Musician Fronted '60s Band Love
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 5, 2006
In a turbulent life that ended this week where it began, in Tennessee, psychedelic rocker Arthur Lee swirled in and out of the public eye, in and out of jail, and in and out of Love, the legendary rock band he created in Los Angeles in the 1960s and re-formed on several occasions through the decades.
Eccentric, occasionally volatile and almost always unpredictable, he was 61 when he died of leukemia Aug. 3 at Memphis's Methodist University Hospital. His music was said to have influenced groups as diverse as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Echo and the Bunnymen.
Mr. Lee was at the Birchmere in fall 2003, nearly four decades after Love's heyday, when the quintet recorded three albums in Los Angeles, all in 1966 and 1967. One of them, "Forever Changes," was an explosion of rock sounds -- Mexican horns, Byrds-inspired guitars, symphonic violins and drug-infused lyrics -- that still shows up on greatest-ever lists. Rolling Stone named it the 40th-greatest album of all time.
Mr. Lee was 22 when the album was released. It made him a local counterculture celebrity, the leader of a multiracial rock band who frequented the Sunset Strip scene wearing one moccasin. He billed himself "the first so-called black hippie."
At the 2003 Birchmere appearance, The Washington Post noted that Mr. Lee and nearly a dozen backup musicians "were greeted like stoner buddies just back from a long trip." The rocker, 58 then, didn't have the vocal range of years past, but "he reached more than enough high notes on songs like 'The Red Telephone' and 'A House Is Not a Motel.' "
Mr. Lee was born Arthur Taylor Porter in Memphis and moved with his family to Los Angeles as a youngster. He formed Love in 1965, when such groups as the Byrds, the Doors and Buffalo Springfield were fusing psychedelic rock and blues and creating a distinctive L.A. sound. The band's 1966 debut album included the hit single "My Little Red Book," written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. The B side of the 1967 follow-up album, "Da Capo," featured just one long song, "Revelation."
After "Forever Changes" (1967), Love broke up. Mr. Lee reunited the group on several occasions, but it never achieved the success of its early years. He recorded several solo albums in the 1970s, virtually disappeared in the 1980s and re-emerged in 1992 with a new album, "Arthur Lee and Love."
In 1996, he was convicted of firing a pistol into the air during an argument with a girlfriend. With an assault charge and a drug charge on his record, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison under California's "three strikes" rule and served nearly six years of the term. Until he received the leukemia diagnosis this year, he had been touring under the name "Love With Arthur Lee."
The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that in May, after three rounds of chemotherapy failed, Mr. Lee became the first adult in Tennessee to undergo a bone marrow transplant using stem cells from an umbilical cord.
Survivors include his wife, Diane Lee of Memphis.