Love's Forever Changes (2003)

Andrew Hultkrans's 33-1/3 book is only the second in the entire series, which is presently up to some 157 titles, so among other things it must be regarded as a pioneering effort. Hultkrans, a Brooklyn-based writer at large and one-time editor of Bookforum, focuses more on the context of Arthur Lee and Love's classic album in tumultuous late-'60s Los Angeles, basically all library-style research—lots of quotes from books, virtually none from original interviews. It's one way to do it and not a bad way either. But too often this one reads like an industrious term paper, although at least we are spared the heavy footnoting of other 33-1/3 volumes. The Love album is a famously tough nut to crack. My experience with it is much like Hultkrans: drawn to it (late) by its reputation, underwhelmed, until finally finding a way in, when it becomes indelible. Hultkrans says the only other album he's had a similar experience with is Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That insight comes early and the good news and bad news is that it's one of the most original in the whole thing. There is definitely some kind of psychic connection between those two albums. Anyway, most of the book is focused on California in the late '60s, mostly Los Angeles, and don't think we're going to get out of this without hearing about Charles Manson. It only makes sense, even beyond time and place, because it appears someone with a glancing involvement with Love was later associated with Manson. Joan Didion naturally gets some attention too, as the reigning Los Angeles essay poet of dread, but the person Hultkrans turns to most often is political activist Todd Gitlin. I think we may have the perspective now to see that the overly familiar and much ballyhooed underside of the hippie experience—Charles Manson and Altamont, with a side dish of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—has been grossly exaggerated as equal to the values of peace, love, civil rights, and respect for the environment. Yes, stuff like the Weathermen happened. And actually a book about Forever Changes is not a bad place to bring it all up again and air it out. Even so, Arthur Lee was alive in 2003 and we miss hearing from him here, understanding that he was an exceedingly tough interview to get. It's hard to say whether that would have improved the book but it might have helped put the focus more where it belongs. It is more intensely trained on context, and in many ways unfortunately the band and the album too are relegated to the background. You can't blame Hultkrans because Forever Changes is a notoriously difficult album to nail down properly anyway. But the result in this 33-1/3 entry is a bit like the joke about losing your keys in the alley but looking for them under the streetlight because the light is better there.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Forever Changes (1967)

I've never had a really good perspective on this album, partly because it's another classic I came to late, when I was self-educating and attempting to fill gaps thanks to infatuations with Dave Marsh's and then Robert Christgau's album guides of the late '70s and early '80s. That was also the time, for example, when I really became acquainted with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and the Dolly Parton collection with "Down From Dover." This problem of perspective among our rock critics, by the way, only becomes more complicated as the years go by. For an era of music conventionally taken as beginning the year I was born, 1955, the game of catch-up only becomes more and more tricky. When you are born in 1999, say, that history is inevitably going to become flattened and distorted (if indeed you are even interested, as "rock" and/or "rock 'n' roll" seem to be going the way of jazz this century, a topic for study by monkish types). Certainly later perspectives are going to be different from those formed by people experiencing things in real time.

Forever Changes by Love, this album and band I had never heard of in 1980, was heralded as brilliant and essential by Marsh, in spite of its commercial failure, a sentiment echoed by others once I started to look into it—about the band, its driving force Arthur Lee, and this specific album. So I put it on my list. I found a copy somewhere. I played it and was struck mostly by how quiet it is. It's almost weightless in a way—strummed acoustic guitars, Lee's warbling muffled murmuring vocals, with low budget drum kit efficiencies pushed to the rear, unexpected accompaniment by strings and horns, and once in a while a breakout electric guitar. I thought it was a strange way to approach psychedelic acid-rock (which appeared to be the favored niche) as opposed to the sheets and walls of sculpted noise I was used to that term signifying from Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, the Who, Cream, etc. I puzzled over Forever Changes for a few weeks, fussing with it and waiting for it to click, but it looked like it might be one I'd have to file under "don't get." We all have a few of those—another one of those niggling rock critic problems.

30. Love, "My Little Red Book" (1966)

(listen)

There's something so deliciously infectious about this nicely appointed little rave-up. It hooks on right away with a fast-tempo'd nervous high-hat pitter-pat and fine rubbery bass figure and builds up its impossible head of steam so efficiently you're probably not even half aware how good it is until it's over. You have to hear it again, almost immediately, or anyway I always do. It just had to be a surefire hit on the '60s discotheque dance floors. I don't know how it could miss. And it all seems so hit/miss unlikely now too: I get a big kick, first, out of the fact that it's a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, featured with pipe organ (and too slow!) as recorded by Manfred Mann for the kooky mid-'60s comedy, What's New Pussycat? (written by Woody Allen, starring Peter Sellers, and with Tom Jones turning the title theme into a big hit). How in the world did it ever fall into the orbit of Arthur Lee? I don't even care. I'm just glad it did. Lee and Love were authors of the great album Forever Changes, recommended to anyone who doesn't already know it, but this was from the band's first, self-titled album, appropriately enough kicking it off with this burst of pure sugar rush energy. Speed, speed, speed, haste, haste, haste, the thing just moves. It's got so much propulsive momentum indeed that I almost get nervous when it plays, but the Bacharach melody and composition is as sweet and beguiling as anything he did. If it's an unexpected alliance of pop forces, it's also one that works as well as practically any other out there. Play it play it again, play it again!

41. Hole, "I Think That I Would Die" (1994)

(listen)

I have always been a sucker for a good drama, and among other things this delivers one of the great declarations of "Fuck you" in all of rock 'n' roll. This one's personal—well, they all are with Courtney Love, but you know what I mean—it rolls up all the grievances she forever nurses about feminist backlash and unfair and you wouldn't with anyone else and why me and low self-esteem and there should have been something about Olympia, Washington, and all the fans and sycophants not appreciative (read: ingratiating) enough, and football players, and John Cheever, and thick meat sandwiches with ketchup. The usual upchuck of association, sung calculatedly out of key. Mostly this is a locus for all the seething resentment she bore over the baby Bean and Child Protective Services and so-called friends who narc'ed her out and who knows what else. But that whole episode. On that level it's just about as authentic as I've ever heard her. That's, I believe, why the chant goes, "I want my baby / Where is the baby? / I want my baby / Who took my baby?" The mumbled, "It's / Not / Yours" before the great volcanic eruption. The point is it's cathartic, like the album, but with a particularly fine point, which somehow never seems to wear away. She really seems to mean it. For a few naked moments the self-centeredness is deliberately cast off—no doubt for self-serving motives, but done all the same. And there she is, with a great band at its peak churning away behind her, genuine: "There is no milk / There is no milk / There is no milk."

Live Through This (1994)

All these years later and I'm still not exactly sure what to think of this, the only album by Hole that matters. At one time I took the side of Courtney Love – call it the sympathy vote – but in light of the band's skimpy follow-ons I have since, grudgingly, come to believe the insinuations about Kurt Cobain having a much, much bigger hand here than he is officially credited for. Not that this is a bunch of Nirvana songs he wrote and threw to the object of his love and hatred, only that he was heavily involved, with an enmeshment that has the density of a Lennon/McCartney collaboration, one of those where it's hard to know where one author ends and the other begins. That's one of the bitches of a primary relationship. One of many. I'm happy to give the nod to Love for the calibrated choice of Young Marble Giants cover, "Credit in the Straight World," the gratuitously bizarre denigration of all things Olympia, Washington, the various passages of shrieking and throaty caterwauling, along with putting the band together in the first place and supplying all the drive and ambition, that being hardly the least significant piece of the proceedings here. The imagery of milk and other bodily functions related to baby-having came from them both – a fascination for which being one of those things they shared. Everything else has something (or everything) of Cobain to it – all the riffs, licks, hooks, and sundry dynamics of sound. Hate Courtney Love as you will. I can't say I think much of her myself. But this album is as much testimony to Cobain's love for her as the timing of his suicide was testimony to his hate. You just can't pick it apart. There's the rub. It's frozen in time that way.

Gas Station Cassette 1-3

In memory of some favorites who passed away this past calendar year.

Gas Station Cassette 1: Arthur Lee
Gas Station Cassette 2: Desmond Dekker
Gas Station Cassette 3: Grant McLennan

Two more still to come, when time allows. More information in comments.