An Appreciation of Arthur Lee and Forever Changes
Freedom, California Bands, and Making Sense of the Sixties
“This is the time and life that I am living/ and I’ll face each day with a smile/ For the time that I’ve been given’s such a little while/ and the things that I must do consist of more than style.”
—Arthur Lee, Forever Changes, 1967
He knew the band was going to hell. The tea leaves were not hard to read. He was spending most of his days in the studio literally waking up his heroin-addled sidemen. Of the lot of them, only his second-in-command and rival, Bryan MacLean, was even functional. And Arthur Lee had something he wanted to say, both about his situation and the world he was living in. His band mates were in the way.
He didn’t particularly like doing it, but his creative vision couldn’t be held captive to the excesses of others. For Arthur’s brand of freedom was, more than anything else, a very personal thing—the freedom to be unpopular, to move beyond any and all social or political constraints. But this personal yearning was now being put at great risk by those who couldn’t handle the unfettered, alternative hippie lifestyle. It was time for a purge. As he later explained, “I knew what needed to be done as far as what I was doing, could these guys keep up with that?”
Elektra Records’ Bruce Botnick, who was helping Arthur produce Forever Changes, sadly agreed. After all, business was business. And, after two albums (Love and Da Capo), Love remained the hottest underground band on the West Coast, the toast of LA’s Sunset Strip.
Unlike John Phillips and Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee was a flamboyant and mesmeric live performer, rated an even better frontman than the up-and-coming Jim Morrison. Arthur oozed a regal, unquestionable charisma, in contrast to the Lizard King’s always-mannered performances; people simply couldn’t take their eyes off him. Love was due to break out. This would be the record that would put them over the top. But Arthur’s masterpiece could only be realized if he had an active, creative group behind him.
That wasn’t going to happen. Even Johnny Echols, Love’s lead guitarist and Arthur’s buddy since they were kids together starting out in the music business, was totally in thrall to the dragon. As Echols later ruefully noted about Forever Changes, “There’s a lot of reasons why it should never even been finished.” There seemed little chance that Love as a unit would continue to exist; more likely someone was going to die before too long. Botnick and Elektra came to the same ruthless but clear-eyed conclusion as Arthur: Love must not be allowed to get in the way of Love becoming famous.
So, as was true earlier for Brian Wilson in making Pet Sounds, Arthur decided to make what was in essence a solo album while retaining the more well-known brand name of his band. Both records were a lot more like French New Wave cinema, then popular with intellectuals and college kids in the States, than traditional pop music: they were founded on the principle of artist as auteur, with the creative genius (be it Arthur, Brian, or French directors Godard or Truffaut) being the hero and focus of the work itself.
This was something really new, in that it was really old. The concept can be traced back to earlier composer-geniuses such as Wagner, Bach, and Beethoven (who Arthur admired). Such a philosophy carried immense creative and artistic risks with it. It could lead to cringe-worthy if not comic results when in the hands of lesser mortals, who looked ridiculous in trying to emulate the gods. But, when the creator was actually up to it, when the myth of the lone genius defying and then conquering the world through his message could be realized, the results were magical.
But to get there, even Arthur as isolated genius needed to be surrounded by competent musicians. He and Elektra acted quickly. Botnick, with Arthur’s backing, fired Johnny Echols, Michael Stuart (drums), and Ken Forssi (bass). Only Bryan Maclean, also a victim of Love’s excess but still standing, uneasily remained.
Immediately, Arthur welcomed aboard veteran session players Billy Strange (guitar), Don Randie (piano), Hal Blaine (drums), and Carol Kaye (bass). It was June 1967, and the new group got right to work, recording two tracks (‘The Daily Planet’ and the beautiful Lee original, ‘Andmoreagain’).
Strung out as they were, the firings worked as a form of shock therapy for the now ex-band. The former members of Love responded to their out-of-the-blue expulsion by pulling themselves together, at least enough to function in the studio as instruments in Arthur’s symphony. As Botnick unsentimentally but accurately put it, the band realized they had blown it, and got their act together.
Arthur was a despot, but generally an enlightened one. For the moment, he graciously pardoned them all, welcoming them back into the fold. But the point had been made. Love was Arthur’s show since his founding of the band in April 1965, when he was only 20. Whatever excesses continued to go on in the band’s communal Laurel Canyon pad— “The Castle,” horror actor Bela Lugosi’s mansion—they would not be allowed to stand in the way of either creativity or commerce.
And there was debauchery a-plenty. Good friends the Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix would drop by and stay for weeks. The band practiced in the library. As Arthur later related about the funhouse, on the rare occasions he made it wearily back to his bedroom, there was a naked chick there damn near every time.
It was not that Arthur had anything against excess; as was true of the rest of the band he reveled in it. But he was not going to let it take control of him in the way it had the others. Freedom to be this crazy was wonderful, but it had to have limits, even if they served the bare minimum of allowing him to be able to make it to the recording studio. Yet, on dwelling on the sadly barren creative fates of his band/roommates even before Forever Changes was really started, Arthur had already personally experienced the excesses of freedom.
The crisis over, shocked back into line, the original Love laid down the other nine tracks on Forever Changes in surprisingly short order between August and September 1967. Michael Stuart, criticized for his conventional drumming on 1966’s Da Capo, never soundedso good, his jazzy and unorthodox beat providing a perfect complement to the new album’s strange and wholly unique sound. Likewise, Echols and Forssi did just what they needed to do on the album, neither overwhelming Arthur’s artistic sensibilities nor proving themselves unworthy of the edgy, challenging material.
Bryan was even better, rising to the creative challenge Arthur not-so-subtly presented. MacLean’s ‘Alone Again Or,’ an off-kilter love song written in honor of his mother and complemented by a flamenco/mariachi sound that befitted her background as a dancer, remains one of the most appreciated tracks on the album, his romantic sensibilities perfectly contrasting with with Arthur’s gloomier, more macabre concerns. Likewise, his other contribution, ‘Old Man,’ while derivative of the Beatles’ ‘Fool on a Hill,’ works as a meditation on unheard prophets and is another fine and unconventional love song. There is no doubt that the personal frictions Bryan had to endure in working with Arthur, as he later admitted, brought out the best in him.
But Bryan was underrated as well; for the rest of his life, Arthur never found another near-equal partner to complement his work. His balance gone, over time Arthur’s first-rate leadership qualities gave way to a more self-obsessed dictatorial style. MacLean was a fine, creative pocket McCartney to Arthur’s Lennon. This was something Brian Wilson, John Phillips, and even to an extent Jim Morrison were sorely lacking. The Lee-MacLean creative partnership is another reason Forever Changes wears a layered, baroque sensibility that most psychedelic music of the time aspired to, but failed to achieve.
Yet there is no doubt that Forever Changes is Arthur’s album, just as Love was Arthur’s band. A musical prodigy, Lee was only 22 years old at the time Forever Changeswas made; he was personally the author of nine of the album’s eleven tracks. Tall and rangy, invariably slouching, walking through the street with one foot bare and the other covered by a moccasin, Arthur was unlikely to ever be overlooked.
Wearing tiny diamond-shaped shades (one lens red, the other blue), and kaleidoscopically colored clothing predating Jimi Hendrix (Arthur grumpily came to believe that his friend had appropriated his dress sense along the way), Arthur was the self-styled, “first black hippie.” Original, complex, temperamental, troubled, volatile—a lone African-American (with the exception of Hendrix) in the very white musical genre of psychedelic music—Lee was endlessly fascinating to those that knew him.
But even by 1967, just two years after Love had taken the Sunset Strip by storm, those who admired him had also come to dread Arthur. For alcohol and drugs made Lee a bully, bringing out the Mr. Hyde in him. As guitarist Mike Randle, a collaborator of Arthur’s at the end of his life said, “When he was sober, he was the sweetest, most giving man on the planet. But I would say he was sober about 15% of the time. The rest was dealing with him and trying to not take it personally.”
His ostensible boss, Jac Holzman of Elektra, agreed. “He was one of those people you know is likely to do something terrible to you or around you but you like him so much and he’s so talented that you always support him”— strong words considering that Holzman worked with that other enfant terrible Jim Morrison. David Anderle, a former Elektra executive, told MOJO in 1997, “I don’t want to say he was demonic, but he was very manipulative and destructive. See, Arthur was not really a hippie, he was more of a punk. There was almost a gangster thing going on there—rule by intimidation. But at the same time he could be so sweet.”
Michael Stuart has made it clear that Arthur had an awful lot of God-given ways to win others over, by fair means and foul. “He liked people to acquiesce to his dominance. When he walked into a room, it was his room. He had his talent, his physical presence, his songwriting ability—a lot of tools to get his way.” But in the end, both his charm and his menace served the same functions for Arthur—they established his leadership on a good day and his dominance on a bad one.
Forever Changes then, for all the fine contributions of others, is Arthur’s album. It is filled with his personal concerns about the experiment in freedom then going on in countercultural circles in the United States. Uniquely, Arthur hadn’t allowed the giddiness of the times to dull his critical senses. While everyone else was singing about incense and peppermints, mindlessly happy that the cultural shackles of the Eisenhower era had been loosened, Arthur was beautifully singing…about the death and the decay he saw all around him, the product of the same freedoms he and others had so recently and fervently celebrated. In making Forever Changes, Arthur demonstrated that he didn’t mind using freedom to be unpopular—as long as he was right.
The contrast between the real beauty and wistfulness of the album and the unalloyed dread of his lyrics, reflecting what Arthur felt about both straight society as well as his hippie allies, gives Forever Changes a shrewd, knowing feeling about societal meltdown, be it the supreme folly of Vietnam, or the drug excesses of his own vampire mansion. This plague-on-both-your-houses vibe makes the record that rarest of things in popular culture: actually wise.
Arthur had the nerve to turn his curious, skeptical mind on himself as well as the ills then plaguing LBJ’s America. Johnny Echols makes clear Arthur had little time for conventional America. “We were living in a strange time—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the police out of control, and Kent State—and our music was actually a mirror-image of the volatility. Arthur and I thought that any day the army was gonna snatch us up and send us over to Vietnam to fight.”
An under-appreciated track on Forever Changes, ‘The Daily Planet,’ reveals Arthur’s disdain for conventional American society in the 1960s; there is little doubt that he sees that the road generally taken leads but to existential despair. It’s a classic straights-baiting track of the sort David Crosby and Dylan used to love to write.
Here again, Arthur plays with the structure of the lyrics to make a unique point; the key to the song is its odd design. There are two rapid-fire verses, followed by two musical bridges and no concluding verse; this song really does paint modern, conventional sixties life as a bridge to nowhere, with the lyrics themselves petering out in confusion, at last blessedly drawing a curtain on the first two verses’ apocalyptic, hopeless wording.
As with the Beatles’ magisterial ‘A Day in the Life’ of the same period, Arthur starts out with a series of mini-narratives, making clear the dullness and futility of modern life. This was the standard hippie/existential critique of the straight world, if delivered with more malice and effectiveness than usual.
The song starts, “Every morning we arise and start the day the same old way.” The conformity of the Eisenhower era has led to a blandness that in turn has morphed the straight world into meaninglessness, echoing French existentialist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre’s observations about the hell of conventional daily life. Arthur gleefully continues the attack, accusing the day— “It’s just a day like all the rest”—of being utterly devoid of importance.
As the first verse moves along, Arthur hits us with the further broadside, “It is oh so repetitious”; images leap to mind of early German expressionist films of the 1920s, where zombie-men perform the same series of menial tasks over and over again, wearing the same drab clothes—not something the peacock-clad Arthur could ever be accused of buying into. The soul-destroying majority has no answers for Arthur, either, as the end of the verse makes devastatingly clear. The straights are merely, “waiting on the sun,” for the day to end, for their lives to end.
Here is where the standard psychedelic rant would come to an end, having made its listeners clear in no uncertain terms that conventional American life was fatally flawed. But Arthur, as ever, goes further, finding in this drab conformity the only possible rationale for the continuance of the madhouse in Vietnam.
In the second verse he focuses his misanthropy on “plastic Nancy” (one can almost see her yellow polka-dot dress and beehive hairdo) buying her kids toys, in a feeble effort to obscure the fact that she’s failing to teach them that life ought to be about a search for real meaning, that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Instead, rampant American consumerism will have to do as the drug likely to dull their senses so they can endure the societal blandness so starkly outlined in the first verse.
But Arthur sees an even worse fate awaiting them. For the toys Nancy’s kids buy will kill time while they are, “waiting on the war.” In other words, they will be numbed into nothingness before actually experiencing it in Indochina. Becoming cannon-fodder in Vietnam was the curse that hung over Arthur and his band mates at the Castle, their greatest fear that they would be called upon to die for conventional society through the propagation of a war that for them made no sense at all. Love, seeing their island of debauchery as their only source of protection against the draft and imminent death in the jungles of Southeast Asia, lived on the razor’s edge.
Part of the uniqueness of Forever Changes lies is its brutal, unflinching honesty. For if Arthur could dissect straight 1960s American society with a scalpel, he also had the good grace to admit he didn’t have the answers. The song — after the two bridges that peter out, both in terms of lyrics and music — simply comes to a rather pleasant if forgettable end, without any sense of resolution.
Love could have continued playing the same even-keeled anodyne riff that concludes the song for another 20 minutes without anyone noticing. The structure makes the point; Arthur ends up lost inside his own head, making Lewis Carroll-like observational non sequiturs, but getting nowhere in terms of some sort of grand plan to supplant the ills of straight life that he is so adept at disparaging.
Much as proved true for the counterculture as a whole, it is easier to critique society and tear down, rather than creatively put something lasting in its place. But a failure to do so leads inevitably to nihilism. And that’s where Arthur and his flatmates at the Castle were so obviously heading.
For if following the dictates of mainstream America was no answer, in Forever Changes Arthur makes clear his increasing doubts about the hippie movement, as well as the doctrine of unfettered freedom it trumpeted. On the album, Arthur speaks of freedom and the movement to further it in romantic terms, as the love of his life that somehow got away and is lost forever.
Believing for whatever weird reason that he was about to die, Arthur made clear that Forever Changes was his last statement on earth; as with Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds (which he consciously emulated) it was the artistic summation of all that he saw around him. Peering out at the world with his drug-crippled band from Lugosi’s fading, gothic mansion, Arthur knew all too well about the damage unconstrained freedom could lead to. Lee is the Norma Desmond and Forever Changes the Sunset Boulevard of the ‘60s: a cautionary, realistic, and frightening tale of American dreams and excess.
Arthur could see ahead to the contradictions that would lead to the demise of the ‘60s experiment with freedom, to the excesses that led to Charles Manson and Altamont, the Rolling Stones concert that began as a paean to flower power and ended in murder. No one else had the foresight, the gift of prophecy. Of course, as is the case for most prophets, Arthur was ignored.
Forever Changes proved as visionary musically as it was lyrically. It is noteworthy that, despite the baroque, intricate, orchestral layering, most of the songs can be played on a single acoustic guitar. Gone are the raging Hendrixian guitar meanderings of the first two albums; in many places Forever Changes is a quiet album, perfectly mirroring Arthur’s gloomy inner reflections.
Underneath all that experimentation there is a rootsiness to the album that makes it feel more substantial than most of the era’s ethereal psychedelia — harkening back to an earlier American musical tradition and prefiguring the direction that groups like The Band and the Grateful Dead would take in the coming years.
Over top of this deceptive simplicity, there is a real Dylanish strain of dread running through the album that you don’t hear much in rock music. It points to a fundamental ambivalence in Lee’s vision about his subject matter. It’s the sound of a man in the middle of a wild party who’s starting to think that maybe its time to get the hell out. His sense that the freedoms opened up by his generation maybe aren’t all fun and games makes it, for all its progressive Christmas wrapping, a rare voice of skepticism from inside the countercultural tent.
Somehow, by a miracle, Arthur had made his record. The greatness of Forever Changes lies in Arthur’s alchemy of creating art out of adversity. In struggling to free himself from the many personal and social constraints that bound him at the time, Arthur’s heroic efforts resulted in a masterpiece. However, the Promethean success of doing so doomed him. Arthur had no more time to waste; it was time for him to move on. But before going, he left us one of the most complicated, questing, original, and enjoyable records ever made.
Arthur’s view of freedom had evolved to the point that it was largely an aesthetic, abstract and very personal concept; he had politically turned his back on the two groups then shouting at each other in America, with more ferocity than clarity—the hippies so rightly damning of the military adventurism that led to people being slaughtered on the far side of the world and the Establishment so rightly pointing out the absence of convincing alternative answers for reconfiguring that world.
Both groups seemed to be in Arthur’s way, imperiling his vision of freedom as primarily the freedom from any social or political constraints, be they placed in his path by either George Wallace or Tom Hayden.
Arthur had freed himself to make an album whose main theme is that the people listening to it—be they straights or hippies—were probably philosophically and emotionally screwed.
Arthur’s bleak, forbidding, ruthlessly honest philosophy was not bound to attract mass adulation. One must remember that most prophets get stoned (so to speak). Forever Changes, Arthur’s jeremiad, proved the rule. Despite the advance hype, which included an eye-catching psychedelic billboard on the Sunset Strip, the record failed to provide the commercial breakthrough that had been so confidently expected. It peaked at a lowly #154 on the Billboard chart, doing slightly better in the UK (where Love was always more popular than in the States), where it topped out at #24.
Forever Changes confused listeners, who saw the future more in terms of the upbeat if somewhat mindless pop music of the time (think the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s ‘Incense and Peppermints’). Forever Changes was skeptical, subtle, difficult, a downer; not words that record storeowners or radio DJs particularly want to hear. Arthur — innovative, fearless, and tragically ahead of his time — certainly grasped the darker days ahead more accurately. But the case remains, artists are rarely rewarded for being right.
Beyond the challenging content, Arthur’s refusal to tour doomed the record. This should have been the band’s finest hour, taking the stage with the strength of the tracks on Forever Changes. For Love had made its name constantly playing live on the Sunset Strip, soaring in the competitive and demanding conditions of LA clubland, which was the West Coast equivalent of the Cavern Club in Liverpool that had incubated so many of the stars of the earlier British invasion.
And it was commonly reckoned that Arthur, for all his prickliness, was one of the best frontmen in the business. But, Arthur, in an act of self-destruction on par with his drug use, personally sabotaged the potential popularity of Forever Changes by simply refusing to tour beyond the cozy womb of L.A.
Years on, Jac Holzman recalled this stunning turn of events with a mixture of bewilderment and anger. “We desperately wanted them on the road. I asked and asked and asked. In California, we sold 150,000 copies of Forever Changes right off the bat, but we just couldn’t convince Arthur to go out. He came to New York once and lasted for a few days before he grabbed a plane back to L.A. Arthur had no drive except in the studio.”
Arthur later said he was just too comfortable in L.A., where he was toast of the town and could effortlessly rest on his considerable laurels. Speculation at the time was that a paranoid Arthur feared being too far away from his vital drug sources, for at a slightly slower rate than the rest of the band he too was descending down the slope from recreational drug use toward definite addiction. Whatever the reason, Love became a West Coast version of the Velvet Underground, more influential and admired by rock aficionados than popularly successful.
Love itself did not survive the commercial disappointment of Forever Changes. Making the record had been such a wrenching experience for all—the sullen and strung-out band members forced to go cap-in-hand to Arthur to save their jobs as well as the dictatorial genius who had morphed into a drill sergeant just to get the record made. Such a process amounted to simply too much emotional wear and tear. As Arthur later said, “I wanted to be the Beatles, the Stones, a real unit, but everybody had different behavior patterns. One guy was this way, another guy was that way, and I’m not Atlas, man, I can’t hold up the world.” After another failed single, the band simply unraveled again, with Arthur, in a fit of rage, firing the lot of them.
But Arthur was losing his balance, too. After the first incarnation of Love, he reformed the band in late 1968 with all new musicians. But the magic was gone. The new Love had a harder sound, heavily influenced by Arthur’s good friend Jimi Hendrix. For the first time, one of the most original men in rock was accused of being creatively derivative, of following someone else’s muse.
There are several reasons for this artistic decline. Arthur was following what would become the all-too-predictable trajectory of rock stars, burning out in the cauldron of drug abuse. This was the very freedom run amok that Arthur had so eloquently warned against in Forever Changes.
Arthur survived a near-death overdose in 1968, but as the years passed his behavior grew increasingly eccentric. Often compared to doomed charismatic frontman Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, Arthur seemed volatile, unstable, and unpredictable when performing live, his innate weirdness only accentuated by drug use. Increasingly known for not honoring his touring commitments, Arthur would walk off stage after fifteen minutes because some overenthusiastic fan in the back of the small venues he was playing would have a video camera. Once again, his disdain for people got in his way.
Accomplishing little of artistic value in the 1970s and 1980s, Arthur would say, “I was gone for a decade. I went back to my old neighborhood [in L.A.] to care for my father, who was dying of cancer. I was tired of signing autographs, I was tired of being BS’d out of my money. I was just tired.” Sounding a lot like Brian Wilson, that other creative West Coast supernova, Arthur had shone so brightly, but just as dramatically faded out.
There is no doubt that Arthur did immolate due to massive drug use, but perhaps his star fell even further for being without the unsung Bryan Maclean. After the band’s disintegration, by late 1968 Arthur scrapped the idea of Love as a real band—the autocrat in him winning out—instead seeing it merely as his backing unit. In so doing, Arthur lost the chemistry that had made the first incarnation of Love the definitive version. Without the creative competition with MacLean that complemented his message and spurred him on to ever-greater artistic heights, Arthur was triumphant, but lost.
And without the discipline of being part of a real collective unit, Arthur had no check on his increasingly drug-fuelled lyrics, which had traveled the short distance from interestingly obscure to incoherent. Arthur, by force of will alone, had pulled Love along to get Forever Changes made. But ironically he would artistically come to miss the source of so much of his personal frustration, his original bandmates.
In the late ‘60s, after the initial commercial and creative failure of the second version of Love, there was some talk of the core group reuniting. Arthur even began playing again and rehearsing with Echols, Stuart, and Forssi. But Bryan Maclean, scarred by his numerous run-ins with Arthur, refused to work with him, instead launching his own ill-fated solo career. As happened the first time, heroin did in the reunion of the rest, with Echols and Forssi, both penniless and wholly in thrall to drugs, pawning the rented equipment they were using to play with Arthur, in order to raise funds for their next score. It was over.
But Forever Changes, like the vampire house where it was conceived, refused to die. Creative talents as far afield as Syd Barrett, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin freely and enthusiastically acknowledged their debt to Arthur’s trailblazing genius. While the album never became a hit, as its cult status grew as one of the truly lasting artistic achievements of the 1960s, it never went out of print, either. It is now simply reckoned as one of the greatest rock albums ever made, and perhaps the greatest that the mass public still knows little about.
Deservedly, Forever Changes is the ultimate cult classic. Looking back on it from the mid- ‘90s, Arthur simply stated, “I have the ability to do just about any kind of music I want to do, and I wasn’t about to compromise.” There is no doubt that Arthur magnificently used the personal freedom he so valued to make an enduring artistic statement; but in the story of Arthur Lee, Love and the making of Forever Changes, freedom’s elemental, Janus-faced nature is starkly clear.
John, I have learned so much from you. Thank you for introducing me to this album! I feel that although we have very different lives, there is a connection to you because of when we were born and raised. We have the same core values. I never knew what it was called, Ethical Realism, until I learned it from you. I know you probably have no memory of me from high school, (and thank goodness we can all leave some memories behind) but I remember you! And my memory is that you were gifted and going places... and I was “precisely correct!” (As you would say!) Thank you for helping me understand this beguiling world! All the best to you and your family!
Sincerely,
Terri