Arthur Lee seems so embedded in the 1960s that it's hard to imagine him existing outside that decade. Strongly influenced by the baroque folk-pop of the Byrds, his smart, steely psychedelia conveyed a dark vision of hippie America-- a distinct contrast to the good vibrations typically associated with the Summer of Love. That was the same year-- 1967, for those of you who don't read Rolling Stone (which I think might be everybody)-- that Lee and his band Love released its scene-paranoid masterpiece Forever Changes, on which he painted himself as a true L.A. outsider, haunting the scrub-brush hills and looking deep into the dark heart of the city around him. In those songs, he foretells his own doom, and everyone else's: On "The Red Telephone", he sings, "Sitting on the hillside/ Watching all the people die/ I'll feel much better on the other side."
On these two albums (Out Here and False Start), Lee repeatedly refers to other artists and other songs, which doesn't anchor him to the mainstream culture but reiterates his underground detachment. This constant dissociation heightens the lively tension on the live disc, which was recorded at various stops on the band's 1970 tour of England. Like the studio version that closes Out Here, "Gather 'Round" appropriates the melody from Dylan's "The Times They Are A'Changin'", not out of laziness but as a pointed commentary on the death of that generation's idealism. Lee thrives on complication and contradiction: As either a supremely cynical or a playful gesture, he turns the song into an impromptu cover of Wilson Pickett's "Funky Broadway". Similarly, he performs songs from every Love album (including a particularly caustic "Bummer in the Summer" from Forever Changes) as a means of acknowledging his past glories as well as his fraught history. Live, this version of Love sounds like a band mustering the conviction to take on the world one more time. But they never did: Lee disbanded the line-up shortly after the tour. Love would barely see the 70s, except as a series of failed reunions.
(full version: pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10386-the-blue-thumb-recordings/)