Love's Forever Changes

Forever Changes is one of my all-time favorite albums and is one of the few I listened to as a youth that I never tire of hearing. So naturally I am as interested in reading about the enigmatic Arthur Lee and his band as I am in listening to them. I just recently got around to reading this book having had no idea what to expect of the author. At first, I was annoyed by his hard left political rants but then as I read on, I became engrossed by his obviously educated take on the album and its meaning. Make no mistake, if you are expecting airy gossip, then pass this book by. Hultkrans' Forever Changes is a thinking man's guide to the album. You may or may not agree with what he says, but you will come away at the end of the book listening to the album with a different mindset. You may even come away wanting to explore the writings of Kierkegaard, Huysmans, Woolf, and other referenced writers to see where Lee may have gotten existential inspiration. Some reviewers didn't find much about Forever Changes in these pages. I found a great deal, not only about the songs, but about the peculiar cultural milieu that spawned Lee. I don't understand why several of the reviewers complain about the elevated tone of Hultkrans' exegesis. Most people I know who really like Forever Changes are of a thoughtful bent, so I would think that most who want to get beneath the surface of Lee's lyrics would be delighted by the approach here. After all, taken literally many of the songs seem nonsensical. However, when they are examined from the viewpoint of the arcane philosophies that seemed to animate Lee, then they begin to make some sense. I enjoyed reading Forever Changes and would recommend it to anyone interested in looking at a great album in a radical new way. It would have gotten five stars had Hultkrans managed to keep his off-topic political biases to himself.

It's fair to say that readers of Rolling Stone or Guitar Player may hate this book. If you're looking for sentences like, "Arthur drifted into GoldStar Studios on August 3rd, plugged in his red Gibson E-335, and strummed an Fmaj7 while sneering at his bandmates," you've come to the wrong place. But I have to strongly disagree with the reviewer below that the book is not about or for fans of Love and "Forever Changes." The writer digs very deep into the historical context of the album--late '60s Los Angeles--and the mindset of its creator, Arthur Lee. He lays out a pocket biography of Lee and gathers tons of quotes from the band, its peers, and LA scenesters and commentators. Through close readings of the lyrics of "Forever Changes," the author unearths plenty of hidden meanings and veiled influences. He treats the album like a difficult novel and tries to get to the bottom of it. This may not be your typical music book, but it's a fascinating book of ideas, and I came away from it with a far richer understanding of the baffling genius of "Forever Changes." The writing and approach--a blend of literary sensibility, cultural history, personal riffage, intuition--matches the enduring complexity of its subject. If all you want from music writing is trivia, gear descriptions, and commentary like "Yeah, man, it's a rilly great album," look elsewhere. But if you think the best records deserve the kind of deep appreciation usually reserved for literature, art, and film, you won't be disappointed. Also, if you're into smart, somewhat paranoid books about LA--Thomas Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49," Joan Didion's "The White Album," Mike Davis's "City of Quartz," etc.--you'll find lots to like here.

Kudos to this publisher for this series. This is the first one I've picked up, but will definitely be buying the others if they're as good as this. This is one of my favorite albums, and I can't believe someone wrote a whole book about it! Good job.

I've been having a great time reading the books in Continuum's 33-1/3 series. They're intelligent but not pompous, easily digested in a single sitting given their 100-page length. Of those I've looked at, I have to say this one on Love's Forever Changes is my favorite. Part of it is the exotic choice of subject---the original album remains a cult "nugget" of 60s rock, even after its 2002 reissue and Arthur Lee's recent tours. But Andrew Hultkrans' thesis that Lee is a "crank prophet" whose 67 opus was an apocalyptic portent of what would come two years later with the Manson murders, Altamont, and the overall collapse of the 60s youth culture is fascinating and informative. The range of scholarly reference here is impressive; you'd expect a mention or two of Greil Marcus, but I give the author props for associating Arthur Lee with Sacvan Bercovitch's work on the jeremiad tradition. I also found the interviews and histories excerpted refreshingly new; although Todd Gitlin's The 60s is well-known, Barney Hoskyn's Waiting for the Sun isn't, though it deserves to be. Maybe the ominousness of the Summer of Love that Arthur tapped into is best epitomized by the fact that a future Manson family murderer, Bobby Beausoleil, tried out as the group's rhythm guitarist. That fact alone seems to confirm a malevolent design to fate. The book made me do what good books on music should: it made me want to study the music more. I've been reading and listening at the same time, in fact.

To tell the truth, I was dreading reading this book. It's not often that a book is devoted to a band or an album about which I care so deeply, and it seemed very likely that this would be another well-meaning but shallow tome along the lines of Barney Hoskyn's disappointing Arthur Lee biog last year. But this little book, in the short space of 121 pages, blew me away.For a start, this is a deeply personal book. If you have a problem with that approach, you will quite possibly hate it. To me, however, such an approach makes perfect sense with this album. 'Forever Changes' is not the kind of record that leaves people neutral - if it gets inside your head, inside your heart, then it will never leave. Astonishingly, it becomes more powerful with time, and when you see the re-juvenated Arthur Lee performing these songs after so long in the wilderness, it's almost like being born again. A phrase which brings me back to the book in hand...Andrew Hultkrans, the author, does a remarkable job of digging into Arthur Lee's lyrics on this album. He writes beautifully about LA in the mid to late Sixties, about the whole scene of which Love were an integral part, and about the extraordinary mental state that Arthur Lee must have been in to create this masterpiece. There is a fair amount of religion and spirituality in here, specifically the concept of Gnosticism. It's entirely possible (as Hultkrans playfully admits) that he's reading too much into Arthur Lee's lyrics, but DAMN it's interesting, and it amazes me that people haven't latched on to this before. I kept catching myself smiling while reading this book - partly out of agreement with what Hultkrans was writing, and also out of sheer happiness that someone had taken the effort to express so well his thoughts about this incredible album.