Love: Forever Changes (Elektra/Warners)
(Expanded and remastered edition of the greatest rock album ever made and its consequent single: includes detailed booklet with unseen 1967 photos, outtakes, remixes, and studio warm-ups.)
One of the most persistent canards about the mid-Sixties – propagated by baby boomer marketing and right-wing journalism – is that the hippies were hopelessly idealistic, stoned-out peace-and-loveniks: proponents of the flowah powah that wilted on its first exposure to external reality (whatever that is). It’s as though the effects of Ecstasy – basically interpreted, accidents aside, as soma – have been retrospectively applied to LSD.
I don’t think so. It’s not for nothing that Acid – after Aldous Huxley – was termed ‘the heaven and hell’ drug: it didn’t smooth everything out but made it hyper-intense, in an overwhelming flood of unfiltered experience. Taking LSD was a risky, often dangerous option, as noted by its inventor Albert Hoffman: ‘Ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles’. Or, as Skip Spence howled in “Seeing”: ‘How to get by – when what greets your eye takes your breath away ?”
Despite its comparative lack of overt psychedelic signifiers (sitars, blaring electric guitars) , “Forever Changes” is – perhaps more than any other album – totally suffused in acid: being full of bizarre juxta-positions, perceptual tricks, multiple viewpoint lyrics, lightning fast, almost schizoid changes of mood and topic, the personal fusing with the universal – ‘everyone I saw was just another part of me’. Its greatness lies in its very equipoise between light and dark: heaven and hell enacted over 45 minutes.
It’s tempting to ascribe the positive to Bryan MacLean and the negative to Arthur Lee – the golden Romantic and the hostile Top Cat – but right out of the gate, MacLean’s “Alone Again Or” sets the paradoxical tone: driven by acoustic guitars, augmented by silver strings and Morricone/ mariachi brass, with a pop at mindless hippiedom leading to a devastating pay-off. This light/ dark tension – both between and within the two writers’ work – is almost programmatically sequenced throughout: “A House Is Not A Motel” into “Andmoreagain” into “The Daily Planet”, “Old Man” into “The Red Telephone”, “The Good Humor Man…” into “Bummer In The Summer” – where Lee does Dylan better than Dylan himself.
There are moments of pastoral beauty, to be sure, but for much of the time the guitars are thrashed in a kind of acoustic punk. Flowers occur in “The Good Humor Man” with its mutilated finale, but Lee was too much of a racial/ social/ chemical outsider not to boil inside: at Watts, at the Vietnam War, at the ethnic cleansing of the Native American, about the nature of everyday life itself, dominated by the false perception of media and consumerism. With imminent death on Arthur Lee’s mind, this is a record which doesn’t have time to lie.
The three major songs here offer a spiritual journey: “The Red Telephone” with its sliver of panic – ‘sometimes my life is so eerie’ – and its sardonic chant of ‘we’re all normal and we want our freedom’; “Live and Let Live”, with its infamous snot lyric and totally explosive John Echols guitar solos. There is no more poignant moment in Sixties rock than Lee’s dying fall here: ‘Served my time, served it well/ You made my soul a cell’.
The cell then was metaphoric rather than actual: the prison of capitalist-constructed everyday consciousness. “You Set The Scene” resolves itself into an explicit statement of what Ian MacDonald calls the ‘revolution the head’: an initial rejection of society’s rules broadening out into a vision of constant intensity and permanent change. ‘Well this is the time, and it is time, time, time, time…’: Be Here Now in the everlasting present.
Such an intensity is impossible to chemically sustain. The final classic Love recording, “Laughing Stock” and “Your Mind And We Belong Together”, was one of the most extreme singles ever to be released: you can hear the group (and Lee himself) disintegrating in front of your ears – a process brutally exposed both in the ‘Tracking Session Highlights’ for “Your Mind” and the final version: ‘I’m locking my heart in the closet/ I don’t need anyone, no, no no…’
This thorough reissue does a good job of representing this vital historical artefact within a current context. The remastering boosts some cuts – “Alone Again Or” in particular – but on occasion the CD sound both exposes the recording’ s fragility and flattens the original vinyl’s sonic weirdness – viz the Echols guitar solos – but that’s the nature of digital technology. Although mandatory for Love fans, the alternate/ outtakes are minor additions apart from one startling moment: a wild, soul-inflected Lee scat fade on “You Set The Scene”.
Nearly thirty-three years after its recording, “Forever Changes” remains a key, perhaps the key Sixties album: a perfect fusion of form and function that both defines and elegantly steps out of its time. Its ambition and scope make it representative of the principal cultural and perceptual challenge of the hippie period (Does life have to be like this ?) that remains powerful because it has never been adequately addressed.