Widely hailed as a genius, Arthur Lee was a character every bit as colorful and unique as his music.
In 1966, he was Prince of the Sunset Strip, busy with his pioneering racially mixed band, Love, and accelerating the evolution of California folk-rock by infusing it with jazz and orchestral influences, a process that would climax in a timeless masterpiece, the Love album
Forever Changes
.
Shaped by a Memphis childhood and a South Los Angeles youth, Lee always craved fame. He would achieve his ambition with a mixture of vaulting talent and colossal chutzpah. Drug use and a reticence to tour were his Achilles heels, and he succumbed to a dissolute lifestyle just as superstardom was beckoning.
Despite endorsements from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, Lee’s subsequent career was erratic and haunted by the shadow of
, reaching a nadir with his imprisonment in 1996 for a firearms offence. Redemption followed, culminating in an astonishing postmillennial comeback that found him playing
to adoring, multi-generational fans around the world. This upswing was only interrupted by his untimely death from leukemia in 2006.
Written with the full consent and cooperation of Arthur’s widow, Diane Lee,
is a meticulously researched biography that includes lengthy extracts from Arthur’s vivid, comic, and poignant memoirs, published here for the first time. Author John Einarson has also amassed dozens of new interviews with the surviving members of Love and with many others who fell into the incomparable Lee’s flamboyant orbit. This updated edition adds a new foreword by Love’s co-founder and lead guitarist, Johnny Echols.