Arthur Lee is back and all about the Love
By James Parker, Globe Correspondent, 10/24/2003
Love
With Arthur Lee
At: the Paradise, Wednesday
"It's nice to be back in Boston," says Arthur Lee. Hurrah! He knows where he is. This is important, because the 58-year-old Love frontman is legendarily wayward and an alleged master of the no-show and the flakeout. Anxiety attends his every public appearance.
But it was not needed Wednesday, because -- as it takes him about five seconds to prove -- Lee is in total control. He comes before us in pointed boots of pale leather, scrupulously flared gray pants, embroidered shirt (untucked), head scarf, top hat with cheetah hatband, and sunglasses, every inch the sharp-dressed medicine man, a little sunken in the cheek but relaxed, wisecracking, and flicking an insouciant tambourine.
His path has been strange indeed. In 1967 Lee, a 22-year-old black man, stormed the crystal towers of highest, whitest LA hippiedom with his band Love's "Forever Changes." Chamber-pop, folk-baroque, psycho-troubadour . . . unfriendly contemporaries opined that the band might more properly be called Hate, so gangsterish were their recreations (hard drugs) and so weirdly preoccupied their lyrics: "And the water's turned to blood and if you don't think so/ Go turn on your tub. . . . Sitting on a hillside/ Watching all the people die . . ."
And then there was this, sung in an airy, disaffected voice, the scariest lyric of the 1960s: "I think that people are . . . the greatest fun!" Here we gaze right into the cracked eye of psychedelia, its humanity all split, refracted into little ice chambers of sentimentality or solipsism, and lit from within by the fires of cooking brain cells.
Love fell to pieces, naturally enough, and Lee staggered through the '70s and '80s forming and sundering various post-Love outfits and acquiring the reputation alluded to above. In 1993, he recruited a young LA band called Baby Lemonade to be his new Love. This is the lineup he plays with today; absent the inconvenience of a six-year stretch for firearms possession (he was released in late 2001), he would have been playing with them for 10 years.
Wednesday at the Paradise, Lee and Love performed all of "Forever Changes" -- impeccably -- and it was spectacular. Now all the '60s weirdness sounds like some sort of deeply encoded foreknowledge, an overture to the bafflements and vicissitudes of Lee's own life. "Served my time," he sings full-chestedly, "served it well/ You made my soul a cell."
A three-guitar band with horns and string section provides plenty to look at, but the eye always returns to the transfixing personage of Lee himself: superbly lean, a high-stepping, soft-footed, loose-shouldered, dipping-and-swerving, skipping-and-shuffling cool old cat, an apparition of indestructible mojo, high on his own most private supply and seeming to gain in energy as the night goes on.
The fans are digging him, to excess: "Don't trip!" he admonishes the overheated ones bellowing out requests. I saw fat old men in T-shirts doing hippie-trippy finger-dancing, weaving their steps and waving their hands as if throwing spells. Lee's 30-year-old music is undebauched by time, its delicate, immaterial boogie intact.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
