About the Album:
“Of the many lost classics produced during the creative explosion of the late ‘60s psychedelic heyday, the greatest may be the third album by the Los Angeles-based group Love.” JD It wasn’t a hit, but its regular appearance on critics’ best-of lists gave it “an enormously far-reaching and durable influence that went way beyond chart listings.” AM It is “a stunning achievement in majestic folk-rock by Arthur Lee’s underacknowledged cult band.” UT This “swirling, string-laden psychedelic beauty hardly made a dent when it was released; time has corrected that oversight.” EW’12
Symbol for an Era?
Writer Joe S. Harrington asserts that “Forever Changes is the eternal sixties time capsule LP” JSH and that it “perfectly summed up its time. This was pre-Manson sixties LA at its finest.” JSH However, the album was “profoundly out of step with the times, a brave (some would say necessary) counterpunch to the prevailing peace/love ethos.” TM
“Love, perhaps more than any band of the time, called bedrock meanings and recognizable identities into question.” AH-50 “Critics said they should have been called Hate.” RV Forever Changes “trades rampant hippie idealism for paranoia, portrays drug use as both illuminating and pathetic…and suggests that widespread mayhem, if not full societal breakdown is right around the corner.” TM
Arthur Lee, Love’s chief singer and songwriter, “turned his demons into one of the defining masterpiece of 1967.” RV He “never subscribed to the flower children’s sunny visions.” JD The world he “chronicled was no utopia, but a dark and sinister place where the occasional ray of light nonetheless managed to penetrate the gloom.” JD “Drugs flowed through his body, the hippie dream was crashing, and he was convinced he was going to die.” RV “It should be an intensely depressing album, but the sheer beauty of the music conspires – at least at first – to sugar the bitter pill of Lee’s lyrics.” TB
Folk-Rock Meets Psychedelia
As “one of rock’s most organic, flowing masterpieces” AM Forever Changes is “the best fusion of folk-rock and psychedelia.” AM It is “as innovative as Sgt. Pepper or Are You Experienced?, but with an entirely different mood and musical landscape.” TB “Love…displayed a heaping dose of the Beatles circa Rubber Soul, folk-rock via L.A. compatriots the Byrds, …and the lush, orchestrated soundscapes of Hollywood film scores.” JD “Inside these songs are ideas about guitar soloing that Lee’s friend Jimi Hendrix rode into the stratosphere; hints of the mysticism and transcendence that became the calling card of the Doors; and the seeds of goth, orchestral pop, and other sub-genres.” TM
Writer Andrew Hutlkrans called them “the first racially integrated-psychedelic band.” AH-69 Critic Ben Edmonds wrote, “While the music of Forever Changes flows with an almost narcotic consistency and deceptive prettiness, the words can be like an itch that you can never quite put your finger on…The combination is thoroughly captivating and slightly unsettling – psychedelic in the truest sense.’” JD
Arthur Lee
Jac Holzman, Elektra Records’ president, described Lee as“one of the few geniuses I have met.” TB He “was a genuine psychedelic cosmonaut, and he truly believed all the trappings of the sixties dream…Lee somehow struck the right balance between non-rock poesy and genuine craziness on a Wilson/Syd Barrett level.” JSH He was “strongly influenced by Mick Jagger; he presented what pioneering rock critic Lillian Roxon called ‘an amusing paradox,’ an African-American singing like a white Englishman singing like an old African-American.” JD He “was raised in L.A.’s tough Crenshaw ghetto” JD and “had grown up with eclectic musical tastes that embraced soul, R&B, folk rock, and MOR.” TB
Jimmy Greenspoon of Three Dog Night said, “Lee cut quite an imposing figure…Dark glasses, a scarf around his neck, Edwardian shirts and – what was to become his trademark – an old pair of army boots with one unlaced…He was a Pied Piper who would lead [audiences] down the road to a different form of consciousness.” AH-47
Bryan MacLean
“In contrast, Lee’s partner Bryan MacLean was the son of a Hollywood architect who grew up swimming in his neighbor Elizabeth Taylor’s pool. His first girlfriend was Liza Minnelli, and he was raised on classical music and Broadway standards.” JD “Lee originally linked up with MacLean because MacLean was a Byrds roadie and Lee thought he was likely to draw their crowd.” JD
The Recording
The band started recording the album in June 1967 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. However, there had been personnel changes and the band was falling apart so Elektra Records’ producer Bruce Botnick brought in the fames session players known as the Wrecking Crew to provide the instrumental backings. TB The band, left watching on the sidelines, were so “horrified by the ease with which they had been replaced…demanded their old jobs back. ‘The band was so shocked,’ remembers Botnick, ‘that it caused them to forget about their problems and become a band again.’” TB By August 11, the original band was back in place of the Wrecking Crew. TB
They “recorded acoustically, sitting in a circle as if jamming in the living room. The tracks were augmented later with tasteful orchestrations evoking the varied sounds of life in L.A., from spicy mariachi horns to lulling strings to dissonant guitars that bring to mind the strangling and ever-present traffic.” JD
The Cover
“The front cover, a distinctly psychedelic but surprisingly timeless painting on a white background by artist/illustrator Bob Pepper, is masterfully iconic, but unquestionably eerie. A mult-hued fusing of the heads of the band members vaguely resembles the shape of the African continent, the image suggests…some five-headed mutation from a David Cronenberg film.” AH-96
The Songs
The songs’ “apocalyptic scenarios come wrapped in lush strings, skittering harpsichords, and whimsical extended melodies.” TM “Every song has a lingering, shimmering beauty” AM which “features Lee’s trembling vocals, beautiful melodies, haunting orchestral arrangements, and inscrutable but poetic lyrics, all of which sound nearly as fresh and intriguing upon repeated plays.” AM
Andrew Sandoval, who oversaw the remaster of the first four Love albums said, “You’ve got song structures that are not like any other songs. They’re not verse-chorus songs, they’ve got stream-of-consciousness lyrics, orchestral interludes that are more like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass than the heavier ones on Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds. It took me forever to understand the album. The songs were not hummable, but they were so melodic.” AH-51
Here are insights into the individual songs.
“Alone Again”
The album’s most celebrated song, Alone Again Or, “is a tribute to [MacLean’s] mother’s flamenco dancing, punctuated by a trumpet solo that brings to mind the Tijuana Brass (producer Bruce Botnick was also working with Herb Alpert at the time). At first blush, the driving and catchy number seems to be a love song, but the narrator scoffs at the hippie notion that he ‘could be in love with almost everyone.’” JD The “unconventional use of horns, strings and guitars manage to engulf the psychedelic experience of the ‘60s, while laying the groundwork for punk.” RV
Even though it isn’t written by Lee, it “represents the whole album in microcosm. The musical elements – acoustic guitars, strings, horns, understated bass and drums – are all here.” TB The song also “neatly sets up the theme of self-imposed isolation that persists throughout the record. In fact, the song could be heard as an instance of Bryan taking on Arthur’s point-of-view, as the latter muses alone on his hilltop about more social souls like Byran himself.” AH-65
“A House Is Not a Motel”
“The propulsive A House Is Not a Motel contemplates an unspecified holocaust.” JD It “says goodbye to naïveté with ferocity even as Mariachi guitars strum in the background.” RV
“On its surface, the title is a facile but odd pun on Bacharach/David’s ‘A House Is Not a Home’ (Arthur had misused Bacharach to great effect on Love’s first single ‘My Little Red Book,’ so the dig had precedence.” AH-36 “But in light of Arthur’s experience of living communally…where he had to step over prostrate bodies on his way to a midnight snack, the title also suggests a loner’s irritation with a house full of overnight crashers and mooching hipsters.” AH-36
One could also interpret the house as “the House of God…and the motel…is what American has become.” AH-37 To that end, “Arthur is playing God, and he’s here to clean house.” AH-37
“Andmoreagain”
Arthur hinted that this song was “a creature, one of the people he saw from his Sunset Boulevard apartment. Given that the Strip was notorious for its drugged-out hippies and junkies at the time, this ‘creature’ Arthur saw out his window, probably late at night, could be seen as representing addiction, yet another physical trap…laid for human beings to keep them tethered to the material world.” AH-83
“The Daily Planet”
This is “a damning indictiment of the tedium of modern life generally and, very specifically, of the part played by toy guns in conditioning children for war.” TB “Arthur rather sarcastically takes us on a guided tour of the treadmill of banality that is everyday LA existence.” AH-56 “During the last revolutions…Arhtur feels that time is indeed running out and that a ‘scorching god’ will soon consume the earth.” AH-58
“The Red Telephone”
The Red Telephone refers to the “the alleged nuclear hotline” JD “linking the White House to the Kremlin, to be used only on the brink of nuclear attack.” TB This is the album’s “most striking studio creation.” JD It “builds from a quiet ballad to an otherworldly and somewhat paranoid nursery rhyme about an Orwellian world where unnamed forces stamp out any trace of individualism.” JD In essence, “freedom is diminished into a sad joke.” RV
The liner notes of a Love bootleg, Castle Walls, says, “This disturbing track manages to suggest its paranoia just through the phraising. The staccato way of highlighting words has a strange, chanting, almost occult effect. It’s been described as a kind of nursery-rhyme rap.” AH-54
“Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale”
This “features an ingenious lyrical device of holding back the final word of the verse and then using it as the first word of the next.” TB
“Live and Let Live”
Lee “lampoons the psychedelic culture by chronicling its ugly realities (Live and Let Live opens with the line, ‘Oh, the snot has caked against my pants,’ which Lee wrote about waking up after a night zonked out on drugs).” JD Arthur “rages against those who impose false religious strictures…on humanity, knowing that that they are merely part of the…conspiracy to enslave man.” AH-84 The song ends “with a guitar solo that deliberately falls apart.” TB
“You Set the Scene”
“From the title on down, [this] is a veritable existentialist manifesto, culminating in perhaps the only positive statement of purpose on record weighted heavily toward the angsty end of the existentialist spectrum. Remember that these words come from a man who believed he was about to die.” AH-67
“The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This”
This song “employs cut-up tapes of horn parts to simulate the sounds of a needle jumping in a vinyl groove.” TB
Notes
“The 2001 expanded reissue on Rhino adds seven bonus tracks: the 1968 single ‘Your Mind and We Belong Together’/‘Laughing Stock,’ the genuine Forever Changes outtake ‘Wonder People (I Do Wonder),’ the demo ‘Hummingbirds’ (essentially an instrumental version of ‘The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This’), and alternate mixes of ‘Alone Again Or’ and ‘You Set the Scene.’” AM In 2005, a live version of the album was released. |
