The Tender Brutality of Arthur Lee and Love

When I crossed paths with the mercurial bandleader, his star was barely flickering. Two decades after his death, he’s revered as an avatar of psychedelic rock—and a cautionary tale of self-sabotage.

Arthur Lee did not look well. 

It was October 3rd, 1994. I was in the opening band for his performance at The Black Cat, the storied nightclub in Washington, D.C. When he finally showed up—late, of course—his face was drawn, eyes refusing to fix on anything too long. When my bandmate, Jesse Quitslund, tried to engage with him after soundcheck, all he got was deflection:

“Hi, Mr. Lee,” he said. “I’m so honored to be playing with you tonight! My name’s Jesse.”

“Jesse James was my grandfather,” snapped Lee, by way of a conversation-ender, and strode off.

The story of rock ’n roll is littered with unsung heroes, pioneers, and straight-up madmen, but few cast as long a shadow as Arthur Taylor Lee, frontman of the ‘60s Los Angeles band Love. This August 3rd marked 18 years since his passing, years in which his legend has only continued to grow.

Then again, that’s not saying much. For most of his life, Arthur Lee’s renown had nowhere to go but up. Love—the band—was more a theory than a working practice, and outside of a loyal following in its mid-60s heyday there were precious few rewards for the band’s labors: A handful of reasonable chart positions and occasional airplay, but little to no financial acclaim, even after their 1967 album Forever Changes—a record now justly revered as a classic. 

Following Forever Changes, the essential lineup of the band quit (or were fired) by Lee, who’d spent the next couple of decades issuing a sporadic series of solo albums and half-hearted reboots, none of which garnered—or, frankly, deserved—much attention. 

So: Why celebrate Arthur Lee now?

What about this troubled—and often troublemaking—man deserves our attention? At its best, Lee’s music embraced contradiction in all its messy, confusing glory. There were the musical styles he blended with utter fluidity—rock, folk, proto-punk, psychedelia, baroque pop, jazz and flamenco—but it’s his ability to embody toughness and vulnerability in equal measure that feels even more revolutionary. Lee’s songs were simultaneously a high point of ‘60s rock and a bursting through into something timeless and ineffable. 

As a Black kid who spent much of his childhood in South Central Los Angeles, Lee adopted a tough, streetwise veneer; as he later put it: “I don’t like violence but I love to fight.” The twist, of course, was that he named his band “Love,” and that their presentation was a perfect distillation of mid-‘60s West Coast hipster cool. Often as not, Lee’s pugilism left others bewildered, or worse. As one shaken San Francisco promoter said after a particularly traumatic booking: “They shouldn’t be called ‘Love’; they should be called ‘Fist’!”

And yet Lee’s lyrics betray a deep, uncomfortably raw sensitivity. “Signed D.C.”, from Love’s 1966’s debut, is as harrowing and honest a song about addiction as you’ll ever hear. Elsewhere, songs like the delicate "¡Que Vida!” from late 1966’s Da Capo display Lee’s idiosyncratic gift for playful and inventive lyrical twists. But then, one song later, Lee delivers “Seven and Seven Is,” one of the fiercest musical blasts of the decade. Stripped of all the era’s frills and ornamentation, it’s a shot of pure adrenaline—and a clear precursor to the punk wave then still a decade in the future.

Listen to how Lee splits lines of verse—a tactic he uses all over the first side of Forever Changes—twisting expectations just when you expect relief, as in “The Red Telephone”:

Sitting on a hillside

Watching all the people….

Die

Or how backing vocals break through (and over) his own, as in “The Daily Planet”:

I can see you

With no (hands/face)…

You’re my (heart/face)

The technique lends the words a fractal and ambiguous cast, as well as being, in this case, fairly creepy.

If Love’s commercial profile was never particularly robust, the band’s influence ran far and wide. Sharp jabs like “My Flash on You,” an unironic rejection of the addictions that would bedevil many of the band members— Lee included—were catnip for aspiring garage rockers. But more established musicians were taking note as well. According to Ray Manzarek of The Doors:

“[Jim] Morrison turned to me and said, ‘You know, Ray, if we could be as big as Love, man, my life would be complete.’ I thought Love was one of the hottest things I ever saw. They were the most influential band in Los Angeles…we all thought it was just a matter of time before Love conquered America.”

Jimi Hendrix was another fan, and briefly collaborated with Lee; it’s highly possible the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” was influenced by Lee’s “She Comes in Colors,” an achingly lovely meditation on vision, projection, and transparency. Or, typically of Lee, perhaps none of these things.

It’s this refusal to be defined, to continually deflect labels and stereotypes, that made Arthur Lee such a compelling artist—and such a frustrating figure. Forever on the edge of widespread recognition, he would invariably sabotage it, firing his collaborators, skipping performances, or employing any other number of artful sidesteps to dodge the success he so rightfully felt he deserved.

Lee did experience a taste of this acclaim late in his life, but it wasn’t without its complications. Interest in the music of the ‘60s had bubbled quietly in the underground ever since the decade’s passing, and in the early ‘90s Lee put together a backing band and toured, something he’d been loath to do in his heyday. 

Hence my brief interaction with him that October night thirty years ago.

After our set, I positioned myself at the front of the stage to watch. As Lee’s backing band—Los Angeles’ Baby Lemonade—ran through a best-of from his catalog, Lee sometimes seemed fully immersed in the music, passion intact and in fine voice. Other times, his spirit seemed to leave the room entirely, his eyes widened as some inner turmoil took over.

Eventually, he broke. Midway through one song, Lee suddenly fled the stage and fairly ran down the stairs to the backstage. The band exchanged knowing, exasperated glances and vamped for a few minutes until Lee returned, sauntering onstage with a cheshire cat grin that signalled everything was super-cool and under control.

It wasn’t. The remaining dozen-odd years of Arthur Lee’s life would be a tragicomic admixture of highs and lows: A prison sentence for a firearms crime (this on top of previous convictions for arson and assault); sold-out performances at venues like London’s Royal Festival Hall, complete with string and horn sections to flesh out the majestic, towering arrangements of Forever Changes; bailing out on tours while still on the jetway. And finally, the diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of blood cancer. He was just 61 years old.

Forever Changes is the perfect vantage point from which to get to know Love, and also to bid farewell to Arthur Lee. At the end of the record’s second track, the deeply unsettling “A House Is Not a Motel”—inspired in part by an interaction with a traumatized soldier just back from Vietnam—the band launches into interstellar overdrive. A martial drum break, a phalanx of electric guitars, and an urgent clarion call: an apocalyptic two-note figure fracturing into the beautiful, messy chaos of Arthur Lee’s imagination. Out, out, far out in the cosmos to which it beckons, where its creator—one hopes—has finally found some peace.