Here's some interesting reflections on Arthur's passing & in particular on Forever Changes, and when I tell you who wrote this at the end I doubt you'll believe me.
My brief wistfulness over the Sleater-Kinney retrospective I linked to yesterday was nothing compared to the way I felt a couple hours later when I heard that Arthur Lee had died of leukemia. I didn’t discover his 1960s band, Love, until just a year or two ago, but Lee’s obits make it sound like he was that great rock archetype: the remarkable talent squandered too young.
I have Forever Changes, Love’s landmark third album, playing right now, and its title is oddly accurate: almost forty years later, it hasn’t aged a day, which makes it practically unique among late-60s psychedelia. (I’m second to no one in my love for the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, for example, but play it today and set the wayback machine for 1968, Sherman.) It’s not that the album sounds decades-ahead-of-its-time in a Velvet Underground way. It’s that the broad musical swath it cuts–jazz, folk, classical strings, Spanish guitar and horns–sounds just as un-1967 now as it probably did in 1967. Forever Changes ends with Arthur Lee repeating “time, time, time, time, time…” but it’s an album completely unmoored from time.
(from Ken Jennings' blog)
