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(TV) Part 1B
It is also hard, almost excruciating, to imagine
the kid who nearly defined L.A. freak style, the
singer who wore the crazy glasses and just one
buckskin boot onstage (one foot bare), in a
place that prides itself on being devoid of
personality, an antiseptic institution that's
mind-numbingly regimented. Shaved head,
prison garb -- Arthur Lee? Lee's now fighting to save his life. "This is the
worst thing that's ever happened to me," he
says. He denies that he ever shot the gun that
landed him in jail. He speaks with a subtle
drawl that gives away his Tennessee roots. He
refers to me with an absent-minded
Southernism; a soft, drawn-out "chile...." (a
shortened "honey chile"). It's easy to imagine
his mother, a Memphis schoolteacher, talking to
him this way. His voice is gentle, light and airy,
with a flighty intonation that sounds like
someone standing on his tip-toes, ready to
amble off at a moment's notice. But he guides
the conversation with an intractable grip, like
an air traffic controller with a serious trust fund.
Clearly he is a person who is used to getting
what he needs. Every phone call from prison is monitored (you
can hear the clicks and beeps), usually cut short
("the prison's going down..." he says, right
before the line is abruptly disconnected), and
constantly interrupted with fellow inmates'
hoots and the prison's recorded warnings --
"This recorded call is from an inmate in a
California correctional facility...." To avoid the
frustrating interference, Lee also answers
questions by mail. The pages are typed
carefully, but a wacky confidence and spiky
sense of humor are in full effect throughout.
When asked about his backing band, Baby
Lemonade, he responds, "Baby Lemonade are
among the finest musicians I've ever played
with...I love them very much...I think they play
my music better than there (sic) own." When
asked a slightly convoluted question about his
lyrics, he says: "Actually the effort came quite
natural, far easier than the question that was
asked." Queried about when he realized drugs
were beginning to take their toll on the band, he
deadpans: "When they ran out." When he was barely out of his teens, Lee was a
star, bell-bottomed, beautiful, black; he was a
man who even physically captured the
kaleidoscopic possibilities of the era. "It's
difficult to convey just what a dash Arthur Lee
must have cut when he first broke through the
Strip in 1966," Barney Hoskyns writes in his
book about California rock, Waiting for the
Sun. "Arthur was at the centre of it all, a black
freak on the white scene, a ghetto punk in
beads." Robert Rozelle,
a member of Love in
the '70s, remembers the
first time he met Lee at
the Hollywood club
Bido Lito's, which was
on Cosmo Alley,
between Hollywood
Boulevard and Selma.
Love held a residency
there and built up a
strong local following;
fans would line up
around the block to see
the group. "In walks
this guy with chandelier
droplet glasses, one lens was red and one was
blue, like a prism. My goodness, I've never seen
anything like him before: He was a freak. Then
they started playing and I'd never heard anything
like that in my life." Lee was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1945.
His father played the cornet, but Arthur rarely
saw him. He and his mother moved to Los
Angeles when Arthur was five. At South L.A.'s
Dorsey High, he became a track and basketball
star, but he had played the organ, harmonica
(he's a wicked harp blower), drums, and conga
before that. He dropped-out of school at 17 to
pursue music. Rumor has it that seeing Johnny
"Guitar" Watson pull up in his gold Cadillac
and surrounded by bodyguards whetted his
appetite for musical fame. "I started playing guitar when I was about 17,"
Lee says, "but I started playing on washtubs at
the age of three or four." Lee had already been through one band --
Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- before he hooked
up with Byrds roadie Bryan MacLean,
bassist/onetime Surfari Ken Forssi,
guitarist/LAG holdover Johnny Echols, and
drummer Don Conka. Conka was soon replaced
by Alban "Snoopy" Pfisterer, and the band's
name was changed from Grassroots (a name that
was already taken; see "Let's Live for Today")
to Love. When the band formed in 1965, Los
Angeles had been inundated with the Beach
Boys' clean, striped-oxford uniform,
cars-and-surf version of Southern Californian
leisure pop -- "Fun, Fun, Fun." In sharp
contrast, Lee was already cultivating his
lifelong role: part sonic space traveler, part
earthy canyon recluse. Things were definitely
changing in rock music. San Francisco's brand
of counterculture was trickling down; the Byrds
responded, conjuring a sound that melted
Dylan's folk-rock and British Invasion jangle
into Ken Kesey's acid-test aesthetic. They came
up with white-boy radio pop with enough of a
randy, psychedelic undercurrent to keep things
interesting. It was an innocent time, but Los
Angeles music was starting to get a little seedy
and cynical. The atmosphere was never as
naive as the more provincial, collegiate scene
up north. More and more, the record industry
was moving into town. L.A. was never known
as a place that harbored the purest, or most
intellectually utopian, intentions. Even that brief
period of innocence was always perched
precariously on the edge of experience. Though hippie culture courses through his
music, the element that makes Lee's songwriting
feel potent and revealing today is its dark, even
sinister, edge. "I never was a 'I love you, I want
you, I need you' kind of writer," he says. It
separated him from the cooing flower-power
pack. Love formed, after all, the same year the
Velveeta pop of Sonny & Cher's "I Got You
Babe" was topping the charts alongside the
sweet, cushiony haze of Donovan's "Catch the
Wind." Love was California's answer to New
York's Velvet Underground and London's
Rolling Stones. "He described things that were very menacing,"
says writer/producer Harvey Kubernik. "We're
coming out of the Summer of Love, and he's
singing 'Bummer in the Summer.' He's talking
about racial tensions, tensions between men and
women." It was almost as if he could see the
other side of the blinding freedom. "He was
talking about these things as the very threads of
the country were being blown apart. Arthur Lee
was giving everybody a good reality sandwich.
And that's why the music holds up today -- even
more." Love's tough edge
promptly seduced
New Yorker Jac
Holzman when he
trolled L.A. clubs,
scouting the
burgeoning scene for
his label, Elektra. In
his book Follow the
Music, he describes
what he encountered at
Bido Lito's the first
time he saw them play.
"It was a scene from
one of the amiable
rings of Dante's
inferno. Bodies
crushing into each
other, silken-clad girls
with ironed blonde
hair moving the kind
of shapes you didn't
see in New York, to a
cadence part musical
and all sexual." When
Holzman got there,
Love was already
onstage. "The band was
cranking out 'Hey Joe'
and 'My Little Red
Book,' " Holzman
remembers.
"Inwardly, I smiled.
'My Little Red Book'
was by Burt
Bacharach and Hal
David, and featured in
the Woody Allen
movie What's New,
Pussycat? Hip but
straight. And here
were Arthur Lee and
Love going at it with
manic intensity. Five guys of all colors: black,
white and psychedelic...My heart skipped a
beat." Lee frequently saw the Byrds play, and he
obviously took his cues from that band and
others, such as the highbrow Britpop of
Manfred Mann and the Kinks, the nasty blues
hoodoo of the Stones. But he drove it further
into his own streetwise musical no-man's-land,
forging a new psychedelic shagginess. He dove
into the deep, sometimes menacing secrets of
country blues; the rock-star swagger of Elvis
Presley; the flashy guitar action of surf music;
the blue tones of jazz; the upstart folk of Dylan;
the sensual soul of Jackie Wilson, Johnny
Mathis, and Nat King Cole -- all three crooners
of Lee's youth. ("I've always said that Lee
sounded like Johnny Mathis if Mathis lived in
Manchester," Kubernik says.) Paired with
Bryan MacLean's childhood love for musicals,
it was a bizarre compendium of original
American music, from creaky Southern back
porches all the way up to slick Broadway.
Kubernik remembers being struck right away by
the combination. "Lee wanted to bring in very traditional folk
elements; very light, almost 'white' tones," says
Kubernik, "But all that was first originated by
black musicians. He brought it back around, but
in a way he also brought American music
forward, because he wasn't making dance music
for your feet or body, he was making dance
music for the mind. It was cerebral, musically
and lyrically." Holzman offered the band a deal on the spot that
night at Bido Lito's, and the group signed their
contract and promptly whipped out its
eponymous debut in four days. At the time the
band was living together; they eventually moved
into a mansion in the Los Feliz hills that had
belonged to Bela Lugosi. Dubbed "The Castle,"
it was the site of many of the band's promo
shots -- taken either in the back, around a
crumbling fireplace left standing when part of
the house burned down, or in its stairwell. The
stairwell photo is probably the band's best
known: MacLean poses sly and ridiculous with
bangs brushed down over his eyes, his fingers
making out something between an OKsign and a
meditation gesture. Arthur Lee is a studied
portrait of homespun, low-rent cool. But look
closer: There's a cigarette sticking out of his
ear. Even back then, the dynamic of the band was
carefully controlled, with Arthur Lee the
creative genius/feudal tyrant. When asked about
the role of the others in the band -- besides
MacLean, Lee's right-hand man -- Botnick,
without a second's hesitation, shoots out,
"Sidemen. It was Arthur. It wasn't a
democracy." Asked about rumors that studios
were completely trashed in the course of
making the records, Botnick balks. "Nooo. No, I
never saw Arthur trash studios. Maybe his
musicians. Maybe [he trashed] himself, but he
didn't trash a studio." When Love came out in 1966, it never hit the
top of the charts, but it became a local
sensation, with its rugged version of "Little Red
Book" emanating all over L.A. AM-pop radio
stations, sandwiched between Frank Sinatra and
the Byrds. Peppered by Lee's bluesy harmonica
playing and the country-rock guitar jangle, the
record is a melodic jab of shimmery garage pop
that even caught the ears of local jazz artists. "I remember doing a Bud Shank album,"
Botnick says. "And I had the Love album sitting
up behind me on a shelf, and these jazz
musicians grabbed it and blurted out excitedly,
'Oh yeah! We've been listening to this!...We
want to do this!' " Lee's stubborn side came out early on, when
Elektra tried to get the band to tour, and he
simply refused to leave L.A. And, though he
always reacted to Elektra and Holzman with a
certain amount of suspicion, Lee craftily
worked out a new contract with the label by
stating that his signature on the original contract
wasn't legal since he was a minor when he
signed that three-record deal. "He treated the label as if we were trying to
scam him," Holzman says. "He scammed us
first!" The band's second album, Da Capo, floats up
from the first record's visceral club grooves
into the stratosphere. It's far more psychedelic,
jazzy, and lyrically strange: "If I don't start
crying it's because I've got no eyes," Lee spills
out in a talky sing-rap on "7 and 7 Is."
(Released as a single the previous year, the
song was Love's only national chart hit,
reaching number 33 in September '66.) "My
father's in the fireplace and my dog lies
hypnotized...Trapped inside a night but I'm a
day and I go/Oop-ip-ip oop-ip-ip, yeah!" Da
Capo also included the long-player
"Revelation," a side-long epic that one-upped
Dylan's "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" from
the previous year by taking up half an album,
instead of a mere quarter. "Revelation" was a
statement, sure, but the recording itself was
merely an unsuccessful attempt to capture the
band's live version. Despite that mistake, the
record was a provocative warm-up for the rock
masterpiece that was to follow.
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