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: 'Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles'

A few months ago I reviewed Joel Selvin's Hollywood Eden, an interesting, well-written chronicle of the earliest days of L.A.'s fertile rock scene in the sixties. Because that book halted just as Brian Wilson created "Good Vibrations" and the scene was really about to take off, I described Hollywood Eden as "an extended prologue" and ended the review by suggesting that "further reading is required to learn the complete story of why LA was so important to sixties rock."  

Published four years before Hollywood Eden, Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles could be that further reading. William McKeen's book covers the same period Selvin's does (though with fleeter feet through the 1950s run-up to the main story and a lot less focus on dopey Jan and Dean), but then he moves beyond the point L.A. really exploded. Selvin cuts his tale short just as The Byrds and Mamas and Papas were getting together. Key L.A. artists such as Buffalo Springfield and The Doors and Joni Mitchell, never get to jump in Selvin's sandbox. However, they're all on board for Everybody Had an Ocean, and instead of Jan and Dean, the far more artistically and commercially pivotal Beach Boys become the track on which the narrative rolls. Natch, that narrative rolls into some pretty dark places as Brian Wilson loses his grip on his group and brother Dennis runs into a certain charismatic psychopath with a grudge against producer Terry Melcher.

McKeen's writing also brims with humor, vulgarity, and the willingness to confront the artists' myriad flaws--all the things a rock writer should bring to the table. I wish he'd given more attention to at least two key L.A. artists: Love, who (with the exception of Brian Wilson, and arguably, The Byrds) made better records than any of McKeen's mostly white main cast of characters, and The Monkees, a massively popular, massively weird group that could not have sprouted anywhere but L.A. Oddly, Selvin's two pages on Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter are riddled with errors (he states that it took The Monkees a couple of years to take control of their music when it was closer to six months, suggests non-instrumentalist Davy Jones had "musical chops" Micky Dolenz lacked, and repeats Mike Nesmith's line that The Monkees outsold The Beatles and Stones combined as if it was fact, though Nesmith later admitted he was bullshitting). So maybe it's for the best the author didn't devote more time to them. These mistakes also made me question some of the other factoids McKeen lays down, but there's still no question that Everybody Had an Ocean is a highly entertaining read. It's now being published in paperback for the first time.

Farewell, Hal Blaine

A session musician becoming a household name is almost unheard of, but the name "Hal Blaine" is probably as close as it comes. This is the guy who thumped out what may be the most iconic beat of all: the two bass hits/one snare snap that launched "Be My Baby". That startling moment is just one of many, many startling ones. 

The list of songs Blaine helped bring to life is absolutely staggering. He was responsible for scattering majestic fills all over Simon & Garfunkel's "America". He brought orchestral grandeur to Pet Sounds and SMiLE. He funked up The Monkees' "Mary Mary". He pummeled out those rolls that make Neal Hefti's "Batman Theme" go POW! That's him on Elvis's "Bossa Nova Baby", The Association's "Along Comes Mary", The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Hungry", Love's "Andmoreagain", The Mamas and Papas' "Go Where You Wanna Go", The Crystals "Da Doo Ron Ron", The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man", The Vogue's "You're the One"... the theme from Three's Company! Phil Spector and Brian Wilson would have been nowhere without Hal Blaine. By his own estimation, he played on some 6,000 tracks.

Blaine was also a big personality, as evidenced in the numerous documentaries to which he contributed his memories, such as The Wrecking Crew! and Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of SMiLE. Sadly, the world just lost that beat and that personality because Hal Blaine died at the age of 90 yesterday. You can't say the guy didn't live a full life though.

Big Box of Love's 'Forever Changes' Coming

Rhino missed the mark by several months when naming its upcoming Forever Changes box set the '50th Anniversary Edition', but better late than never I suppose. On April 6th, the label will pay tribute to Love's highly influential and still wonderful 1967 masterpiece with a set containing 4 CDs, 1 DVD, and 1 vinyl LP. 

The CDs feature the newly remastered original stereo mix, the original mono mix, the 2008 alternate mix from Rhino's 40th Anniversary set, and a collection of singles and outtakes on Disc Four. The DVD is mostly audio with a high-resolution version of the new stereo remaster as well as a rare promo video for the "Your Mind and We Belong Together" single. The vinyl features the stereo mix as well.

Each disc adheres to the same track listing of the original album except for Disc Three, which contains "Wonder People (I Do Wonder)" as a bonus track, and Disc Four, which includes:

1. Wonder People (I Do Wonder)
2. Alone Again Or (Single Version) 
 3. A House Is Not A Motel (Single Version) 
 4. Hummingbirds (Demo)
5. A House Is Not A Motel (Backing Track)
6. Andmoreagain (Alternate Electric Backing Track)
7. The Red Telephone (Tracking Sessions Highlights)
8. Wooly Bully (Outtake)
9. Live And Let Live (Backing Track)
10. Wonder People (I Do Wonder) (Outtake, Backing Track) (*)
11. Your Mind And We Belong Together (Tracking Sessions Highlights)
12. Your Mind And We Belong Together 13. Laughing Stock
14. Alone Again Or (Mono Single Remix)

Review: 'Psychedelia: 101 Iconic Underground Rock Albums 1966-1970'

LSD has a tendency to confuse the senses, so it’s no coincidence that pop’s most acid-soaked years birthed its most visual music. The late sixties’ psychedelic discs often came housed in fluorescent, marvelously garish sleeves, but nothing more than the sounds in the grooves was necessary to paint multicolor images in listener’s minds. Sgt. Pepper’s, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Disraeli Gears, Axis: Bold As Love, and The Doors are among the most celebrated of these trippy masterworks, but as Richard Morton Jack hips us with his new book Psychedelia: 101 Iconic Underground Rock Albums 1966-1970, there was a lot more happening in the acid era.

Frankly, I am ashamed to admit how puny a percentage of Morton Jack’s picks I’ve heard, but I will admit that’s a good thing. Any book of this sort is useless without recommending unfamiliar music, and the hunt was on after reading the write ups on obscurities such as The David’s majestic Another Day, Another Lifetime, The Millennium’s sunny and wonderful  Begin, and The Fallen Angels’ haunting (though not exceptionally psychedelic)  It’s a Long Way Down. Yes, I missed inclusion of personal favorites such as The Monkees’ Head, The Rascals’ Once Upon a Dream, Shine on Brightly by Procol Harum, and The Who Sell Out (which received similar short shrift in another recent Sterling Publishing publication), but of course, I’ve already heard those albums. Still, Morton Jack’s details are intriguing enough that I may have learned a thing or two about these old favorites had he decided to include them.

Each entry follows a similar format beginning with a bit of background history, details about and critique of the given album (no, the author does not love every album he selects), quotes from participants, and excerpts from period reviews. I wasn’t aware that The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow and Love’s Forever Changes—two widely acclaimed classics now—were so poorly received in their days. We also get a slew of large-scale, full-color images of the genre’s vibrant album covers, which may explain why such pics were missing from that other recent Sterling book to which I referred earlier. Illuminating and suitably visual, Psychedelia: 101 Iconic Underground Rock Albums is a coffee table book that may inspire you to substitute that cup of coffee with something “a bit more potent.”*

*I’m talking about acid. You might want to take some acid while reading this book.

Psychobabble's 20 Greatest One and No-Hit Wonders of 1966!

1966 was the final year in which the 45 rpm single was the unchallenged dominating force in Rock & Roll. Although that year included such major statements as Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, and Pet Sounds, the L.P. didn’t become the ultimate Rock delivery system until the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in mid-1967. 1966 was a year flooded with amazing singles from Rock’s most popular artists—“Paperback Writer”, “Good Vibrations”, “Paint It Black”, “Substitute”, “Eight Miles High”, to name just a few—but groups that never achieved the celebrity of The Beatles or The Stones contributed just as integrally to the rainbow quilt of ’66 pop. Some of these groups went on to develop mighty cult reputations. Some sank into obscurity. But they all made at least one monumental statement, whether it climbed into the top forty or not. Here are twenty of the most incredible one-off hits and flops of 1966.

Note: I had to amend my original list when I learned that Question Mark and the Mysterians had a #22 hit in the U.S. with “I Need Somebody” and Los Bravos hit #16 in the U.K. with “I Don’t Care”. That’s why “96 Tears” and “Black Is Black” didn’t make the final cut even though they’re often remembered as the work of one hit wonders.

20. “Why Don’t You Smile Now” by The Downliners Sect

While Lou Reed and John Cale were infecting the New York underground with their new band, Twickenham’s The Downliner’s Sect were attempting to climb the charts on the other side of the pond. They’d heard “Why Don’t You Smile Now” in demo form, perhaps unaware it had already flopped for R&B group The All Night Workers. The Downliners’ reimagining of the song as a hard-driving, echo-laden variation on “Louie Louie” didn’t win them a hit either, but its status as an early co-composition by Reed and Cale, who’d been grinding out made-to-order ditties for the Pickwick label, guaranteed its place in history. Its relentless fuzzy funk guaranteed its status as one of the great misses of 1966.


19. “Fight Fire” by The Golliwogs

With its nagging riff, hip-shaking percussion, pulsing rhythm, and mid-song freak-out, “Fight Fire” is the quintessential 1966 rocker. Yet San Francisco’s Golliwogs failed to turn it into a hit. No matter. A 1968 change in name and musical approach resulted in one of the biggest and best bands of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s: Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Fight Fire” isn’t as monumental as “Green River”, “Fortunate Son” or “Up Around the Bend”, but it is early and convincing evidence of John Fogerty’s songwriting talents… especially when played alongside The Golliwogs’ otherwise weak output.


18. “Eventually” by The Peanut Butter Conspiracy

With their universal love philosophy and ultra-dated psychedelic moniker, The Peanut Butter Conspiracy seem like prime candidates for irrelevance. But

The Ten Best Old Albums That Were New to Psychobabble in 2010

I may purport myself to be some sort of authority on classic Rock & Roll, psych, pop, and punk records, but in reality, there are lots and lots and lots of them I’ve never heard. Nevertheless, I’m happy to say that I’m still discovering great old albums that are new to me, whether I’ve long heard about them but have yet to give them a spin or I’d never even been aware of their existences. Here are the ten finest retro-rock records that were new to me in 2010, presented in glorious chronological order...

1. We Are Ever So Clean by Blossom Toes (1967)



Having long read about We Are Ever So Clean, a real cult favorite of British psychedelia, I was a bit disappointed on first listen. “When the Alarm Clock Rings”, which concludes Rhino’s Nuggets II box set, was all I knew from Blossom Toes prior to hearing their only LP, so I was a bit taken off guard by how thoroughly daffy, and often cacophonous, it is. I’m glad I gave the record a number of additional spins. Now it sounds perfectly conceived, and that includes the more insane tracks, such as the borderline grating “The Remarkable Saga of the Frozen Dog” and “Look at Me I’m You”, which sounds like William Burroughs diced up the master tapes of Revolver, and reassembled them willy nilly. Still, the album’s best songs are its most straightforward. There’s the rousing “When the Alarm Clock Rings”, “I’ll Be Late For Tea”, a marvelous Kinks pastiche that fuses that band’s early heaviness with their mid-‘60s pastoralism, the groovy “Telegram Tuesday”, “What’s It For”, with its chugging cellos, and the Move-esque “I Will Bring You This and That”. Definitely the psychedelic find of the year.


2. Pandemonium Shadow Show by Harry Nilsson (1967)



I probably wouldn’t have given Harry Nilsson his fair shake if my friend and occasional collaborator Jeffrey Dinsmore hadn’t insisted I do so. I like “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Coconut” (more because it was used to great effect at the end of Reservoir Dogs than anything else) well enough, but “Daddy’s Song” and “Cuddly Toy” are not among my favorite Monkees songs and “Without You” makes me barf. Because Jeffrey was a former Nilsson skeptic, himself, I agreed to check out Pandemonium Shadow Show. This is a terrific vaudeville record, much closer in spirit to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band than a lot of records to which The Beatles’ album are often compared. Really, the predominant sound of Pepper’s is not psychedelia but old-timey music hall, so Pandemonium Shadow Show sounds much more Peppery than, say, Their Satanic Majesties Request. And not only did the Fabs inspire Nilsson, but he pays direct tribute to them when he covers “She’s Leaving Home” and cheekily mangles a variety of their songs in the hilarious mishmash “You Can’t Do That”. “River Deep, Mountain High” has been covered by too many people who aren’t Tina Turner, Nilsson’s version of “Cuddly Toy” is just marginally better than The Monkees’, and “Ten Little Indians” was neither a good song in the hands of its creator or The Yardbirds, who recorded the most famous rendition during their Jimmy Page period. The rest of the album is phenomenal though. “Sleep Late, My Lady Friend” is the lullaby Bacharach and David always wanted to write. Gil Garfield and Perry Botkin’s show-tuney “There Will Never Be” is an instant standard. Sparsely arranged with cello, bass, and flute, “Without Her” is a haunting melding of baroque and jazz balladry. The masterpiece of this collection is “1941”, an elegiac lament about Nilsson’s abandonment by his father (a recurring theme in his work that did not prevent him from pulling the same shit on his own first born). The album’s ultimate endorsement is that it won Nilsson a quartet of Liverpudlian super-fans, three of whom personally called him to tell him how much they loved his latest record.


3. The Natch’l Blues by Taj Mahal (1968)

January 11, 2010: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: Love

With the exception of Hawthorne natives The Beach Boys, Love was the greatest group ever to sprout in Los Angeles. Before shouting “What about The Byrds?”, who surely had more international influence (unlike Love, The Byrds did not refuse to tour outside their hometown) and released more great albums, I’d like to point out that Love had their share of far-ranging influence (particularly on The Rolling Stones) and released three albums that stand as a greater LP-run than any triad of Byrds albums. The Byrds vs. Love issue is of particular relevance considering what a profound influence The Byrds had on Love’s debut album, which is rich in jangly twelve-string folk rock and features a song that cops the oft-copied “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” riff. But whereas The Byrds’ sound evolved gradually— only changing radically on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, their marvelous 1968 exploration of bluegrass and C&W— each of Love’s greatest albums was a jagged departure from their previous record, and each one took both their personal style and Rock & Roll as a whole in a completely new and electrifying direction.

Even Love novices know that the reputation of their album, Forever Changes, looms over everything else the band did previously and subsequently. Forever Changes is, indeed, Love’s masterpiece, a sumptuous, poetic, and straight-up weird monument of folk-rock and light-psychedelia; a must-listen cult classic that can sit proudly alongside The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle and The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. But is it the best place to form a Love habit?



On Rhino’s recently released Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968, Love are represented by “You Set the Scene”, the winding, mysterious epic that served as the climax of Forever Changes. Yet they also make an appearance earlier in the set with “You I’ll Be Following”, a raw power-pop number from their eponymous debut album. Eleven years earlier, Rhino tossed Love’s most well-known song, the jittery, acid-rush “7 and 7 Is”, into the stew of its first Nuggets box. These three tracks from three different albums sound as though they were recorded by three different bands, and each is a fine representative of the album from which it was picked. Certainly the most demanding of these is “You Set the Scene”, and it accurately indicates Forever Changes’ lack of immediacy.

Forever Changes was the first Love album I heard, and with that first listen, I wasn’t quite sure what the hype was about. It seemed to be a pleasant enough collection of acoustic folk. Lead-Lover Arthur Lee and cohort Bryan Maclean had pleasant enough voices. The string arrangement were certainly nice, but the record didn’t exactly knock my stockings off. It was only with multiple listens that the brilliance of Forever Changes—it’s intricate structures, hauntingly bizarre and morbid lyrics (Lee convinced himself he only had a short time to live, and his obsession with his erroneously eminent demise drives his strange lyricism), and utter uniqueness—fully emerged for me. As a result of the long gestation of Forever Changes, I did not snatch my next Love record for several years. Had I begun with either Love or Da Capo I might have wholeheartedly fell in Love a lot sooner. Both albums are immediately appealing in ways that Forever Changes is not, yet both have their own unique sound—and their own unique flaws that may affect which one will be your best doorway into this essential group.


Love (1966), the band’s catchiest, simplest, poppiest record, suffers slightly from derivativeness. Da Capo and Forever Changes sound quite unlike anything else that preceded them. Love sounds a whole lot like The Byrds and The Rolling Stones. On “Can’t Explain”, Lee nicks the main riff from The Byrds’ “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and much of the lyric, rhyme-scheme, and melody of The Stones’ early LP-cut “What a Shame”. Now, as far as heavily derivative albums go, Love is one of the greatest. Each of its 14 tracks is bracing and infectious, and the moments of quiet, insightful, acoustic folk keep the proceedings from sounding excessively samey. And if you’re a Byrds or early-Stones fanatic, you’ll find much to love about Love.

Da Capo, however, sounds like no other band on this or any other planet. Its fusion of baroque complexity, amphetamine tempos, lysergic noise, jazzy experimentation, and vivid lyricism makes it one of the hardest rocking pure-psychedelic albums of psychedelia’s zenith year of 1967. The Stones were certainly dazzled enough to return Love’s petty thievery by stealing elements from “She Comes in Colors” for their own “She’s a Rainbow”.

Lee also contended that The Stones ripped off his band with “Goin’ Home”, the centerpiece of their 1966 LP Aftermath. “Goin’ Home” is a lengthy, bluesy improv that bears a resemblance to Love’s “Revelation” that could hardly be coincidental. Lee said that Jagger and his cronies saw Love perform the marathon-length “Revelation” live in ’66 before The Stones cut the allegedly derivative “Goin’ Home”, but his timeline doesn’t jibe: The Stones recorded their number in late ’65. Regardless of who is the true author of “Revelations”/“Goin’ Home”, neither is a high point of either band’s respective career, and “Revelations” is the one major flaw of Da Capo. On the flip of what is probably the most superb side of music on any Love album is the side-long, 17-minute, excruciatingly dull “Revelations”. Had Lee and company been able to put together another six songs as revelatory as the ones on Side A of Da Capo for its second side, the album surely would have been the band’s masterpiece. Still, that first side remains more instantly gratifying than Forever Changes, so I’m going to recommend getting your Love-affair started with Da Capo.


Following the release of Forever Changes, Arthur Lee disbanded the original Love line-up and put together a group of less individual musicians, most significantly losing Bryan Maclean, who wrote some of Love’s most enduring songs, including the gorgeous “Softly to Me” on their first album, “Orange Skies” from Da Capo, and “Alone Again, Or”, the most well-known track on Forever Changes. Historians and critics tend to dismiss the second coming of Love outright, and although the group lost some of its delightful quirkiness in favor of a less imaginative acid-rock path, I recommend you also check out Four Sail, the group’s first record from their second incarnation. Four Sail may not be as consistently dazzling as Love’s first two-and-a-half albums, but “Robert Montgomery”, “Your Friend and Mine – Neil’s Song”, “Nothing”, and several other tracks still show off Lee's mastery of tangy chord structures and outclass much of what his contemporaries were doing in 1969. Definitely deserving of a listen.