The lost years of Love’s Arthur Lee: From the hippie dream to a prison cell

“I didn’t say ‘Love’ because I am a lovable person,” Arthur Lee declared in 2002, referring to the name of the groundbreaking and influential LA psych-rock band he’d founded in 1965, “I thought of the name ‘Love’ because someone ripped off the name Grass Roots [the original name of Lee’s band]. I did it rather than fight.”

Even if it came as a bit of a frustrated afterthought, the very simple, ultimately un-Googleable moniker Lee settled on has given an awful lot of people a warped and inaccurate impression of what Love, the band, were really all about.

The album generally celebrated as Lee and Love’s finest work, 1967’s Forever Changes, was literally recorded during the ‘Summer of Love’, and its somewhat belated recognition (the record peaked at just number 154 on the US Billboard chart in its own time) has retroactively made it one of the classics of the hippie age.

As no coincidence, subsequent generations have come to see Arthur Lee himself as a very groovy cat; the gentle-voiced cult hero who helped integrate the folk-rock scene and inspire the fashion senses of everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Sly Stone. He was the guy who hired Hendrix for one of his first session gigs, in fact, and after Love got signed to Elektra Records, it was Arthur who opened the door for The Doors to sign with the same label.

Left out of this impressive CV and appealing personality profile, however, was Lee’s darker side, a reputation for being “the toughest kid in the neighbourhood” during his teen years in South Central Los Angeles, according to John Einarson’s 2010 biography, Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love. Music became his escape, allowing him to channel his energy into everything from R&B to surf rock before settling into a unique new folk rock sound, supposedly before The Byrds had even figured out their own niche.

Success came to Lee at a very young age, though, and he never really had the opportunity to smooth over the rough edges in his personality that he’d built up as a kid.

In contrast to their name, Love were known as one of LA’s most intimidating groups, operating out of a compound in Los Feliz called ‘The Castle’, a dilapidated old mansion once owned by the famous cinematic Dracula, Bela Lugosi. Here, Lee and his bandmates supposedly stockpiled drugs and weapons in between jam sessions with local pals like The Doors and Frank Zappa. Their dangerousness was as intoxicating as the 20-year-old Lee’s astounding songwriting craft.

According to Doors’ Ray Manzarek, Love was the end-all be-all band in LA by 1966, so much so that even the wildly ambitious Jim Morrison was content to merely get on their level.

“Morrison turned to me and said, ‘You know, Ray, if we could be as big as Love, man, my life would be complete’,” Manzarek recalled, “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.”

By the time Forever Changes was released at the end of 1967, though, Arthur Lee was already becoming disenchanted with the West Coast counterculture he’d helped manifest. As a result, that album is less an artefact of the hippie dream at its peak and more of a premonition of its imminent collapse.

The lead track ‘Alone Again Or’ addresses the central principle of free love with “I could be in love with almost anyone”, and then undercuts it with the harsh reality, “I will be alone again tonight, my dear”. Then there’s the apocalyptic waking nightmare that is ‘The Red Telephone’, one of the best examples of a young pop songwriter confronting the Cold War dread and civil unrest lurking behind every psychedelic love fest of the late ’60s: “They’re locking them up today / They’re throwing away the key / I wonder who it will be tomorrow, you or me?”

Arthur Lee’s personal demons and his ‘difficult’ attitude in the studio were ultimately among the factors that derailed Love, if you believe the folklore. On the cusp of wider fame, Lee had decided not to take the band on tour beyond the West Coast, and by 1969, he’d alienated or fallen out with the rest of the group, leaving him the sole member to play on both Forever Changes and its follow-up, Four Sail.

In some ways, Lee’s virtual disappearance from public life in the 1970s helped to gradually reignite interest in Love, as new fans of the band’s first three records became fascinated with the mystery around this one-of-a-kind frontman, a Dylanesque singer/songwriter with a Hendrix flair. Lee was not averse to trying to capitalise on his growing legend, either, and in 1981, still just 36 years old, he re-emerged for a new solo tour and conducted a few interviews.

“Well, I didn’t really disappear,” Lee told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that year, “I just didn’t go out on the street. All that craziness. All that manic depression and confusion. I went home to mama and regrooved. Yeah, back to my mother’s house. Sometimes, you know, you just want your mama… Now it’s time for me to get out there again.”

Lee announced his plan to “put the original band back together; find the guys again and go touring,” but this never happened. Some of his old bandmates had proven just as mysterious and unpredictable as Lee, including guitarist Johnny Echols and bassist Ken Forssi, who’d supposedly taken to robbing doughnut stands together after Love’s demise, eventually ending up in the clink on drug charges. Any expectations for a true comeback and return to glory, however, always hinged entirely on Lee.

It’s a heavy burden to carry, being hailed as a genius for songs you recorded in your early 20s, then living out the next few decades trying to re-establish or rediscover whatever that spark was. Lee vanished again through much of the 1980s, only making the news for an arrest on arson charges and an eventual two-year prison sentence for violating his parole.

Lee attempted another comeback in the early ‘90s, this time touring Europe, where Love had a stronger following than they ever had in the States. Then, in the summer of 1995, he was arrested again, this time for firing a gun into the air while arguing with a neighbour. It sounds like a minor offence, but when cops were later called to Lee’s house on a potential domestic abuse incident (despite protestations from Lee’s girlfriend), they took him in, and he was formally charged on the earlier gun firing offence.

Thanks to the infamous ‘three strikes law’ that President Bill Clinton had ushered in a year earlier, Lee’s collection of this third criminal offence was enough to get him sentenced to an extremely steep 12 years in prison, and despite the best efforts of his fans and fellow musicians to get the conviction thrown out, he wasn’t freed until he’d already served half of those years.

When he finally re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, he quickly made one last effort to recreate Love, telling journalists that he had “literally heard the voice of God”.

“I was lying in bed when this invisible veil came over me, and God spoke,” Lee told the Detroit Free Press, “He said, ‘Love on Earth must be’. I was overwhelmed that He spoke to me, of all people. I have a group called Love, so I’m using God’s name… It has nothing to do with any phoney religion, and it certainly has nothing to do with drugs.”

Lee was adamant in denying the rumours that he’d spent many of his ‘lost years’ as a junkie, and wanted it to be known, for whatever reason, that he wasn’t gay either. He had little interest in discussing his six years of incarceration, however, acknowledging only that he hadn’t spent his time writing new songs, at least not in the traditional sense.

“Where I was wasn’t conducive to that,” he said, “I made music, but in my mind. I’ve had a lot of time to think, as you can imagine”.

Lee put together a new version of Love in 2002, featuring the members of the California indie rock band Baby Lemonade, and would later be joined by his old childhood friend and original bandmate Johnny Echols for some shows over the next couple of years.

“The band I’ve got right now is the rockin’-est band I’ve ever had in my life,” Lee said, “This is not some sympathy act like Brian Wilson; this is the real deal. I know I’ve kept you waiting, but we’ll make up for it. We’re gonna blow your mind.”

He wasn’t wrong. By 2004, Arthur Lee and Love were generating more attention than they had in 35 years, and as the new version of the band finally played the lush arrangements of Forever Changes to adoring audiences in the UK and further afield, all those years of darkness and misery seemed finally left to the past.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, Lee informed his band that he wouldn’t be participating in their planned 2005 tour. He didn’t initially explain to them that he’d been diagnosed with leukaemia. A year later, he was dead at the age of 61.

In many ways, his career is one of the great ‘what if’ stories of rock; a supremely talented songwriter who spent most of his prime years in the proverbial wilderness. Lee, however, seemed to have a healthier view of it all.

“Listen, I was just gifted, man,” he told The Guardian in 2004, “My purpose on this earth is to leave a mark that will never be forgotten”. So he did.

The post The lost years of Love’s Arthur Lee: From the hippie dream to a prison cell first appeared on Far Out Magazine.