LOVE

As the latest incarnation of LOVE prepare to return to the UK, talismanic original guitarist Johnny Echols, drummer Michael Stuart-Ware and longtime disciples Baby Lemonade explore the rich, enigmatic legacy of America’s most mercurial ’60s band and their visionary frontman, Arthur Lee. “He wrote music for future generations,” hears Rob Hughes. “Since he was a man ahead of his time, it stands to reason that it just took everybody else a couple of generations to catch up.”

WHEN Johnny Echols thinks of his former school friend and bandmate Arthur Lee, his memory often flashes back to his mid-’60s pomp, when the band Lee led dominated the stage of the Whisky A Go Go, in the heart of Love’s Los Angeles.

“The Whisky was home to us, our crowd was there,” Echols remembers. “We’d play four shows a night, six days a week. Then a matinee on Sundays. Arthur loved attention, so it could be the middle of June and he’d be wearing a fur coat, with one shoe and these coloured glasses. He had a reputation for being different. People would just come to see what he was going to do next. It gave us an aura of unpredictability.”

It is fitting, then, that Echols chose to launch the current tour by the latest iteration of Love at the Whisky, bringing full circle the band’s rich history with this storied venue. It’s where, in May ’66, Lee urged Elektra’s Jac Holzman to sign Love’s support band The Doors; its location at the intersection on Sunset Boulevard prompted “Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale” from the imperious Forever Changes. It’s where Lee and fellow songwriter Bryan MacLean attempted a one-off Love reunion in 1978, where Lee supported a Doors tribute band during the ’90s. It is also where Echols and ex-Love drummer Michael Stuart-Ware hosted a benefit show when Lee was undergoing treatment for leukaemia in June 2006, shortly before his death.

While Lee is no longer with us, Love are – six decades after their inception. It has been an extended second coming that no-one quite expected. Or almost no-one. “Arthur was the face of the group, a profoundly gifted songwriter and charismatic poet with a bent for the unusual and unpredictable, who could kick your ass if you didn’t see things quite his way,” says Stuart-Ware. “Arthur wrote music for future generations. Since he was a man ahead of his time, it stands to reason that it just took everybody else a couple of generations to catch up.”

Indeed, 18 years after Lee’s death, audience demand for Love is perhaps stronger than ever. This latest tour featuring Echols and the Love band – comprising members of longtime Love disciples Baby Lemonade, with Rusty Squeezebox taking over on vocals – is their seventh since Lee’s passing.

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The Da Capo shoot, 1966: (top) Arthur Lee, (l–r) Tjay Cantrelli, Johnny Echols, Michael Stuart-Ware, Alban ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer, Ken Forssi and Bryan MacLean

GABARCHIVE/REDFERNS

“It’s amazing to me that this music has remained relevant all these years,” says Echols. “The time before last, we were in London doing Forever Changes, Rusty’s voice had given out. So he held the mic out into the audience to sing for us. Not only did they do it, but they knew these words inside out. It was so touching that it almost brought me to tears.”