Wake Up in the Morning, Find Your Poor Self Dead

Love founder/frontman Arthur Lee has died at the age of 61. Forever Changes, their third album, is one of my very favourite records; pretty/eerie, intricate/forceful, it just keeps on surprising me. Their other early albums are well worth hearing too, and the single “Seven and Seven Is,” from Da Capo, is one of the great artyfacts of the first psychedelic era.

I had planned to see Arthur Lee play Lee’s Palace three or four years ago (can’t remember if it was billed as a Lee show or a Love show), but his troubles with the law – he’d recently done time for drug charges – got him turned back at the border. [Correction: it was a dubious gun charge, not a drug charge. A little more info here.]

Anyway, their big tune is “Alone Again Or,” the opener on Forever Changes, but here’re another couple cuts from the album, as well as a primo B-side that surfaced on a new Forever Changes reissue about five years ago. (Buy the reissue here.)

• Love, “Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale”
• Love, “Bummer in the Summer”
• Love, “Laughing Stock”

And here are some Love covers, including Billy Bragg’s very un-Billy Bragg-like version of “Seven and Seven Is.”

• Black Tambourine, “Can’t Explain” (buy here)
• Yo La Tengo, “A House Is Not a Motel” (buy here)
• Calexico (with Nicolai Dunger and band), “Alone Again Or” (buy here)
• Billy Bragg, “Seven and Seven Is”