Arthur Lee, at 61; leader of the '60s rock band Love
LOS ANGELES -- Arthur Lee, who forged a legacy as one of rock's great visionaries and forbidding eccentrics while reigning briefly with his band Love as princes of the mid-1960s Sunset Strip, died Thursday of leukemia in a Memphis hospital. He was 61.
Mr. Lee, who established himself as the first black rock star of the post-Beatles era, fronted Love through astonishing musical changes that have continued to resonate for other rockers and a cult of critics and fans.
Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant cited the influence of Mr. Lee and Love in his acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
But Love also became one of the first burnout bands of the 1960s, and with Mr. Lee's death, only three members survive of the eight who were in the band between 1965 and 1967.
Dogged by intra-band rivalries, substance abuse, and Mr. Lee's reluctance to tour, the first version of Love was finished by 1968, although Mr. Lee continued using the band name to record and perform at least sporadically for the rest of his life.
He was imprisoned from 1996 to 2001 on a third-strike weapons charge, but after his release he had new energy and a new story to tell that led to a resurgence for a time in concerts, including a 2003 performance in London, available on DVD, in which Mr. Lee was able to recreate Love's masterpiece album, ``Forever Changes," backed by a sharp, four-man rock band and an orchestra of horns and strings.
Love's first three albums were indeed forever changing. They yielded eloquent folk-rock on the 1966 debut, ``Love," the first rock record ever released by Elektra Records, and jazz-inflected rock with a flute player added to the lineup on the follow-up, ``Da Capo." That album also included the explosive hard rock of the band's lone Top Forty single, ``7 and 7 Is" -- a song that ended with the sound of an atom bomb exploding and foreshadowed late-'70s punk rock by 10 years. In 1967 came ``Forever Changes," a gorgeous, haunting song cycle infused with classical horns and strings.
Thematically, the album gave an emotionally undulating, impressionistic take that captures sweet hopes from the ``Summer of Love" giving way to paranoia and dread. ``Forever Changes" ranked 40th on a list that Rolling Stone magazine compiled of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Yet it has remained an overlooked treasure, reaching no higher than No. 154 on the Billboard albums chart after its original release, and selling 103,000 copies since 1991 on CD reissues, according to SoundScan.
Besides helping to hasten rock's acquisition of a wide range of stylistic possibilities, Love played a crucial role in Los Angeles' early rock history. By 1965, the Byrds had created a Hollywood folk-rock scene at Ciro's. When Mr. Lee and his guitar-playing boyhood friend, Johnny Echols, saw the Byrds, they decided folk-rock was the way to go, rather than the Booker T & the MGs-style rhythm and blues they had been playing.
``We didn't want to be stuck playing the Chitlin' Circuit," Echols said Friday. ``We wanted to play this new kind of music." They quickly enlisted the Byrds' guitar-strumming road manager, Bryan MacLean, who became second-chair singer-songwriter to Mr. Lee.
Love's racially integrated lineup -- Mr. Lee and Echols were black, MacLean, bassist Ken Forssi, and drummers Don Conka, Alban ``Snoopy" Pfisterer and Michael Stuart were white -- forged a model that the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly and the Family Stone, and War would follow to much greater stardom.
Intent on bringing his New York-based Elektra label into the rock era, Jac Holzman rifled through newspaper club listings on a trip to Los Angeles, thought the name Love looked interesting and checked out the band at Bido Lito's in Hollywood.
Mr. Lee ``was one of those people you know is likely to do something terrible to you or around you," Holzman said, ``but you like him so much and he's so talented that you always support him."
