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gengelcox's review
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Contrary to Bryan Adams’ ode, the summer of 1969 was actually quite horrible. In fact, in general the late 60s had a lot more negatives than positives, even though rose-colored glasses tinge nostalgia for it, especially for those who didn’t live through it (I was a toddler at the time and don’t remember any of it firsthand). Delving into this book about an album released in 1967, I was expecting an insight into the making of the music, why this album sounds so unlike others of the time, with its 12-string guitars, orchestral sections, and strangely disjointed lyrics that sometimes run together or over themselves. Hultkrans does a great job of establishing what made Arthur Lee and his band Love different, from the more obvious visual characteristics (frontman Lee was black when many of the other LA bands were decidedly less diverse, unless you counted being Canadian as diversity) to the psychological (Lee, in interviews at the time and afterwards, had a premonition of his own death that proved to be unwarranted). Along the way, Hultkrans fills you in on some trivia about the band and the LA scene. Lee and his bandmates considered calling themselves the Asylum Chorus after the inmates in Peter Weiss’ German play Marat/Sade; Love itself was a truncation of another considered name, Strangelove. Fellow musicians in both LA and San Francisco thought of the band as Hate, given their swagger and attitude. Much of Lee’s strange musings come from the gnostic gospel, including the cryptic song “7 and 7 Is.” At one point, Bobby Beausoleil had been rhythm guitarist for a previous incarnation of the band when they were known as the Grass Roots; Beausoleil would later make a name for himself as the first member of Charles Manson’s “Family” to commit a murder (and for which he remains incarcerated in California). At one point, Love was considered the foremost LA psychedelic band, but Lee’s disdain for touring meant that the band he helped Elektra sign, The Doors, became much more popular.
As with other books in this series, I listened to the album constantly while reading the book. I had been indifferent about the album before, finding only the first track, “Alone Again Or,” worth listening to repeatedly. This book helped open my ears to some of the other tracks, especially “Andmoreagain,” “The Daily Planet,” and “Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale.”
jdkeller1's review against another edition
4.0
One of the better 33 1/3 books I've read. The right mix of musical analysis and offbeat historical meandering.
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