A Book? Who’d Read It?

Lately, I’ve been sifting through my archives looking through all the drivel I put down with the goal of assembling a book. My own Best of Joe Ehrbar anthology, The Joe Ehrbar Musical Companion, Select Writings from 1996-2003. Funny, I know. Don’t worry, I don’t plan to sell it to the wider public or foist it on any reluctant family members. It’s simply a self-serving vanity project, an older-school version of this blog, but printed on actual paper and packed between two cardboard covers. I’ll have a few copies bound and that’ll be it. That way, if I need to refer to something I wrote back in the day, it’ll be smiling at me from the bookshelf. No longer will I have to rummage through hundreds of newspapers and tabloids—I can simply pack up all the papers and send them off to their final reward: the recycling plant, where they can be spooled as toilet paper. I’m not sure when said book will be published, but I’m happy to know that you’re not actually waiting for it. There are many pieces to review—oh, and I’m not merely reprinting them verbatim; I'm editing them, making my problem children a little less problematic. And in some cases, I’m actually rewriting stories, or at least adding to them.

Which brings me to the little orphan below. I doubt I'll include it in the book. Lucky for you, you can read it here. I wrote it for the defunct Seattle rock magazine Backfire, which was published by Dawn Anderson. I don’t quite remember when the piece ran, probably in 2002. It was a revival of a column I did in The Rocket called Demo Joe, in which I’d ask bands to send me their demos and in return I would constructively eviscerate them, usually from a third-person point of view. I’d like to think that since none of these bands exists today or did anything of merit following their appearance in my inane little column that they took my advice and did something more meaningful with their time, like TV-watching or alcoholism. (I should talk.) Here's the copy:

Hey vocal guy of Pistol for a Paycheck, Demo Joe suggests you use it—point it at the feet of your sloth-ly band members and squeeze the trigger. Wake them up; put them on notice; whip them into shape; do whatever it takes to get their drooping asses moving. PFAP’s vocalist really wants to wage blitzkrieg bop, but the rest of his band isn’t so sure they want to get off the couch and join him, and as a result their demo suffers from mid-tempo malaise. Remember, loud and fast rules, boys…Blue Star Creeper have some promise and they’re trying to find their own voice in this great sea of mediocrity. But there’s no spark or spontaneity to be heard on their submission, and they sound bored. Come on, people, it’s supposed to be fun…Monkey and the Butt Puppet probably think their pretty hilarious, Demo Joe surmises, by mouthing such drivel as, “I didn’t mean to butt fuck you,” or, “I want to fuck your mom until the break of dawn.” Classy, guys. Demo Joe is just pleased as poop you molested a perfectly good acoustic guitar and masturbated all over an unsuspecting 4-track to render this musical abortion. But if you want to keep fisting your assholes with such stupidity, do yourself a favor and buy a Frogs record—maybe then you’ll learn how to truly shock your audience with lewd juvenilia that’s exponentially more clever…Horrible’s bio says it all; here’s an excerpt: "Khjkreraklelhnlirj; ekbfhklhb; lkj; kljwkljljw; ljeb; l; rlejb; ebrljbr!lj." Well put. Unfortunately, Horrible aren’t as bad as they’d like you to think. We’ve heard this power-trio-produced power-pop punk plenty, but the band actually cares about the music, and as a result cast songs that, while fishing conventional waters, are at least baited with serrated hooks…Daddies Little Girl are in need of a lyricist. As it stands, their songs are fairly stupid to be heard so prominently in the mix. Listen, guys, if you’ve got lame lyrics, at least sing them in French. At least then you’ll sound like Les Thugs, all be it like their retarded nephews, but anything’s better than this…As for Psychonaut, Demo Joe has this advice: Buy yourself a Throbbing Gristle album, tighten your lyrics, and ease up on the distortion. The electronic barrage is effective, but subtlety is a virtue. Also, if you’re gonna complain about the world sucking eggs, show some insight. Or maybe you are; it’s just that it’s hard to hear through all that distortion-saturated alfalfa obscuring the meat….

All You Need Is Love

I have to be honest: there's no reason to post this dusty old record review of a CD reissue I wrote for a defunct magazine six years ago other than the fact that I just love this album and have been spinning it quite a lot lately. The thing about Love's Forever Changes is that it's one of those rare albums you could call timeless. Forever Changes is often held in the same esteem as the great psychedelic albums that captivated the young ears and minds in 1966 and 1967: The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced?, The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But to me, it's more than just a pinnacle of psych rock. To me, Forever Changes transcends genre--as well as time and space Tell me Sgt. Pepper's doesn't sound a bit dated. No, like Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited or Bringing It All Back Home, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On or Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew (among many others), Forever Changes is a true classic. But unlike those records, which were all critical and commercial successes, Forever Changes struggled to an audience. But find an audience it did; it just took aI'm glad its troubled creator Arthur Lee, who succumbed to Leukemia a couple years ago, lived to see his master work get its well-deserved recognition.

Love
Forever Changes
(Elektra/Rhino CD)

When Love entered the studio in 1967, they would summon all their strengths, talents, even demons for what would be their third album for Elektra Records. On the back of the proto-punk hit "Seven and Seven Is,"from the band's 1966 album, Da Capo, Love had enjoyed minor commercial success, and there were high hopes that this new LP would be their breakthough. And when the band finally emerged with an album titled Forever Changes, they managed to produce one of the great innovative records of not only 1967 (the year which brought radical rock from Pink Floyd with Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Beatles with Sgt. Pepper’s, the Mothers of Invention with We’re Only in It for the Money, and Tim Buckley with Goodbye and Hello, among others), but the entire 1960s. It was an album that would forever change not just the band itself, but everyone who got tangled in its web of splendor and sorrows. A blockbuster release it was not.

Love's road to Forever Changes was rocky. When the psychedelic folk band convened at an L.A. studio to record it, it was just waking from a long stint of dormancy. The band -- composed of vocalist/guitarist Arthur Lee, guitarist Johnny Echols, guitarist/vocalist Bryan Maclean, bassist Ken Forssi and drummer Michael Stewart -- were lethargic, rusty, out-of-sync -- hardly up to the task of making record, much less a masterpiece. Lee, seemingly the only glue keeping Love together, wasn’t about to let his project crumble. He took control of the sessions (much like Brian Wilson) and became a relentless taskmaster, whipping the band into shape, coaxing some truly amazing work from his mates and thus realizing the brilliance to which this album and its songs aspired.

But there’s a darkness that haunts Forever Changes. The album radiates with beautiful, mostly acoustic instrumentation, glorious string arrangements and evocative vocal stylings, but ominous shadows loom over songs, like big black clouds threatening grassy meadows on a spring day.

Much of the gloom stemmed from Lee, whose existential dread in a climate fraught with socio-political and racial tensions and empty hippie idealism forced him into seclusion deep in the Hollywood Hills. And while Lee was a youthful 22 when he began working on the album, he had already resolved that he would be dead by 26. (It never happened, of course.) Naturally, sadness, longing, dread, paranoia, heartache, madness and death infect his songs like a deadly virus. This is particularly felt on the hauntingly gorgeous “The Red Telephone” whose lyrics read: “Sitting on the hillside, watching all the people die, I’ll feel much better when I’m on the other side.” It’s a bad trip, all right, and there are more bad vibes ahead on this compelling work. Other black beauties include “A House Is Not a Motel,” “The Daily Planet,” “Bummer in the Summer” and “Live and Let Live.”

Lee wasn’t the album’s sole visionary. Brian Maclean, Love's most underrated member, brought two of his own songs to the sessions, “Alone Again Or” and “Old Man.” He sang both, casting them in fragile, evocative tenor, rendering sublime melancholy to an album that was already spectacularly sad and emotionally sweeping.

Considering the circumstances into which Forever Changes was born, it’s amazing just how together Love sounds on this album. It’s a stunning document created by the most unheralded band of the 1960s, and it perfectly captures the mood of the times, while offering a portrait of a band on the verge of collapse.

--Joe Ehrbar
Originally published in Backfire, July 2001