Arthur Lee

While my attention was otherwise occupied this weekend, very sad news was delivered. Arthur Lee, frontman and primary songwriter for Love, died of leukemia on Thursday. His career was overwhelmingly made up of ups and downs (certainly with far more downs than he needed) but his ups--primarily the Love album Forever Changes--are transcendent. It's a cliche to say as much, but Lee and Love were far ahead of their time. It doesn't seem like such a big deal these days, but Lee, an African-American, led one of the first integrated rock bands. They were very low key about that status--it was just the way the band was.

But Lee was far in advance of musical trends, as well. Forever Changes came out in 1968, and although it was acclaimed and sold well in Britain at the time, it had limited success on this side of the Atlantic. It was a good twenty or twenty-five years before it routinely started showing up on critics' all-time album lists. (Here it is coming in at #40 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 from a few years ago.) While they were making their masterpiece, Lee and his bandmates were also expanding their minds (as was the fashion of the time), and Lee grew to be little more than a recluse. He refused to tour in support of the album (or to venture very far from his house for any reason), and the band fell apart.

Lee continued to record (sometimes under the Love name with other musicians), but he was never able to recapture the chemistry he'd had with the Forever Changes line up of the band. He also had some run-ins with the law and spent much of the '90s in a California jail cell under that state's "three strikes you're out" law. Released in 2001, he finally organized a tour for Forever Changes (which I was fortunate enough to see when it came through Chicago) and received the acclaim he deserved. Although it might've seemed like a nice set up for a happy ending, Lee remained troubled, and his leukemia diagnosis followed much too quickly.

You can find a number of remembrances and appreciations of Lee around the Web. Rolling Stone has a fairly detailed one, and Doors drummer John Densmore recalls the Sunset Strip scene in this morning's LA Times (Lee recommended the Doors to Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra Records). Read about Forever Changes from The Village Voice and Sun-Times rock critic Jim DeRogatis. Take in an Arthur Lee video at YouTube. Or, what the heck, go buy the expanded edition of Forever Changes if you don't already own it. It's the least Arthur Lee deserves.