate a new world but not before reducing everything to rubble.
In the melting pot of Southern California, Lee walked among the hippies and dwellers of the barrio. Briefly in the Summer of Love, he couldn’t decide whether to join or condemn them. Forever Changes is the sound of a man–a band–determinedly dismantling the achievements that had put him in that position. His band Love was pulling apart, and their refusal to tour imploded their success, but Lee was too autocratic and willful to let success get in the way of making the music he felt anyway.
The album is strung from one end to the other with a churning mixture of wavering resolve, apprehension, confusion, hope, and comaraderie among misfits. In angle and sentiment, it varies little from Love’s previous LP, Da Capo (also from ’67), but Forever Changes has the more deeply layered heart of a man recording his last will and testament. Indeed, Lee said of the album, “I thought I was going to die at that particular time, so those were my last words.” It is indeed a kind of last hurrah. The Love lineup that produced the sound of these classic albums would collapse soon after, and no Love LP would capture the same spark again.
Where “The Daily Planet” bemoans tedium, agitating for something, anything, new to move on to, Lee still boasts of his little community in “Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale.” Contradictions abound; condemnation is bred from understanding, though great comfort is found there too. Though society on the whole is burning to the ground (“The Red Telephone”), little pieces of joy still twinkle brightly (“The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This”).
Forever Changes is a sterling achievement because, like many other sterling achievements, it raises so many issues, so many problems, presents them from a singular point of view (well, most singular–there are two Bryan MacLean songs, which complement the rest amply), and practically relishes its inability to resolve anything. The end track, “You Set the Scene,” gathers everything from the preceding 36 minutes–the ups, the downs, the smiles, the freak-outs–and arrays them attractively by one another.
There’s an ascending feeling of resolution, a sense of realization, but ultimately Arthur Lee just walks off. He asks the requisite questions, makes a few observations, but in the end just throws up his hands. Toward the end of the song is a line as telling as anything on the album: I want to love you, but oh… It echoes into halting dissolution, with Lee longing to embrace his world but still dismayed by its failings. And then soon afterward the album is swept to a close by a pageantry of lush strings and horns. “You Set the Scene”–and by extension, Forever Changes–is traced by darkness but churning within with great wonder, presumably precisely as Arthur Lee felt it. From: https://rockoclock.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/love-you-set-the-scene/
Following the November 1967 release of Love’s Forever Changes album, Arthur Lee—Love’s lead singer and primary songwriter—was forced to reassess his situation.
Forever Changes had failed to sell on release and was not properly recognized in this country for more than a decade. (Elektra Records has never let it go out of print.) The album’s single, “Alone Again Or,” was, as expected, a hit in California but charted nowhere else.
It was now early 1968. Lee’s band, a once-kinetic ensemble now lazy, drugged out, rusty, and drained of confidence, was crumbling around him. Love was never a happy good-time group, instead choosing to anchor itself on the left coast in voluntary isolation, holing up and staying local as other Los Angeles bands traveled the globe.
Racially integrated at a time when such a thing was rare, the daringly eclectic band wore its alienation on its collective paisley sleeve. Some on the Sunset Strip felt that Love should have been called “Hate,” as the band put out strange, aggressive vibes on stage and in its interactions with writers and other musicians. Some of that might have been due to drugs; much was surely due to Lee’s volatile personality.
Now, with 1967 in the mist, Lee switched gears once again. Gone were the lovely string and horn arrangements of Forever Changes, and the jazzy experimentation of the album before, Da Capo, faded even further into memory.
Henceforth, Lee would compete with the harder rock sounds of the day. On January 30, 1968, the fivesome—Lee, Bryan MacLean, and John Echols on guitars, Ken Forssi on bass, and Michael Stuart on drums—gathered in L.A.’s Sunset Sound studio to record a new single.
You couldn’t call the two songs Love recorded that day “commercial.” “Laughing Stock,” which would be the b-side, quoted lyrics from the band’s first 45, “My Little Red Book,” and exaggerated its aggressive stop-start rhythm to an almost parodic level. The ending fade, in which the band literally falls apart, was far too close to the bone.
The a-side, “Your Mind and We Belong Together,” in some ways resembled Forever Changes: it had a typically odd Lee title, it combined several interesting fragments into a sort of suite, and was impossibly sad, as if written by a man watching a dream evaporate like water on a hot day.
I’d like to understand just why I feel like I’ve been through hell
and you tell me I haven’t even started yet.
To live here you’ve got to give more than you get—this I know.
So many people, they just seem to clutter up my mind
And if it’s mine, throw it away. Throw it again, once for my girlfriend.
After months of barely playing, the band wasn’t tight; it took 44 takes to get a perfect (?) recording of “Your Mind and We Belong Together.” Outtakes that Elektra released on its Forever Changes expanded CD indicate that Lee ran a tight ship in the studio and sometimes had to be unpleasant to urge a better performance.
The final product, though, is stunning, an extension of the high-art pop single in the tradition of “Good Vibrations,” “Paint it, Black,” “Whiter Shade of Pale,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever." Lee produced a minor masterpiece.
The multi-part paean to a lost love opens with a zippy folk-rock beat and odd time changes. After a couple of loopy but hypnotic verses, it stumbles into a gorgeous flamenco-like section, and just as suddenly veers back into catchy pop, but with an impossibly dark twist.
I’m locking my heart in the closet. I don’t need it anymore.
You find me behind the door and all of the far-out faces
From long ago, I can't erase this.
Echols’ gritty, sloppy guitar solo takes the record to the fadeout. Elektra’s decision to release this odd, winding, but riveting single, all 4:22 of it, might have been more about letting the notoriously chippy Lee have his way rather than any feeling that the song could actually be a hit. While the record got a bit of airplay on the west coast, it was not a hit in Los Angeles, San Diego, or anywhere in between.
Oddly enough, “Your Mind and We Belong Together” reached #11 on Toledo, Ohio’s top 40 station, an event that can be put down either to incredibly progressive listeners, an aggressive promotion man, a program director with nothing to lose, or pure lunacy.
From: https://tenrecords.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-song-day-love-your-mind-and-we-belong.html
