There's this baseball player named Garrett Anderson, who played for the Angels until a few days ago, when the team didn't pick up his option. For years, whenever sportswriters made lists of the most underrated baseball players, Anderson was a guaranteed inclusion on "most underrated" lists. And then, one year, he showed up on a list of the most overrated players in baseball, and the explanation was that he had been described as "underrated" so much that he had actually become overrated. It's actually kind of funny when you think about it. It seems that a similar thing is happening, or has happened, to one of my absolute favorite albums,
Forever Changes by the band Love. When the album was released in 1967, it basically flopped, reaching no higher than #154 on the charts. Over the last forty years, it became a sort of cause
celebre among rock critics, not unlike The Kinks'
Village Green Preservation Society or the three Big Star albums. And then, last year when I was leafing through a Rolling Stone "Summer of Love Retrospective" issue that I had no intention of ever purchasing I noticed their write-up for the album in a section ranking the best albums of that year, and I noticed with some amusement that it said something to the effect that the album had been overly lionized. It had been so vigorously labeled as underrated that it too had become overrated. Somehow, this seems par for the course for this magnificent, strange album.
For all of the sixties talk of civil rights and unity, it's worth noting the shortage of integrated rock acts in the 1960s. The Jimi Hendrix experience, of course, and Sly and the Family Stone, and Love and who else? (It gets worse when one actually reads some of the contemporary accounts of Hendrix, where terms like "Superspade" and "the Electric Nigger" get thrown around casually. And this is in the supposedly hipper counterculture). Of these three acts, Love breaks more from what might be called "black music" than Hendrix, with his heavy blues footing, or the soul-enfused Sly Stone. Love is more comparable to The Byrds or The Doors (who took more than a little from Arthur Lee and Love. In fact, Lee's repeated endorsements helped get the Doors signed to Elektra). Lee himself is more like Brian Wilson than anyone else, I think- if for no other reason than both more or less lost their minds in fairly spectacular fashions, became utter recluses and both had triumphant comebacks. But this is all kind of beside the point.
"A House Is Not A Motel". What does that even mean? I suppose it must be playing off of "A House Is Not A Home", which had been a song, penned by Bacharach and Hal David, that had been a minor hit for Dionne Warwick three years earlier. (Wikipedia seems to confirm my suspicions, for whatever that's worth to you.) The gist of the song is that without the singer's baby beside them, their house is not, cannot be a home. This has more or less nothing to do with "A House Is Not A Motel". But that's kind of the way Arthur Lee named his songs. I mean, sticking with just the Forever Changes album, we find "Maybe the People Would Be The Times or Between Clark and Hilldale" and "The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This". So we'll just accept it.
The song starts out with a guitar riff, joined after a few seconds by drums that sound like they are straight from the dark side of folk rock. It's a little unnerving. Lee's first verse begins "In my house I've got no shackles/You can come and look if you want to". The first line is a fairly typical sixties sentiment of freedom, but that second line, the way he says it and the way the music sounds, I can't imagine many being eager to take Lee up on that offer. He goes on to say "And the streets are paved with gold/and if someone asks ya, you can call my name". The gold streets bit goes way back, to Cotton Mather in 1709. I have no idea if Lee was familiar with this, but it's not impossible (this is an album that quotes Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade, so I put nothing past it), but it does contribute to the song's prophetic vibe. Jeremiad might be too heavy of a word for it, but this song is a judgment. A house is NOT a motel, and while they say the streets are paved with gold, I look around and that ain't what I see.
After Lee insures the listener that they can call upon his name, the song falls back to that ominous riff and drumming for a moment before the second verse begins. Now, Lee says "And it's so for real to touch/to smell, to feel, to know where you are here" before repeating the lines about the streets and saying you can call his name. But this time, he repeats "You can call my name" and adds "I hear you calling my name/yeah all right now", and then hell starts breaks loose, in a somewhat orderly way
After another moment of the same guitar and drum, an electric guitar comes strafing into the song, but just for a few moments, before the ominous drums and guitar reassert control, and Lee steps up to continue his revelations;
"By the time that I'm through singing
The bells from the schools of walls will be ringing
More confusions, blood transfusions
The news today will be the movies for tomorrow
And the water's turned to blood, and if
You don't think so
Go turn on your tub
And if it's mixed with mud
You'll see it turn to gray
And you can call my name
I hear you call my name"
And he sings it so fucking calmly. Only on the last "I hear you call my name" does he raise his voice. The streets may be paved with gold here, but the water has turned to blood- it's the first of the ten plagues of Egypt. Clearly there are people who need to be let free. Judgment has been cast, and somebody has been found wanting. Remember, this was made in 1967, when Sgt Pepper ruled the day. The rule of the day was psychedelic, which Forever Changes certainly fits, but After Bathing At Baxter's and Piper at the Gates of Dawn don't really prepare you for what happens when you turn on that tub. And now the drumming, which has been threatening all song, becomes all out war drums, and the electric guitar attack resumes, in a way that the subdued, menacing yes, but still subdued acoustic guitar that the song had mostly presented did not prepare you for. It's not an all out guitar assault, but within the context it's deadly. And then the next song on the album starts, we're back to an almost orchestrated acoustic sound, and no mention is made of what just happened to you, and to Arthur and to this land he has apparently condemned. In 1967, the only other shit like this was the first Velvet Underground record, which nobody bought (in comparison to that record, Forever Changes was a legitimate hit), and maybe the first Doors album, but only kind of. Oh, and I suppose you could point to Hendrix's first album, and parts of John Wesley Harding, but... I think I've lost my thread completely here, and I'm worried I might be undermining my point, but let's go with it nonetheless.
The kind of people who are prone to making silly generalizations (I suppose I had best watch myself when I begin throwing such stones) love to talk about the Manson murders and Altamont as being "the end of the sixties". This is true, in that both events happened in the latter half of 1969. But it's still stupid. But both events do reveal quite a lot about the darkness, or perhaps just the foolish naivete at the heart of the hippy ideal. After all, an obvious sociopath like Manson was able to infiltrate the inner sanctums of the hippy music scene, living with Dennis Wilson and meeting Neil Young. And the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey both saw the Hell's Angels as fellow counterculture travelers, rather than the very bad people they so clearly were, leading to the killing of Meredith Hunter at that show at Altamont Speedway. But any real audit of the music of the 1960s reveals that the darkness, or whatever the hell you'd like to call it, was there all along, in songs like the Byrd's "Artificial Energy" (which describes a drug fueled murder of a "queen") or The Doors' "Five To One" (to pick one song from any number of equally eligible candidates) or the riot at the end of Tommy, or most of the Let It Bleed album, or Neil Young's "Down By The River" or...I could go on, and this is just sticking to rock and roll. And this is all so obvious, I feel kind of silly taking the time to point it out. But then I see another infomercial with bloody Peter Fonda talking about the music of the 60s (particularly the songs by bands that don't cost a lot to anthologize) and acting as if he doesn't even remember how Easy Rider actually ends. "We blew it" indeed. The danger and the destruction was always right there, all along, just like how the electric nightmare of "A House Is Not Motel" is there lurking in an almost entirely acoustic album by a band called Love, of all things.
(Big dose of credit to Andrew Hultkrans' book about the album for the 33 1/3 series, and to Ben Edmonds' liner notes from the 2001 Rhino edition of the album)
