AnyBlogDotCom: Arthur Lee and Love

Saturday 3 March 2018

Arthur Lee and Love

Love were essentially a local Los Angeles band who, possibly because they were multi-racial in a racist Sixties America, didn't feel safe touring outside their local area, yet acquired a significant critical reputation first in the UK, and then later in America. The main talent and only constant figure was the unstable Arthur Lee, who wrote most of the songs, although some of their best known songs were written by Bryan MacLean. Their music included elements of folk rock, hard rock, blues, jazz, flamenco and orchestral pop.

While finding only modest success on the music charts, Love would come to be praised by critics as one of the finest and most important American rock groups of their era. Their third album, Forever Changes (1967), is their masterpiece, and since the Seventies has been widely regarded along with Sgt Peppers and Pet Sounds, as the greatest album of all time.

I saw Lee perform as Love with Baby Lemonade as his backing musicians at Canterbury Fayre in 2002. It was a fairly low key event for such an important musician, and he was third on the bill. But he gave a memorising performance.

Albums