Love - Forever Changes

Like many people, I look back at music I used to love and listen to and ask myself, "what the hell were you thinking?" In retrospect, very little of the music that was popular in the 60s and 70s was any good. Most was just simple minded noise with some weird electronics mixed in. At best, it had energy and there is something to be said for that, and it certainly beat the crap out of most of what I hear today.

But, there were a few bands and a few albums that really were good and, here and there, a few greats showed up. My vote for the best album of that era goes to, no, not The Beatles insipid Sgt. Pepper, but to an album by a relatively obscure band, Love. The album was called Forever Changes.

Love was an Los Angeles band starting in the mid-60s. There first 2 albums were okay, nothing special, but interesting. Then came Forever Changes, an album that perfectly captured its time. The mood had almost, but not quite, changed from the over the top happy vibe that held sway in those heady days to the later cynical, dark mood. Paranoia was rearing its head, the acid hangover was coming on and the reality that things were not really changing was setting in, yet there was still the vision of how things could be. A tension between idealistic dreams and harsh reality existed in a kind of dynamic tension and Love, led by its quirky and brilliant lead singer and songwriter, Arthur Lee, embraced that tension and produced a masterpiece.

Lee was a young black man from Memphis. On their first album, that's just what he sounded like. On their second album, he sounded like Mick Jagger trying to sound like a young black man from Memphis. On Forever Changes, he changed and for most of the album, sings like, as odd as this may sound, Johnny Mathis, if Johnny Mathis had a head full of LSD. The music is a very baroque folk rock, the guitars are mostly acoustic, and in places, there are strings that fit beautifully and a horn section that calls to mind mariachi music. Yes, it is strange, but, somehow, it works, and the band produced an album of energetic, happy music. Too energetic, and too happy, sort of like many people get on acid.

And that was the point, they wanted to capture that, "I'm wired and happy and I have no idea why" feeling that acid produces and they did it, only to juxtapose that with some extremely unusual, dark, and brilliant lyrics. This is the brilliance of the album. It captures perfectly the vibe of the era, a longing for freedom and fun with an awareness that the fun is about over and the walls are closing in.

Noteworthy on the album are the songs Alone Again Or..., A House Is Not A Motel, the wonderfully gentle and beautiful Andmoreagain, and the stunning Maybe The People Will Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale.

The band never was as big as they should have been, partially because Lee hated touring. After this album, the band broke up. Lee, from time to time, put together other versions of Love and recorded a bit but never did he do such great work again. Like many others, he drifted through periods of substance abuse and legal problems

For years, he refused to perform any of the songs from Forever Changes and would not really talk about it. Finally, not long before he died, of cancer, he put together a band and rehearsed it meticulously and toured, finally performing his masterpiece. When asked why, he said that the songs were just so good that they deserved to be heard again. He also let onto why he was so uncomfortable doing those songs for so long. It seems that during the time he was writing them, he became convinced that he was going to die before long. That certainly explains the intensity. Why could he never produce anything as brilliant again? Well, there have been many artists over the centuries that have one great work in them. They give it all they have and have little left. There are those who are somewhat critical of such artists but I believe it is better to produce one great work than to turn out a bunch of mediocrity.

The album is still available and I urge you to give it a listen, Also, on You Tube, you can find video of some of those later concerts he did featuring those great songs. The performances are stunning. Forever Changes, along with just a handful of other works, is a rare example of art that completely captures its era.