LOVE
Love was an American rock group of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. They were led by singer/songwriter Arthur Lee who wrote most of the songs, although some of their best known songs were written by Bryan MacLean. One of the first racially diverse American pop bands, their music reflected different influences, combining elements of rock and roll, garage rock, folk, and psychedelia. While finding only modest success on the music charts, Love would come to be praised by critics as one of the finest and most important American rock groups of their era. Their third album Forever Changes (1967) is generally regarded as their masterpiece. (More from Wikipedia)
Among the many 1960’s psychedelic bands are the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Big Brother and the Holding Company, 13th Floor Elevators, the Chocolate Watchband, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Iron Butterfly, and Tomorrow. Our local newspaper, the Sun Herald reported over the weekend about a previously unreleased album by Arthur Lee’s band Love that is supposed to hit the stores shortly; I didn’t expect such hip news from them frankly.
(March 2011)
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The Skywalkers learned about the 1960’s music scene through early Pink Floyd albums and the Soft Machine, and no doubt the rich musical heritage in their home country. Their musical vision was to fuse garage and psychedelic music together, but always with a pop sensibility; as they put it in the interview: “We like psychedelic music but it has to have a pop character as well. Think of bands like the Electric Prunes, Love and Strawberry Alarm Clock, Tomorrow. Our favorite years in music are 1966 and 1967, where garage and psychedelic music just came together. Our favourite subgenre is Baroque Pop with artists like Billy Nicholls, Sagittarius, the Millennium, and of course the Zombies.” I would add to that list a rather under-appreciated American band called the Left Banke, who had a lovely hit song in 1967, “Walk Away Renee”.
(January 2013)
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This is taken from the write-up by Greg Shaw in Destination: Bomp! for the SS-20 song “Arnold Layne”: “Once in a while I get enthusiasms that few others seem to share, and this was one of those. I was in awe of Bruce Wagner’s ability to squeeze original ideas out of the boneyard of rock guitar cliché, and I particularly love what he did with old songs. We cut stuff by people including the Seeds, the Stooges, Love, and the Doors, in each case adding something new to songs I thought had already been done to perfection. Against this, SS-20 had Madeleine Ridley’s morbid, gothic poetry, a blend I found intriguing.”
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The two songs on the B side of SS-20 with Sky Saxon are outtakes from the Dream Life LP (Sky Saxon is not involved in these recordings) and are two more cover songs by SS-20 of the Music Machine’s “Trouble” and “No Matter What” by Love (who had called the song “No Matter What You Do”). In their entry on this disc, the website www.skysaxonseeds.com/ notes: “This EP is a very rare post-Seeds instance of Sky [Saxon] not including ‘Sunlight’ in his name.”
(December 2017)
