“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 N 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.
“It's going to be a powerful, powerful album,” he says. “My music's going in an Arthur Lee direction. But all my old fans will recognize my voice. It's like Jesus, you know what I mean? The sheep recognize his voice. They should recognize my voice.” Lee does say this last bit with enough of a laugh to give you the impression he appreciates his own audacity.
He has a lot of songs and says he plans to record and release his backlog of songs from 1993 and '94 before he gets to his more recent stuff.
“It'll all be new to you, but I've got a lot of newer stuff,” he says. “In prison, I hardly touched a guitar, and not for writing. It was a test to me to see if I could do all these songs totally in my head. That kept me going. So all the arrangements, the horn parts, everything, were in my head. When I got out and put it in front of my musicians, it all came together perfectly, like a hand slipping into a glove.”
Lee waxes ecstatic about his current Love lineup of Mike Randle and Rusty Squeezebox on guitar, David Chapple on bass, and Dave “Daddyo” Green on drums. Formed from the LA band Baby Lemonade, these are the same splendid players who backed Lee pre-prison and waited out his return. While they may play Love's old songs with a decades-melting force, Lee isn't playing his new songs live, for fear they'll be bootlegged before he can get them out officially.
There are plans afoot to tour Europe next year augmented by strings and horns to perform Love's classic 1967 Forever Changes album in toto. Most critics place that album way up in the rock pantheon, and it's still an influence on musicians such as Belle N Sebastian. The lush instrumentation is contrasted with stark lyrics that show Lee's preoccupation then with the notion that he was going to die soon.
“I was, what, 21 years old when I wrote them?” he says. “Life just looks different. You go through stages. Sometimes in my life, I thought I was going to die and all that shit. It's just stages youngsters go through, and I watch them do it, through the same things.”
What moods and feelings does he write about now?
“Not stupid ones, not like that stuff. You go when your time comes. I've already had two lifetimes compared to Jimi Hendrix and how long he's been dead. Life's a trip, man. You just keep living, like my mother says, and you'll find that out.
“Tell everybody I said come and see me, man; you'll get your money's worth. The last of the living legends: here I am. If it wasn't for me, there wouldn't be no Jimi Hendrix. There wouldn't be no Sly Stone walking around like that, no Parliament looking like that. I'm the one that kicked the damn door in. I'm the one that was accepted, but I'm not recognized. I'd like for this planet to be called Love instead of Earth.”
Love performs with the Mojo Filters at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano, (949) 496-8930. Sat., 8 p.m. $19.50. All ages.
