lost paws:

33 1/3 – Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans, 2003.

First, a bit about Continuum Press’ 33 1/3 series: Continuum Press lets critics, super-fans, whoever, write books on their favorite albums. Skeptical? Hold on... So far, they’ve covered classic albums, a few oddities, and at least one extremely questionable album (Celine Dion for god’s sake?). Forever Changes is the story of Love’s seminal 67’ album, written by a former editor-in-chief of Bookforum, Andrew Hultkrans. A friend of mine lent me the book. He told me: I had picked it up expecting something light like cheese and crackers, but this was not the case. The book was horrifying and put me in a horrible mood, eschatology, the Watts Riots, the Manson Family murders, drug-addiction… Great, I said, I’ll read it.

Hultkran’s tribute to Forever Changes is almost a tribute in spite of the album, more of a tribute to the neurosis of Love’s dynamic front-man, the legendary Arthur Lee. At the time of the album’s recording, Lee, once a Sunset Strip socialite, was beginning to withdraw further and further into his own cocoon. Hultkrans brings us on board the bad-trip that was ‘67 L.A., comparing the cultural climate, and Lee’s growing paranoia as he holed up in Das Schloss with a fridge-full of LSD, to the paranoid vision of 60’s writers and playwrights like Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, and Peter Weiss (notably, Marat/Sade, one of Lee’s favorite plays). Arthur Lee had a presentiment at the time that Forever Changes was being recorded: he was sure that his days were numbered.

Hultkrans seems to make the connection, though not explicitly, that the myth of Arthur Lee was bigger than the album, that Arthur Lee necessarily acquired the status of prophet through his on-stage preaching (though Hultkrans prefers to call it “Insiting to Riot”). There is a brilliant discussion in Forever Changes (the book) on the nature of prophecy and the role of the prophet in American culture. Hultkrans links Lee’s position to a tradition of false prophet-hood, though the term is not necessarily pejorative – really it’s an attempt to dissect how listeners respond to prophet-hood and the idea that “if you don’t take the message the person behind you might.” Unfortunately, this eventually winds around to the inevitable heavy-is-the-head-that-wears-the-crown comparison to Jim Morrison. I am going to venture a guess and say that, perhaps the reason Love and Arthur Lee have aged like fine-wine, while Jim Morrison and the Doors, have garnered something of a reputation for doped-up baby-boomer bullshit (Morrison couldn’t sing and was mostly illiterate, irregardless of popular opinion), is because the people raised Arthur Lee on an altar that was broken before they even got there. Lee’s soul contained the substance of time, he chose to run away, rather than come out to society, and that’s how he confronted the distress that was 67’ – in spite of himself. He was a prophet because the reclusion of LA that began after the Manson Murders, had already happened to Arthur, it was if his mind was the lens through which the sixties were refracted through – the renouncing of the Summer of Love and the embrace of the Winter of Disillusionment that followed it, which of course are the big theme of Hultkran’s book. The only other musical icon I can think of, who captured the moment like Arthur Lee did was Sly Stone on There’s a Riot Goin On’.