"If I don't start crying, it's because that I have got no eyes. My Bible's in the fireplace, and my dog lies hypnotize. Through a crack of light, I was unable to find my way. Trapped inside a night, but I'm a day—and I go boo bip-bip, boo bip-bip yeah!"
That's from "Seven and Seven Is." Is there a better lyric in all of rock & roll? I don't think so, and for sure not in 1966, when Arthur Lee and his band Love reigned over the Sunset Strip.
Lee was an R&B musician who'd had his head turned around by hearing the Byrds on the Strip. The '60s being such a speedy little incubator, within a year, he had formed Love and taken over as the chief head-torqueing unit in Los Angeles. They inspired the Doors to be the Doors. They mingled a garage-rattling aggression with a fragile romanticism achieved by Van Morrison and damn few others then or ever. That was then.
Arthur Lee is talking to me from his cell phone as he walks down Beale Street in Memphis, on a visit to his childhood hometown. I hear him buying a Beale Street T-shirt, shouting after his hat when it blows off, telling me how the street has changed from the days when it was known as the Harlem of the South.
"It's just a tourist place now, but everything was happening here then," he says. "I used to go here in the 1950s when Clarence the Peanut Man used to walk the street—scared me to death. I wouldn't get too close to him."
I have no idea in hell who Clarence the Peanut Man was. A lot has been written about Beale Street, but writers miss what a kid sees. I wonder if some kid there now is shying away from Lee as he chases his hat and dissembles into his cell phone.
Is he crazy? Beats me. A genius? Maybe. I don't know the guy. By varying accounts, Lee has been rock's unrecognized pioneer (he claims Love's interracial makeup paved the way for Hendrix, Sly Stone and others), a manipulative Svengali, a music-industry victim, a talent equal to Brian Wilson, a fuckup greater than Jim Morrison, a heroin burnout, or one of the most misunderstood, gentle-souled poets of our time.
The last time I saw Lee live, he sang his old tunes marvelously and between songs mugged like a black Soupy Sales looking for a faceful of pie. That had to be more than six years ago because I haven't yet mentioned his five and a half years in prison. In 1996, Lee had a third-strike conviction on charges of discharging and illegally possessing a firearm, for which he drew a 12-year sentence.
Lee still protests his innocence and got some measure of satisfaction when an appeals court recognized deficiencies in his trial and released him earlier this year. Not especially contrite, Lee says of his first trial, "Those people were dead wrong that did me like that. The prosecutor should have been born dead, and the attorney I used should have died in his daddy's dick."
As for the reputed mess Lee has made of his life, he maintains, "Journalists are the ones who wrote that. Journalists have no life. Their life is talking about somebody else, and if you put somebody down, then you get recognized. It's an old trick, an old fucked-up joke. I mean, get a life, damn! I've never been strung out on heroin a day in my life! That's a rumor. I killed my road manager—another rumor! All kinds of stupid shit.
"I've written a book about the times from 1963 to 1974, with the exception of the things that happened in my life with God almighty. I don't care if you believe in God; you're going to do his work anyway. God chose Cyrus to overthrow Babylon. Where was Cyrus from, that little Pygmy guy? See, Cyrus didn't believe in God, but God chose him to do the job, and he got the Jews back on the good foot. I consider myself a Hebrew, see? That's what time it is. Scattered, sold into slavery, all that shit, and going to a place with all these people they'd never seen before."
I couldn't agree with him more, but to get back to the journalist bit—once having thought on it, I say: screw that, Jack. Many journalists do indeed have lives, and the writings of the best of them, rigorously done over decades, have moved me and moved the nation—was it you who got Nixon to resign, Arthur?—more than your handful of 30-year-old pop songs has. They are great pop songs, though.
I didn't say this to Lee, and not only because I'm a pussy, but also because I figure both he and I have more important things to do with our lives. I, for a not-very-good example, have to finish writing this story about some other guy's life, while Lee will soon be playing some West Coast dates (including the Coach House Saturday) and then going into the studio to record his first album in decades.
