When Love’s second record, Da Capo, appeared in 1967, it bore little similarity to either its predecessor or anything released that year.
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Though they frequently played live early on, Love rarely toured after their initial success. He showed little interest in becoming a rock shaman or a spokesperson for his generation, and his band was similarly retiring. While he impressed those around him with his talent and intelligence, he seemed to enjoy keeping those qualities close to the vest. Whereas Jim Morrison, Grace Slick, and Hendrix possessed flamboyant, commanding personalities, Lee was more reclusive and withdrawn. Though the record sold well, Love didn’t soar to stardom like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, or Jimi Hendrix. The band gave Burt Bacharach’s “My Little Red Book” a blunt, garage-rock treatment, while their acoustic dirge “Signed D.C.” conveyed the thoughts of a dying junkie with unsparing bleakness. Suffused with folky melodies and the peal of electric 12-string Rickenbackers, the record merged the Byrds’ trademark jangle with a more aggressive attack. A year later their eponymous debut hit the stores. They became a major attraction around town and were one of the first rock bands signed to the Elektra label. In 1965, after seeing the Byrds in an LA club, Lee formed Love with a bunch of local musicians. He was an eccentric character who managed to wow acquaintances with his allegedly extravagant use of LSD, even in a milieu where drugs were commonplace. Along with Sly Stone, he was one of its few black participants. In the mid-60s Lee was an anomalous figure in the burgeoning California rock scene. It was idiosyncratic–like its chief architect, Arthur Lee. It was too terse to be psychedelic, too restrained to be hard rock, and too odd to work as pure pop. Likewise, their music never fit snugly into the prominent styles of the day. Where most bands intoned overt political slogans and messages of brotherly love, Love’s lyrics were often cryptic, dark, and intensely personal.
#Genius of love series#
Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content).What's so deep is not some sort of physical measurement here, which would make no sense in relation to a male, but how deeply funk artistry has been able to penetrate down through the layers of civilization to renew that primitive rhythm of life, sex, and dance. It recalls that wonderfully bittersweet song from the musical HAIR "Frank Mills" where the persona bewails the absence of her (one night) lover: "If you see him, tell him. The plaintive "If you see him, please remind him." at the end pulls the focus back from the artist onto the "lady who waits" herself. The boyfriend represents not only this particular musician, but every funk artist, the music itself, drugs, and yes, sex. This refrain reflects the theme of the whole piece, the boyfriend is the genius coming and going, the girlfriend is static, delirious when he's around, lonely when he's not. I really love the way the normal rhythm of the phrase "gen-i-us of love" is completely distorted, making "genius" trisyllabic followed by the two beats "of love", creating an asymmetrical 3/2 metric as the flow of syllables come to an abrupt stop. The stacatto scratching of the name "Bohannan" and the other riffs thrown in make it an homage to the "evolution of funk", as someone briliiantly stated, in the same vein as "Groove is in the Heart" and presumably out of the same musical milieu.
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With references to the rough underbelly of a musician's life, the female voices are just so incredibly upbeat and delightful, emitting a giddiness at the level of Japanese high-school girl.
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Once it gets in your brain it will never leave, it will just set up a little home there and always be there to cheer you up. General CommentThis song so rocks!! One of the reasons I love it so much is that it's more than catchy, it's infectious. Who needs to think when your feet just go With a hippie-the-hip and a hippie-the-hop Who needs to think when your feet just go? What you gonna do when you get out of jail?įeels like I'm dreaming, but I'm not sleepingĬlinton's musicians such as Bootsy Collins