Arthur Lee

Before establishing Love, Arthur Lee operated as a Los Angeles hustler, relentlessly pursuing the elusive formula for stardom. During the early to mid-1960s he cut several unsuccessful singles, among them the American Four’s “Luci Baines”/“Soul Food” on Selma, a Del-Fi subsidiary, and he also participated in a session for Rosa Lee Brooks that included Jimi Hendrix as session guitarist. Lee finally discovered his direction in 1965 by assembling Love, one of the era’s defining garage/folk/psychedelic groups, whose lineup included fellow songwriter and singer Bryan MacLean; the band produced three remarkable Elektra albums, most notably Forever Changes, widely regarded as a serious candidate for the greatest rock album ever recorded.

By 1968 Lee abandoned the concept of Love as a stable ensemble, dismissing the remaining members and turning instead to pickup bands and session musicians. The group’s and Lee’s commercial prospects deteriorated rapidly; never the most stable individual even in favorable circumstances, Lee displayed increasingly erratic conduct as drug use exacted its price. He released additional unsuccessful albums under the Love name, issued the solo set Vindicator in 1972, and gradually receded from prominence. Although he maintained a schedule of live appearances whose performances were documented, he seldom entered the studio or composed fresh material. In 1994 he issued the single “Midnight Sun”/“Girl on Fire,” the B-side drawn from an unreleased project he had recorded years earlier with Jimi Hendrix.

Legal difficulties soon dominated his life. In 1995 Lee entered an ex-girlfriend’s apartment and attempted to ignite it; Rhino Records, which had recently released the Love Story 1966-1972 anthology, posted bail. The following year he was arrested for discharging a firearm into the air during a dispute with a neighbor and convicted on an illegal-possession charge. Under California’s stringent three-strikes statute, and given a prior drug conviction from the 1980s, he received an eight-to-twelve-year prison term. In 2000 Rhino issued an expanded reissue of Forever Changes, underscoring the magnitude of Lee’s talent at his peak.

Lee was released on December 12, 2001, after serving six years. A federal appeals court later vacated the negligent-discharge conviction upon finding prosecutorial misconduct at trial. Freed, he assembled a new version of Love that toured in 2002, performing Forever Changes in its entirety. He continued to appear onstage in subsequent years, earning recognition such as the Living Legend Award at the 2004 NME Awards. In early 2006 he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Despite intensive therapy that included three rounds of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant utilizing stem cells from an umbilical cord—the first such procedure performed on an adult patient in Tennessee—his health declined, and he died on August 3, 2006, at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, with his wife at his side.