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Re: (TV) Part 1B
Now here's a boy with way too much time on his hands!
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>From: jpontrelli@nallmiller.com
>To: tv@obbard.com
>Subject: (TV) Part 1B
>Date: Wed, Feb 23, 2000, 2:52 PM
>
>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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