Review: 'Forever Changes: The Authorized Biography of Arthur Lee and Love'

Love was the greatest American band of the sixties to never score a national hit. Arising from an LA scene that spat out superstars like The Byrds, The Doors, and Buffalo Springfield, Arthur Lee and company were widely regarded as the godfathers of the Sunset Strip. Jimi Hendrix admired Lee; Jim Morrison worshipped him. Even the Stones borrowed liberally from Love (although the reverse is true, too). Love’s first three albums, particularly 1967’s Forever Changes, are regarded as a triptych masterpiece even though each section is completely unlike the others. 

Yet Love has not endured as their contemporaries have because Lee refused to play the major label game. He hated flying and being jarred out of LA— where he lived in a castle, was regarded as royalty, and the mixed-race nature of his band wasn’t a major issue— so he refused to tour. His controlling, stubborn, angry, paranoid nature alienated many of the people who most wanted him to succeed. Eventually he became a serious coke addict who chastised his bandmates for their drug use. 

Review: 'Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child'

In the introduction to their new book, Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child, Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik point out that "virtually no one claimed to know Hendrix." This sort of absolves them from digging any deeper than the myriad existing books exploring the life of the guitar genius (at least 300, according to the curator of an exhaustive Hendrix website). However, their oral history approach makes one hope they might uncover something new, something personal, something that sheds at least a little new light on what made Jimi Hendrix so different, so innovative, so remarkable. Yet, even his own sister, Janie, doesn't provide any revelations. More often than not, the book's contributors react to Hendrix, like rubes recounting sightings of UFOs speeding over cornfields. He was shy. He was visually striking. He had trouble with audiences who wanted to put him in a box (more than once he is frustrated with dum-dums shrieking for "Purple Haze" while he has other things to express). He was brilliant. 

This isn't a knock against Voodoo Child, because anyone who has ever seen the special edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind knows how disappointing it is to go inside the UFO. Some mysteries are worth preserving, and if few got close to Hendrix, that fact ultimately may be the story to tell. And the Kuberniks do interview or quote people who personally knew Hendrix: producer Eddie Kramer, fellow black artist in a white scene Johnny Echols, bandmate Billy Cox, tour-mate Micky Dolenz, friend and rival Pete Townshend, and so on. Even Janie Hendrix says that she has been learning more about her own brother by curating his legacy as president of the Experience Hendrix company. Oddly, there are quotes from neither Mitch Mitchell nor Noel Redding, whom Moody Blue Justin Hayward speculates may be the only people who really knew Hendrix.

Voodoo Child is also a great-looking book, a small-scale yet photo-filled hardcover as resplendent in color as one of Hendrix's outfits or guitar solos. You may not learn anything from it, but you'll love looking at it.