By Harvey Kubernik C 2025
March 7, 2025 was the birthday of singer/songwriter Arthur Lee. Love’s co-founder.
High Moon Records has slated for 2025 release, Just to Remind You. It’s a compilation album sourced from Arthur’s trove of tapes, recorded during the last fifteen years of his life, most of these songs are being heard here for the first time ever.
Arthur asked his wife Diane Lee to issue them after his death. Having been hospitalized for several months, Lee realized he was losing his fight with Leukemia, and asked Diane to oversee the release of a final record of his unreleased songs. Although many of the tracks were in various stages of completion, Lee left some specific musical notes to execute his vision.
High Moon Records previously issued Love’s Reel-To-Real and Black Beauty.
Guitarist Johnny Echols is the co-founder of Love.
In 2012 and 2017, I interviewed Echols about Arthur Lee and Love, and Johnny’s memories of Love’s Forever Changes.
Portions first appeared in my books Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972 and 1967 A Complete Rock History of the Summer of Love.
HK: How did the concept of Forever Changes begin?
JE: We started with kind of an idea after hearing the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers. And we decided that we wanted to do something that had horns and strings and we knew from the very start how this album was going to be. And what we were going to do and that we were going to try to make this what we would consider our magnum opus. This was gonna be the thing that defined us. And it was either we were gonna take off and just go all the way or something was gonna have to happen. We were going to really leave the three-minute pop song format. We were getting bored of the three-minute rock tune and wanted to push it. We knew with Sgt Pepper’s there was a whole new sonic thing going on. Absolutely.
“The material and concepts of an outline of it were written before we went into the studio. Arthur was not very much of a guitar player. He could play a few chords and basically would sing the songs to me and basically play the outline of them and then I would get together with Kenny mostly and we would work out some structure for the song. Bryan had a way, kind of a counter point that he would do with his finger picking that would work against what we were playing. We would always have the rehearsals with Kenny and me first and then Michael Stuart. We would rehearse with acoustical instruments, or sometimes at a friend of ours who had a house, Joe Clark. He lived in the Valley and we’d go to his place. Sometimes we would rehearse in the daytime at the Whisky. But mostly at one of our houses.
“My role with Arthur and Bryan was basically an ombudsman to kind of keep these two personalities happening.
“So, I knew that from the very start to keep. Because they would have been at loggerheads all the time. Because they liked the same chicks, if you listen to some of the songs. That is rock ‘n’ roll. That’s tight, of course, but there was always that strong tension between the two of them and I was always stuck there in the middle kind of keeping the peace but also drawing the best out of them that I could. Because otherwise, you know, Bryan was very much a show tune kind of guy and I knew we could not release show tunes so we had to do a lot of work on his songs to meld then into something that was acceptable to an audience that we were developing.”
HK: Lyrically, Arthur was breaking new ground.
JE: Lyrically Arthur was writing some absolutely phenomenal lyrics. I was knocked on my ass. Hell, yes it did! Because I am expecting the pedestrian the same old stuff that I’d heard before. Then I started reading these lyrics and looking at them. And this isn’t Arthur I know. A dude that I’d fought with and wrestled around the ground with. This was a poet. And I am listening to this poetry and it was absolutely shocking. Because it just came out of no fuckin’ nowhere and still to this day, and it was only for this brief period of time that it was just profound.
“The writing for that brief moment of time was just extraordinary. And I don’t understand it. I’ve asked him over and over and he did not understand. Because he did not realize for ‘Everyone who thinks that life is just a game. Do you like the part you’re playing?’ He did not realize how fuckin’ profound that was. He didn’t know.
HK: It’s a L.A. album with regional influences that continues to reach a global audience.
JE: Forever Changes could only happen in the city of L.A. And could only happen at that particular point in time. And only in L.A. Because you did have that cosmopolitan freedom, you know, that you didn’t have people necessarily put into little categories and boxes. You were able to go anywhere.
“In the L.A. area you could be able to hear blues one night and go hear rock and go hear experimental or avant-garde jazz, or whatever. So, you were right in the same area you are exposed to all these different cultures. And also, on the radio. If you listened to the radio then the DJ’s were playing Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, they were playing Dick Dale and Frank Sinatra. All on the same radio station. So, you were exposed to whole different genres.
HK: Forever Changes continues to be lauded?
JE: My theory on why this album is so popular and in the top ten of all time. The magic of the record is that it is unexpected. It just came all of a sudden there is the atom bomb. You are dealing with regular TNT explosions and all of a sudden, you’ve got an atomic bomb. It just pushed the envelope so far outside of the mainstream that it took a while. Now if it had been released in the last few years it would have done a whole, whole lot better commercially ‘cause people are ready for that. But back then people were just kind of stunned. All of a sudden you go from here to there and then stunning Arthur lyrics. Everything was just different. The way the horns were done. The way the jazz was blended in with folk music, was blended in with kind of show tunes and rock ‘n’ roll.
“It was all put together. But also, because the times we were living in. We had civil rights movement, we had Vietnam war, all of this turmoil and out if the turmoil there’s a rose landed in all of this shit. There are assassinations. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard. So, there we got a rose coming out of all this shit and it is blooming. And it is kind of permeating the air with sweetness.
“If you listen to ‘A House Is Not a Motel.’ I knew what those words were having been with there when Arthur was with a Vietnam veteran who came back and he was at the Wherehouse in San Francisco, when we were playing with Janis Joplin and he sat down with us and started telling us about ‘how when blood mixes with mud it turns gray.’ And how these kids were dying in the fields and nobody can get to them. And they’re calling out their mother’s name or calling out God’s name or someone’s name. So, you hear ‘I hear you calling out my name.’ These kids are calling out to somebody. Anyway, he tells us all of this and Arthur listening to it and when we go back and put the song together, we want the music to reflect what somebody felt when they were out in that field by themselves. You know, listening to bombs explode around them and all of the stuff that is happening.
(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015’s Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016’s Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017’s 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.
Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His book Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll Television Moments) is scheduled for 2025 publication.
Harvey wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.
During 2006 Kubernik spoke at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 he appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series).
