Notes on Love's FOREVER CHANGES

In the summer of 1967 a billboard appeared on Los Angeles’ legendary Sunset Strip telling all who looked skyward to “watch for the third coming of LOVE.” Emblazoned with an image of the group painted in oozing pink, purple, blue, and green meant to resemble an organic heart, Love were barely recognizable in their collective obscurity. Though they had followed hot on the heels of The Byrds to rule the L.A. club scene a year earlier, the band (at the time perhaps the most progressive and uncompromising in pop) never made the leap to mainstream acceptance or the Billboard Top 10. Ironically, that same summer their Elektra labelmates and former opening act, The Doors, hit #1 with “Light My Fire.” Meanwhile, the five members of Love (Arthur Lee, Johnny Echols, Bryan MacLean, Ken Forssi, and Michael Stuart) struggled to complete an album that would barely chart on initial release.

In most stories Love would be the group that promised more than they delivered. That would be had “the third coming” not been Forever Changes, a long-player widely rated above any other waxing of that idyllic era.

If anything, Elektra’s billboard for this as-yet-untitled release was a bid to appease their once top-selling act. Two albums into their contract with the label, Love had grown increasingly bitter over Elektra’s success with The Doors (who snagged a billboard before Love) and were eagerly looking for a way out of their deal. “I think Arthur felt so much of what he was doing was co-opted by others,” explained Elektra founder Jac Holzman in 1980. “He turned me on to The Doors, but then they eclipsed Love. All of this festered some resentment. It was the unfairness of life in general.”

“We’d been offered this substantial amount of money from [another company],” adds guitarist Johnny Echols, “and we knew Forever Changes was probably our magnum opus. It was going to be the album for us. We wanted to split, but we couldn’t get out of the contract, because Jac Holzman didn’t want to let us go.”

Holzman had good reason to hang on to the group. Despite their unwillingness to embrace promotional activities in the same way as The Doors had, Love still seemed set for a breakthrough. June 2, 1967, found them on a bill with that band (as well as Canned Heat and The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band) for a concert at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Days later, sessions for their third album began under some acrimony with engineer/coproducer Bruce Botnick. “Love was going through a terrible time,” remembered Botnick in 1980. “Arthur had all these great songs, but the band was so untogether.” No longer living under the communal roof of “The Castle” (a Los Feliz mansion pictured on their first two albums), they had not recorded together since October ’66. Though they gigged regularly throughout this period, hard drugs and interband squabbling overtook their better efforts. “After we started making money,” said Lee in 1980, “the less we were a unit, and Love deteriorated. People’s personal habits started to come before the music.”

“There were serious problems from the outset,” admits drummer Michael Stuart-Ware of the first Forever Changes session. “On the first day Johnny and Bryan couldn’t get their guitars in tune. Arthur, having no instrumental responsibility, was sitting in the booth with the engineer, occasionally flipping the switch to make verbal contact with Johnny, Kenny, Bryan, and me. Arthur was yammering over the booth microphone, engaging in what was supposed to be ‘humorous interplay,’ but it wasn’t making it.

“Arthur was laughing, and the studio employees were smiling, because they thought they were supposed to join in the frivolity to some appropriate degree. It was bad. Finally, Bryan and Johnny got the guitars tuned, and we started the run-through on the first track. The moment we started playing, you could hear it. Uneven, unacceptable. Everybody cringed. It was awful.

“I could see Arthur and the engineer huddling up, apparently trying to come to some kind of decision that would resolve the problem. [After a break] we settled back in, Bryan counted it off, and we slid into the beginning of ‘The Daily Planet.’ Almost immediately somebody made a mistake. Arthur’s voice came in over the music, loud and clear. ‘All right, that’s it. Stop.’ We ground to a halt as Arthur exited the control booth. ‘OK, gather around, we gotta have a meeting.’ We all climbed out from behind our [studio] baffles and walked over to where Arthur was standing. ‘Look, we’ve been talking. This could go on forever, so here’s what we decided. Elektra’s willing to pay to hire studio cats to come in here and lay down, not just the string and horn tracks, but the foundation tracks, as well. It could save us a lot of money in the long run, and it’s not like you four won’t be on the record, because we all have vocal parts, and there’ll be some instrumental overdubs on a lot of the cuts, which you guys will do. What do you say?’”

With few alternatives the group agreed to this plan, and session musicians were brought in to cut the backing tracks for Arthur Lee’s “Andmoreagain” and “The Daily Planet.” It bears some explanation that these were no ordinary songs. Nearly all of the material at hand was not only ambitious, but also musically beguiling. Among the dizzying array of chord changes, the compositions for Forever Changes were bizarrely fashioned with as many obtuse, nonrepeating sections as there were hooks. The genius of the work was in how these disparate elements were at once tuneful, catchy, and, above all, memorable over repeated plays.

The use of session musicians on “Andmoreagain” and “The Daily Planet” had a dramatic effect on the band members. They were instantly challenged and, after a month off for gigs, were ready to record the rest of the album unassisted. On August 11 sessions resumed with the taping of five songs in one day, a remarkable feat considering it had taken the combined efforts of Love and session musicians three days to record just “Andmoreagain” and “The Daily Planet.” “[There are rumors that] we were all so weird and strung out that we couldn’t play,” states Echols. “That’s just ridiculous. You can’t be so strung out you can’t even play one day and then come in and do a classic the next day. It doesn’t work that way.”

A prime example of their renewed vigor is Lee’s driving “A House Is Not A Motel,” which, despite its complexity, was completed in just nine takes. Lyrically the song drew on an encounter with a war veteran the group met in San Francisco. “He was in the Army [and] was telling us about the Vietnam experience,” recalls Echols. “Blood would seep out into the ground, and when it mixed with the mud, it would turn gray. He was telling us this whole thing. Throughout all of our lives during that time, we were all afraid that they were going to snatch us and throw us over into that cesspool.

“That night Arthur and I happened to be staying in a motel room there in San Francisco. So we started writing that song from the conversation with that guy. He ended up threatening Arthur, saying, ‘You see, I’ve got a gun now’ [imagery Lee would weave into the album’s ‘Live And Let Live’]. He had brought back his service revolver and was showing it to us. Arthur thought he was actually going to use it, because he said, ‘I could show you what it’s like to see blood now.’ He was that drunk. It was really a hairy situation.”

An instrumental take of the song is featured on Disc 2 and shows that the song’s ending was edited and extended to accommodate an improvised and electrifying double-tracked guitar run from Echols. “Arthur said he had a dream, and he wanted me to do that. He started humming things to me, and I went in there and recorded what he was humming.

“The guitar solo was me playing two guitar [overdubs], and I could not hear my first guitar solo while I was playing my second one. It’s so strange to me how they mixed them together to sound like they meant to be like that, but I’m only playing from memory. It’s remarkable that it blended together so well. That’s probably one of my all-time favorite guitar parts that I ever did.”

As for the song’s title (which many thought was a play on Dionne Warwick’s 1964 hit “A House Is Not A Home”), Arthur Lee explained: “A house is not a motel where people come and go and do this and that and the other. Your home is exactly in your heart. A relationship between you and another person, it’s your hearts together, your understanding together. ‘Wisdom is my sister, and understanding is my next of kin.’”

The title of “The Red Telephone” was similarly meaningful in that it was meant to represent the President’s hotline from which he could call the country to war or even a nuclear holocaust. Taped under the simple title of “Hillside,” Arthur’s lyrics painted a fanciful vision of the scene outside his canyon home. “When I wrote Forever Changes,” he explained in 2002, “I wrote on things that I thought were always going to happen. Therefore, these songs would always sell if I talked about these things in life. All except for the [lyric about] thumbing a ride in ‘Red Telephone.’ I saw a girl the other day thumbing a ride, and it tripped me out.
 
“Where I got that from was, in the ’60s, everybody used to thumb a ride. ‘Where you goin’?’ ‘We’re going to Haight-Ashbury.’ ‘We’re going to Big Sur. You gotta come.’ ‘Well, how’re you gonna get there?’ ‘We’re gonna hitchhike.’ Until a fool comes in and starts slaughtering up people, like the Hillside Strangler or Charlie Manson. That just messed everything all up. Because those days were the best days of my life. Nobody was on a racial trip. Nobody. And it was at the height of the Watts Riots. We weren’t tripping like that. We were all getting along.”

Echols feels some of the song’s inspiration came from the February ’67 film Marat/Sade. “It was about those people in the nuthouse,” he says. “I remember right after we saw that, Arthur started humming those words here and there. It was a difficult guitar part for me to play, because it didn’t necessarily fit the words the way some of the other ones did. It was a pretty difficult song to put together—not to play, but to try and follow the words with.” Resultantly, the song would require 20 takes to complete, during which Love found time to break into a bit of Sam The Sham’s “Wooly Bully” (heard on Disc 2 of this Collector’s Edition reissue).

Another track from this August date is Lee’s lyrically bizarre “Live And Let Live” (which the band perfected in seven takes). Lee would later express that while writing this album he was haunted by premonitions of his own death. “It was a strange time,” said Lee in 1980. “I thought I was going to kick the bucket.”
“Arthur became really melancholy around that time,” confirms Echols. “He would talk about dark things and about that war that permeated everything. He was having a series of nightmares. He said he thought he was going to die. I didn’t know any of that beforehand, but I did find that out later. I said, ‘Man, why didn’t we talk about it?’ Because we talked about everything in life: the stupidest things, the most mundane things, to things that were sublime and beautiful and special.”

“I think a lot of worrying is trust,” reflected Lee in 2002. “A lot of things in a lot of songs and titles come from my mother. ‘Live And Let Live’ is one. My mom was a schoolteacher. Her aunt was a principal, retired. I hated school, because I’d go to school and I’d come back home, and I’d still be back in school. I hated it. It’s like one of the reasons I ran away from home. I drove away from home.”

“I noticed when we were doing that album we often talked about that war,” remarks Echols, who grew up with Lee and felt similar pressure from his parents to conform. “It was strange how adults and older people felt about that war. It was romanticized like World War II was. But not to us. The people that necessarily had to go and fight it didn’t look at it the same way as the people who were sending the people over there to fight. That permeated that whole period of time. A lot of the horrors were coming back, and we were seeing friends come back with a missing limb or other people dying.”

To counteract the negative forces that surrounded him, Lee said in 2003, “I went within and I created things that are beautiful. I do my best work under the most difficult circumstances. I just reversed it. This is the way I want it to be. It’s not the way it is. For example, ‘The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This,’ off Forever Changes. I went purposely to sit in front of a school and watch kids, because I wanted to write a song about the way I find life should be, kids having fun and stuff, and the song being fun and the beauty of the song—the whole thing. None of that stuff was actually happening. I created that in my mind. The whole thing. Guys were fighting over their lunch money and fighting over this and that, but I wrote it the way I wanted it to be. That’s the way most of my songs are.” Originally known as “Hummingbirds,” the song had been kicking around for more than a year when it was remade for Forever Changes. An earlier, Jac Holzman-produced demo is included on this reissue. Another bonus is the fully orchestrated album outtake, “Wonder People (I Do Wonder),” which Lee would later record under the title “I Do Wonder” for a 1977 EP.

A second day of recording in August produced three more songs for Forever Changes. The Dylanesque “Bummer In The Summer” would become the most musically straightforward song on the set. Conversely, album closer “You Set The Scene” is Lee’s most complex and profound creation. “That was three different songs,” remarks Echols. “Yet they were brought together to sound like one, which was fantastic. That was a very, very difficult song to play, because I couldn’t finger-pick the beginning of that. So I’m picking that, and it was hard to keep the rhythm going.”

Though the multitracks for Forever Changes have been missing for several years, an alternate mix of the album (heard on Disc 2) was made from these tapes at some point, featuring a different vocal coda on “You Set The Scene.” “When I heard that, I was in the joint,” said a surprised Lee in 2002, admitting he didn’t initially remember this overdub that went unused on the 1967 album. “I bought a copy, and at the end of ‘You Set The Scene’ somebody just starts rapping! I said, ‘Damn! They even threw another guy in!’ And then I remembered I did that. And it sounds just like rap. I can’t make heads or tails of what I was saying.”

The August sessions were capped off with guitarist/vocalist Bryan MacLean’s “Old Man.” With references to “a small brown leather book” and seeing “the light,” the song lyrically presaged MacLean’s later Christian-inspired work. “At that time I don’t think Bryan had really realized his beliefs,” notes Echols. “They hadn’t coalesced into a coherent Christian thing. He was kind of searching, looking. Later on he realized and became totally dedicated to God. That was a song he had written quite some time ago, because I remember at ‘The Castle’ hearing him do that quite some time before we recorded it.”

Sessions wrapped in September with a new, albeit unused, instrumental electric version of “Andmoreagain” (heard for the first time on this Collector’s Edition) and both of the album’s original side openers: “Alone Again Or” and “Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale.” For a record seemingly dominated by the genius of Arthur Lee, “Alone Again Or” (composed by Bryan MacLean) is extraordinary in that it neatly sets up the entire album while nearly surpassing all the songs that followed in its wake. “I really wanted my first band to be a unit,” noted Lee of MacLean’s contributions. “I really wanted Bryan MacLean and myself to be like Lennon and McCartney. It just never happened. It was ‘Alone Again’ [when] he wrote [it originally]. I put the ‘Or’ on it.”

“It was a very, very rough song when we got into the studio,” recalls Echols. “It was hardly even written. Bryan went and wrote some more words after we’d done the instrumental track and after he’d heard what [arranger David] Angel had done with it.” Angel, whose remarkable orchestral arrangements grace seven of the album’s eleven tracks (plus the outtake “Wonder People”) greatly fleshed out Lee and Botnick’s subtle production. “He did a fantastic job on all of those arrangements,” says Echols. “As far as production David Angel should’ve been given credit for that. It should’ve been him and Arthur, because Arthur had a concept of what he wanted things to sound like on the instrumental parts.”

The second song from these September sessions, “Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale” (a titular reference to a short strip of Sunset Boulevard) is another example of the dynamics Angel brought to Love’s tracks. “In a lot of songs he would take my guitar lines and he would add that and score that musically,” says Echols, “and then the other instruments in the orchestra would take up that same theme. On that one especially, he would add what was already played on the guitar and he would have the trumpets or the rest of the group play that. It was coherent and it fit together as if it were meant to be that way. He doesn’t nearly get the credit that he deserves.”

With the recordings now complete, the final mixes were sent to New York, where Jac Holzman personally sequenced the album. “Arthur didn’t particularly like the reprogramming,” admitted Holzman to Zigzag magazine in the ’70s, “but I felt he was too close to it at that time to make the decision.” For as much flack as Holzman got from Love on matters of business, Holzman’s obvious affection for their work cannot be denied in his flawless running order. Moreover, the fact that Holzman allowed Love to create this work with few commercial constraints speaks volumes of his obvious dedication to their artistry.

On September 29, 1967, the band was booked at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to unveil what was billed as “the third coming of Love” (alongside the Strawberry Alarm Clock and Spirit). In any event, they cancelled and reemerged for live dates in December.

Forever Changes snuck out at year’s end to little fanfare and a chart high of #154. In February 1968 Rolling Stone wrote: “The third coming of Love, heralded on Elektra’s Sunset Strip billboard last summer, is upon us. The group has dropped its sixth and seventh members, originally added to sophisticate their music and they have, in the end, produced their most sophisticated album yet.” Still, the review, like several others from the period, lacked the perspective that only repeated spins of the album could afford. “Its weakest point is the material,” wrote Rolling Stone. “Some of the songs meander and lack real melodic substance.”

In January 1968 Love recorded a new single to follow Forever Changes: “Your Mind And We Belong Together,” coupled with “Laughing Stock.” Though the new songs were every bit as brilliant and inventive as the material on Forever Changes, it went unnoticed by the record-buying public. The band performed live dates through May ’68, but drugs and discord fragmented the group beyond repair. “Those guys were into drugs too heavy, man,” remarked Lee of this period. “They were into that heroin. That just wiped out the band. I got tired of that shit.”

Johnny Echols adds, “Bryan was kind of shooting the breeze with Jac Holzman, and Jac had given him the impression that he was going to record a solo album with Bryan. Bryan mentioned that to Arthur, and Arthur blew it. He just freaked out about that. Bryan getting to do a solo album first was not what he wanted to hear. We started having meetings about doing a farewell tour and splitting up, because we had said all we wanted to say or could say as far as the group was concerned, because we weren’t going to be able to get out of our Elektra thing. We came back together to play one more time at the Santa Monica Civic, but it just wasn’t happening.”

Though Lee fronted several versions of Love in the years that followed, rumors of a lost album by the original lineup (the mythical Gethsemane) continue to circulate. “There was no Gethsemane,” said Lee in 2002. “There’s no such thing as that stuff. I don’t know any of those songs. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take being around those guys anymore. There’s no album.”

Echols claims Gethsemane was a banner for unfinished ideas the band was developing. “The working title was The Garden Of Gethsemane,” he elaborates. “We were trying to come up with something like that. Then I could go on and be a jazz musician, Bryan could go write show tunes, and we could do it that way, but it didn’t wind up the way we’d planned it. That’s why you hear that rumor about Gethsemane. Gethsemane exists only as part of Forever Changes, which never was completed. We were going to do the whole musical thing, from the beginning, primitive, all the way to Beethoven, and then classical music, modern music, and then out. It never was finished, so that was the story untold.”

In fact, much of Love’s story remains untold. With the passing of Arthur Lee (in 2006) and Bryan MacLean and Ken Forssi (both in 1998), it shall remain as such. Thankfully, Lee lived to see his work widely acknowledged. After seven years in prison he remerged in late 2001 to sold-out concerts and a renewed career. “[I once thought] that my first three albums were a false start,” he said in 2003. “In actuality I shouldn’t have listened to people and carried on. Because I think Forever Changes is the best album so far. I have to agree with the people. People tell me, ‘You know what? I lived my whole life by the words you wrote in Forever Changes.’”

The concerts ended when Lee was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. “Time is the most precious thing in the world to me,” Lee reflected in our last interview. “Sometimes it takes a lot for you to realize it. I realize how important time is. I think we’re lucky to be alive and share with each other. There’s no time for hate. There’s no time for revenge and grudges. There’s not enough time to dwell on ignorance and stupidity. Love is the greatest thing on earth, that’s what I believe. It’s coming wherever you are. By the time you figure out, Wow, I should’ve done it that way or I should’ve done it this way, I wish I had done it—you’re too old to do anything. That’s really the trick. But, then, people are born dead. Who can explain the mind of the world?”

-Andrew Sandoval

 

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This essay by Andrew Sandoval appears inside the liners notes for the 2008 reissue of Love's FOREVER CHANGES.