(Elektra Records)
The year 1967 saw the release of two psychedelic pop masterpieces — one globally famous (the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper), the other nearly forgotten: Forever Changes, by Love. Sometimes referred to as Arthur Lee’s Love, it was one of the first mixed-race bands — “still to this day, you don’t see many bands like that,” notes Maria McKee, the younger sister of Love member Bryan McLean. “If we had been an all-black group,” recalls guitarist Johnny Echols, “we would have been typecast as a blues group or an R&B group, and we didn’t want that.”
Like Sgt. Pepper, Forever Changes was an eclectic record that mixed different '60s elements with symphonic ambitions, including fully orchestrated horn and string sections. McLean and Arthur Lee — both dead now — wrote and sang lead, McLean bringing the folk-rock influence he had acquired as a road manager for The Byrds. But Forever Changes made little impression at the time. Its undercurrent of darkness and paranoia may not have suited the Summer of Love, and it was certainly overshadowed by the Beatles’ great watershed.
But it was in Britain that Forever Changes found its audience, as Maria McKee saw firsthand many years later. “When I was in my band [1980s country rock group] Lone Justice and we performed the first time in London, that was pretty much all anybody wanted to talk about — Love.” As a new generation of American musicians and fans of ‘freak folk’ has rediscovered the lesser-known 1960s, Forever Changes’ reputation continues to rise.
The record was selected for the National Recording Registry in 2012. Telling its story are Johnny Echols, Maria McKee, and the record’s producer, Bruce Botnick.
Alone Again Or
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Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen is a co-production of Public Radio International and WNYC Radio, and is funded in part by Ken and Lucy Lehman and the National Endowment for the Arts. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our Science and Creativity series is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Comments [6]
A friend of mine got me into this album when I was in high school, circa 1990. I loved it the first time I heard it and still do. "The news today will be the movies for tomorrow".
"Forever Changes" is a great LP. Love's refusal to tour to support the LP did not help sales though. Surveys in the U.K. show increasing appreciation for "Forever Changes". Love hardly sounds like a group on the verge of breaking up but they were. These surveys also show an increasing appreciation for "Odessy & Oracle" --- recorded by the Zombies immediately after The Beatles completed Sgt. Peppers but delayed in production. (It didn't help O&O's sales that the Zombies disbanded and Date Records folded.) Both LP's/CD's are highly recommended.
Wait....I loved this album, from when I was kid. The song Red Telephone made its way into the movie Taking Woodstock.
Great Stuff. Love's Early Work With Elektra Records Was Outstanding. Partly Their Own Doing, Love Never Had The Success They Deserved.Their Ability To Influence Musicians Today And Attract New Fans Is A Testament To How Good These Guys Were.
A great and under appreciated album.
One comment regarding their being first multi racial band.
Booker T and the MGs had. Green Onions in 1962
Like them, Arthur Lee also had Memphis roots.
Wow. Great segment on Love! I remember when it was only record hounds who knew about that record, and one of 'em played a cut off of it as his sign-off song on KDIC Grinnell, late at night some time in the early '80s. I was recording the show on a cassette, so later I was able to recover the name of the song, "A House is Not a Motel," and track the record down.
It has to be a very different experience coming to sixties culture a generation removed from it, than to have lived through the period. Listening to this music, I'm reminded of reading a reprint of Richard Brautigan's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," and knowing nothing more of its context of creation than the peculiar smell of mimeographs, the medium it was first distributed in.
One of the fundamental symmetries of the universe is invariance over (spatial) translation, though. Recently a Grinnell grad posted a montage of a telecined Super 8 mm film shot at a campus-wide party, using "Alone Again Or" by Love for the music, and somehow, totally out of place and time--it completely fit.
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