Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out of focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...
I guess if you’re going to pontificate and opine about the late Arthur Lee and Love, it may be more de rigueur to delve into the 24 pages of commentary that accompanies the 2001 expanded "deluxe" reissue of Forever Changes from 1967, a classic blend of psychedelia-tinged folk-rock.
Trouble is, I don’t own a copy. But moreover, any Love album that doesn’t have the great and sonically astounding pre-punk adrenalin rush that is “Seven and Seven Is” calls attention to the fact that it doesn’t have the great and sonically astounding pre-punk adrenalin rush that is “Seven and Seven Is.” That it is, therefore, too unrepresentative and lacking.
That "Seven"-graced album of note would be Da Capo, from earlier in ‘67. But since The Best of Love incorporates that earlier synapse-singeing single with songs from Forever Changes and from such other albums as the self-titled 1966 debut (with its tragically catchy oldies staple, a cover of the Bacharach/David’s “My Little Red Book”), I’m going to go with the liner notes from the 1980 Rhino compilation, the one-stop Love shopping LP that addresses most of my multi-album needs.
The liner notes of The Best of Love are comprised of contributions from a few Love connections, plus Lee himself. First up, Bruce Botnick, engineer of most of Love’s first three albums and producer of Forever Changes (originally planned with Neil Young as co-producer) gets right to the heart of Lee’s eccentricities and their effects on the band and the music. “He was real unusual,” notes Botnick, “on acid 24 hours a day. In fact, everybody is the band was out of it.”
Botnick goes on to recount a psychological ploy he used to get the undisciplined and increasingly unfocused group motivated during the Forever Changes sessions, including but not limited to the move of bringing in prominent studio musicians such as Hal Blaine and Billy Strange. Before this strategy got too entrenched, however, Love rallied: “The band was so shocked, so put out, so hurt, that it caused them to forget about their problems and become a band again.” Stoned and spaced-out rock stars need love, too.
Unfortunately Botnick eventually came to see the band's decline, the lack of “the craziness and rawness” that was Love as their passion disintegrated to the point where Lee “eventually formed a new Love.” But Botnick did get in more than a few fondly-remembered Forever flourishes while he could, such as is described in his declaration that the mariachi feel on Bryan Maclean’s distinctive “Alone Again Or” was a carry-over inspiration from Botnick’s work with the Tijuana Brass.
Article comments