LOVE • EXETER PHOENIX ARTS CENTRE, UNITED KINGDOM, FEBRUARY 9, 2004

As Arthur Lee took the stage, a voice from the audience cried out in relief and celebration, “Arthur!.....You're free!”

To say that Arthur Lee, and by extension his band Love, has led an unpredictable existence is something of an understatement. Within hours of completing their gentle hippie masterpiece, Forever Changes , half of the band embarked on a campaign of robbing doughnut shops. Lee himself did more than five years hard time, for firing a gun in anger.

Would Lee appear as an elder spokesman for the Age of Aquarius, or as a tough guy with a long rap sheet? A bit of both, really, but more than that as a serious musician who has grown with the times, much in the same way that the times eventually grew into him.

It came as no surprise that Love's set was built primarily upon the songs from Forever Changes . They're great songs, they're the only ones that most of the audience knows. What was refreshing was the manner in which they were delivered.

The album seamlessly melds songs, styles, and sounds through a lysergic filter, leaving the listener with a nearly homogenous sense of cosmic continuity and essence. Live, Lee broke the songs back down, emphasizing, rather than nebulizing, his rich diversity of influences. It wasn't merely surprising to hear songs like “Alone Again Or,” “The Red Telephone,” and “Andmoreagain” reproduced over a Bo Diddley beat, or dramatizing the kind of chord progressions more typically associated with the Clash-it was entirely appropriate. Lee wasn't putting anything in that wasn't already there, he was just varying the recipe a bit.

The high point of the show was, for me, an entirely boisterous, Zeppelinesque, “A House is Not a Motel.” Lee screamed with the unembellished abandon of a banshee losing power, accompanied by superbly intricate (but not delicate) riffing from guitarist Mike Randle. Incredible stuff-of course the irony is that Robert Plant has been playing a gentle, understated version of the piece for the last several years. Incredible. Listen to the original, it's all in there.

Lee's personal appeal has lost nothing to the years. It is clear that he considers himself more an artist than a performer. He engaged regularly with the audience, without reacting much or readjusting due to the engagements. At one point he declared the audience the “quietest that I've ever seen,” but quickly laughed, and added “don't change.” As far as Lee is concerned the show is an immeasurable success so long as Lee shows up and does it his way. His ego is palpable, there was very much a sense that he considered himself to be promoting a somewhat less celebrated, if worthy, artist when the band broke into John Lennon's “Instant Karma.”

For all of Lee's charisma and appeal, the most show-stopping musical moments of the night came when Randle stepped front and center into the spotlight. There aren't many guitarists capable of rendering polyrhythmic speed-metal blues (not a contradiction in terms, just very difficult) so fluidly, or with such authority. Randle came of age in Los Angeles during the time when Slash was (rightly, I think) being compared with Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. I tracked Randle down after the show, and he assured me that, nonetheless, Arthur Lee has always been his primary influence.

In fact, he told me one of those great L.A. stories. Eleven years ago Randle was working in a little record store off of La Cienega Boulevard, in Santa Monica. A customer bought a stack of Love albums, and Randle made complementary noises. The customer declared himself to be Love's manager (such claims are made as regularly in L.A. as tea is brewed in Exeter), and Randle told the guy about his own band-heavy in Love influence and covers. Randle offered to open for Love, “anytime, anywhere, for free.” The next day when the phone rang it was the manager, who informed Randle that Lee would like to hear his band. Lee heard Randle's band, fired his own, and Randle's band became Love.

So Love is an evolving band whose influences blow through like spectres in the courtyard. It's all about Lee, and the best player on the stage is a younger man who cuts solo blues recordings on the side. And, the really cool part is that Lee has somehow managed to achieve some of the best of what he set out to do. It's difficult to imagine a more diverse crowd grooving together: to our left was a 15-year old taking photos on his mobile phone and sending text messages, to our right was a balding man in his 60s, dancing so hard that he had to readjust his hearing aid.

Versions of t his review originally appeared in FM Sound and the Exeter Flying Post.

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