Arthur Lee and the Dark Side of Love

I wasn’t born during the 1960s, so I have a romantic idea of the decade: peace, love, great music, social awareness, and lots of drugs. After reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, though, I realized the 60s were a lot darker. “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city,” she wrote, “sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.” The so-called Age of Aquarius started with hippies feeding five-year-olds acid and ended with the word “pig” written in Sharon Tate’s blood on her door.

Didion wasn’t the only one who saw through flower power’s bullshit. While hippies were going to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, Arthur Lee of the band Love was in Los Angeles writing songs for an album that he thought was going to be his last will and testament. The result, Forever Changes, is full of contradictions: gentle and lush production paired with dark and foreboding lyrics. It’s an album caught in the tension between serenity and insanity, with every pleasant note masking an underlying darkness. Forever Changes is the perfect soundtrack to chaotic times.

After the crowd-pleasing opener “Alone Again Or,” the second track “A House is Not a Motel” sets up the contradictory nature of the album by first describing Love’s hangout…