A 1972 NME interview with Lee explained things further, with the journalist Danny Holloway writing: “Arthur was supposedly a pain in the ass to his record companies, too.

Yet it wasn’t all plain sailing Lee’s heroin addiction was a major factor in the band’s destruction and when they should have been at the height of their powers, the group collapsed. I want to blend all of those things I’ve heard,” he said. I think I’m capable of doing just about everything I’ve heard. I don’t have any favourite types of music. “I wanted to put so-called symphony orchestrated riffs in with hard rock, blues, funky, spunky boogies. Legally binding, in fact.Ĭalling himself “the first black hippie”, Lee’s role heading up a multi-racial rock band only a few years after the end of segregation in the US was a powerful, pivotal thing. And it wasn’t just us, in 2002, Lee visited the House Of Commons in London, after British Members Of Parliament voted ‘Forever Changes’ the greatest album of all time and Love “the world’s greatest rock band” in a motion proposed by Labour backbencher Peter Bradley MP.

We ranked it at a pretty decent 37 in NME’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2013. Though it didn’t quite get the rabid recognition it deserved until a few years later, it’s now considered one of the best records of all time a sumptuous, psychedelic wonderland that influenced everyone from The Libertines to Tame Impala. Sometimes the best band names are the easiest ones, right? The folksy rockers released their debut album the following year but it was 1967’s outstanding ‘Forever Changes’ that really set them apart. In 1965 the charismatic but notoriously difficult Memphis-born Lee joined forces with Byrds roadie Bryan MacLean and formed the band Love in Los Angeles. Only one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

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