Then Botnick concludes with an apt summary of those impulsive, make-it-up-as-you-go-along times:
- At that time there weren’t any precedents for anybody. There weren’t your star musicians of rock ’n’ roll that everyone felt necessary to conform to. So everybody just played. It was music from your brain, from your heart.That’s why it was so great.
It’s the kind of experimental, impromptu spirit that led to “Seven and Seven Is,“ which, as Botnick remembers, was a “hellish thing to play,” capped off toward the blues-based end with “an atom bomb blast which a friend of mine recorded in Nevada.” Jac Holzman, president of Elektra who first signed Love, goes on in his portion of the liner notes to recall other "Seven" innovations and problems, not the least of which was the unheard-of belief that “the song had almost too much energy.”
(It also had its share of surreal but evocative "float downstream" lyrics: "Through a crack of light I was unable to find my way / Trapped inside a night but I'm a day and I go
Oop-ip-ip oop-ip-ip, yeah!" But whatever quirks of the song and snags in recording, it was well worth the painstaking effort, and such a frenzied and frantic execution, unusual for the era, must be heard to be believed.)
However, such a casual musical camaraderie as Botnick describes can turn quickly competitive, as Holzman points out in his contention that more than a little resentment started to eat away at “the charming and uncommonly smart” but enigmatic Lee when he perceived other groups, such as the Doors, the Leaves, and the Music Machine, co-opting Love’s style and going on to have bigger hits.
But as Lee himself expands upon the notion, there were a lot of indoor fireworks causing Love to tear itself apart, and whatever success they gained was soon lost of their own accord, or disaccord, as it were: “After we started making money, the more we made, the less we worked, the less we were a unit, and Love deteriorated.”
The inevitable downward spiral kicked in when “People’s personal habits started to come before the music.” Big egos weren't left at the studio door, material possessions weren't left unimagined or unattained — but Lee didn’t merely fingerpoint and leave himself out of the fray and fraying remnants: "Money spoiled them — it spoiled me too. It was a strange time. I thought I was gonna kick the bucket. But you still gotta keep on.”
Something the erratic Lee did with uneven and sporadic results until dying of leukemia August 3.
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