Love: Forever Changes
From Louisville to Eau Claire by way of Bloomsburg
Walking into Guestroom Records in Louisville, you will see painted album covers, just above the vinyl racks and new releases. They line the tops of the walls, interpreting a range of iconic records — from The Bad Brains to Low to Lauryn Hill to Quiet Riot to Ted Lucas to Miles Davis and beyond. It’s quite the gallery and as eclectic as the tastes of the store itself. Best of all this art is priced to move and the cover art changes frequently. So the last time Aubrie and I were in Louisville, I figured it was time to bring an album cover back home to Wisconsin.
After going back and forth between A Tribe Called Quest and Captain Beefheart, we opted for Love’s Forever Changes cover. The cover merges the faces of the band into a psychedelic merged hivemind, framed within a simple tool line and a scripted powder blue Forever Changes serving as the lower right-hand corner. The Love logo is in the upper left-hand corner. The white canvas has a tiny smudge, only noticeable up close, making the painting feel that much more in touch with the album itself. I had had my eye on this cover before we moved and was quietly excited that it was still there… like it was waiting for us to come home. I didn’t have to campaign for it too much and after some creative packaging, it was ready for a nine-hour trip to the Badger State. Truth be told, Forever Changes has been traveling with me for years, stretching back to my first experiences buying music.
When you’re fifteen you have no idea how much of an unintentional pain in the ass you can be, especially to unwitting mentors. After six months of Fridays spent at Mugsy’s Discount Records in Bloomsburg, the shop owner John finally decided to “gift” me with a book. It was a 1200-page tome called The All Music Guide (AMG), freshly pressed and almost tailor-made for motormouthed fledgling record geeks, generously described as precocious. I was so desperate to just know and absorb and seek connections between the names on the liner notes, the artists on the spines, and the music blowing my mind at a prodigious rate.
The day Mugsy handed me the AMG, I also bought a CD upon his recommendation. Love Forever Changes was about halfway over when I came into the store and halfway into my awkward rambling report back on Something Else by The Kinks (purchased the week before), I heard something extraordinary, a flamenco-style guitar solo backed by Latin brass.
Was that a mariachi band playing rock n roll?
I remember listening to Herb Alpert’s “Lonely Bullfighter” at my drum teacher’s studio earlier that year and couldn’t reconcile the sound I was hearing. That song "Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale" was my introduction to Love, but as I stood there listening, the next song’s lyrics took my teenage mind to the second paradigm-jarring jolt in as many tracks…
Oh, the snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal
There's a bluebird sitting on a branch
I guess I'll take my pistol
I've got it in my hand
Because he's on my land
And so the story ended
Do you know it oh so well
Well should you need I'll tell you
The end-end-end-end-end-end-end-end
The delicate finger-picking and acoustic strumming layered atop a bubbly bassline felt like the Beach Boys on Pet Sounds, but the lyrics crooned by a coyly cool Arthur Lee felt way more sinister. The band from the Sunset Strip may have been recording during the Summer of Love, but this music was not the sunny optimism of San Francisco. It felt dangerous, even more than the Velvet Underground, just by the way it juxtaposed incense and peppermints with brown acid and Vietnam. Sure, the Manson Family and Altamont were two years away when Love was recording in June of ‘67 but Arthur Lee and company felt like they were on the psychic cliff of a looming paranoia.
And it sounded pretty. It also sounded haunted, but fragile and beautiful with moments of throbbing doom offset with horns and strings that would not have felt out of place in a Sergio Leone film.
It’s been written that Arthur Lee had premonitions of his death leading into Forever Changes, and in that sense, the album supposedly served as a requiem — a list will and testament to a music career only (at the time) two records long. The fatalism and dread can now be seen as the seeds sown into the third act of the rock n’ roll. A harbinger of the cultural hangover that was the early 70s in rock music. Before Janis, Jimi, or Jim joined the 27 Club, you had Arthur Lee serving as one of rock's first iconoclasts, chronicling the struggle to come while dragging a romantic funeral pall over Forever Changes.
When you’re fifteen and you have only a handful of these puzzle pieces, dropping Love into your lap is nothing short of a revelation. Thinking about me from 1990, in a pre-Nirvana world, Forever Changes spoke to angst and the fragile drama of being a small-town mixed-race kid. Love felt obscure, a cult act with a brilliant album and a lot of history to fill in. It was a secret that had been shared with me with an implicit trust that I would not keep it for myself. Great art only truly grows into its potential and beauty when it’s shared.
I remember spending the weekend with this album on repeat, feverishly reading the lyrics and ignoring the world beyond my headphones. Why wasn’t this album bigger? Why don’t they talk about Forever Changes the way they talk about Sgt. Pepper’s? Why isn’t Love in the same dark poetic conversation as the Doors? This last question now feels ironic since the story goes that Elektra Records wanted Love to tour Europe and was willing to put its promotion machine behind them. Arthur Lee was not interested in leaving Los Angeles and recommended another act they were friendly with, The Doors.
That summer, as I kept trying to introduce Forever Changes to ambivalent friends (“Yeah. It’s okay. Have you heard Damn Yankees though???”) I also spent time pouring through the AMG. By the time September rolled around, I had read the guide cover to cover. Love was just one star in a constellation of albums and artists that became the roots of my ever-obsessive record-collecting tomorrow. There was a whole universe of forgotten icons and near-misses that would become points of reference for 1) how good a record store was and 2) if I could be friends with you. Luckily, I’ve grown out of 2) but that running list of cult-artist staples still gets pulled out as soon as we hit the uncharted territory of a new record shop.
I am forever grateful for Mugsy’s and his patience with teenage me. John could’ve easily dismissed my curiosity, sold me Appetite for Destruction or Led Zeppelin III, and called it a day. It’s a look I see in the eyes of the best record store clerks, and it’s always a welcome sight to see. Passion recognizes passion and gives oxygen to a flame. It’s a continuum to a community and I can hear my voice echo from both sides of the counter.
The Forever Changes album art is hanging over our dining room table, and occasionally it’ll appear in the background of a social media post. A former student recently asked me about it in a DM.
“What’s the painting? Since it’s you I’m guessing it’s an album cover. Do I need to hear it?”
Sometimes the only things that change are the roles, I guess.