Love's Forever Changes (Thirty Three and a Third series)

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but..."zeitgeisticide"?
Review: I discovered Forever Changes about two years ago and was blown away. Unlike many other albums from the psychadelic era, the album does not seem dated at all. This book is remarkable in being able to both explain how the time and place in which Arthur Lee and Love made this album (late sixties Los Angeles)was essential to its creation but at the same time exploring why it has transcended that time and place to become a timeless work. A very good read.

Rating:
Summary: Perspective and Context
Review: I discovered Forever Changes about two years ago and was blown away. Unlike many other albums from the psychadelic era, the album does not seem dated at all. This book is remarkable in being able to both explain how the time and place in which Arthur Lee and Love made this album (late sixties Los Angeles)was essential to its creation but at the same time exploring why it has transcended that time and place to become a timeless work. A very good read.

Rating:
Summary: Love's Forever Changes (33 1/3 series)
Review: I was excited to get this book, to learn a bit about the album and it's making. What I got was someone's (at least it reads like) doctoral thesis. This is an intellectual analysis, guesswork in many instances, some fact thrown in. When someone tries so hard to have a heady read, over the head of many indeed, it is usually, in my experience, a lot of maybe this did happen..and maybe some of it didn't, but it is just very boring and it is taking far to long to read this little book that offers little about the group, and guesses much about the mental state of Arthur Lee.

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Summary: Summers of love, prophets of apocalypse
Review: I've been having a great time reading the books in Continuum's 33-1/3 series. They're intelligent but not pompous, easily digested in a single sitting given their 100-page length. Of those I've looked at, I have to say this one on Love's Forever Changes is my favorite. Part of it is the exotic choice of subject---the original album remains a cult "nugget" of 60s rock, even after its 2002 reissue and Arthur Lee's recent tours. But Andrew Hultkrans' thesis that Lee is a "crank prophet" whose 67 opus was an apocalyptic portent of what would come two years later with the Manson murders, Altamont, and the overall collapse of the 60s youth culture is fascinating and informative. The range of scholarly reference here is impressive; you'd expect a mention or two of Greil Marcus, but I give the author props for associating Arthur Lee with Sacvan Bercovitch's work on the jeremiad tradition. I also found the interviews and histories excerpted refreshingly new; although Todd Gitlin's The 60s is well-known, Barney Hoskyn's Waiting for the Sun isn't, though it deserves to be. Maybe the ominousness of the Summer of Love that Arthur tapped into is best epitomized by the fact that a future Manson family murderer, Bobby Beausoleil, tried out as the group's rhythm guitarist. That fact alone seems to confirm a malevolent design to fate. The book made me do what good books on music should: it made me want to study the music more. I've been reading and listening at the same time, in fact.

Rating:
Summary: Profoundly disappointing
Review: If you're a pretentious egghead, you may enjoy this book. If you're a fan of Love or "Forever Changes," you will not.

I bought this because I'd enjoyed the book in the same series (by a different author) about the Kinks' "... Village Green Preservation Society" album. That book discussed the songs on the Kinks album (and others that were recorded for it, but not included) individually and in detail, and contained plenty of interesting information about the making of the album. In contrast, this book, supposedly about "Forever Changes," contains little of interest about that album, instead wasting its pages on yawn-inspiring examinations of Gnosticism, intellectual musings on prophecy, and even self-analysis by the author(!).

I agree with the reviewer below who compared Hultkrans' "Forever Changes" book to a doctoral thesis. If you enjoy reading those, by all means buy this book. If you want to read about "Forever Changes," look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Not Your Typical Music Book
Review: It's fair to say that readers of Rolling Stone or Guitar Player may hate this book. If you're looking for sentences like, "Arthur drifted into GoldStar Studios on August 3rd, plugged in his red Gibson E-335, and strummed an Fmaj7 while sneering at his bandmates," you've come to the wrong place. But I have to strongly disagree with the reviewer below that the book is not about or for fans of Love and "Forever Changes." The writer digs very deep into the historical context of the album--late '60s Los Angeles--and the mindset of its creator, Arthur Lee. He lays out a pocket biography of Lee and gathers tons of quotes from the band, its peers, and LA scenesters and commentators. Through close readings of the lyrics of "Forever Changes," the author unearths plenty of hidden meanings and veiled influences. He treats the album like a difficult novel and tries to get to the bottom of it. This may not be your typical music book, but it's a fascinating book of ideas, and I came away from it with a far richer understanding of the baffling genius of "Forever Changes." The writing and approach--a blend of literary sensibility, cultural history, personal riffage, intuition--matches the enduring complexity of its subject. If all you want from music writing is trivia, gear descriptions, and commentary like "Yeah, man, it's a rilly great album," look elsewhere. But if you think the best records deserve the kind of deep appreciation usually reserved for literature, art, and film, you won't be disappointed.

Also, if you're into smart, somewhat paranoid books about LA--Thomas Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49," Joan Didion's "The White Album," Mike Davis's "City of Quartz," etc.--you'll find lots to like here.

Rating:
Summary: The Good Humor Man Saw This Coming
Review: Kudos to this publisher for this series. This is the first one I've picked up, but will definitely be buying the others if they're as good as this. This is one of my favorite albums, and I can't believe someone wrote a whole book about it! Good job.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but..."zeitgeisticide"?
Review: This was a thoughtful and deeply personal book. Often elqouent and profound (I guess). Personally, I found all the literary and cultural allusions annoying -- like the author was just trying to impress upon us how intellectual and deep he was. I mean, he goes on and on about "prophecy" and America and even spins into Gnosticism. Please. Save it for the Amherst coffee house. The "Iceman" is Death? OK, if you say so Mr. Marat/Sade-Virginia Woolf-SDS-Nathaniel West- Sartre-Nauseau-Pynchon--Didion--Zeitgeisticide intellectual poet depressive New York man. Sorry if that was harsh. I really did like reading it, especially the first chapter, which I loved. But still, all the cultural theory crap annoyed me.
What you won't get is any specific/actual information about the recording of the album, such as: how the songs were recorded -- in what order? how was the ochestra utilized/conducted? How were the songs written (for instance, was there much collaboration between Lee and Maclean?).
Of course, there is a lot of great stuff here. And the author paints a more holy and laudable image of Lee than others have done, especially Michael Stuart-Ware; who I think wrote a great book.
"Forever Changes" is the greatest human creative production of all history, and so anything written about it is great -- and this book certaily had its charm and insights and passion and stuff. But too intellectual and hyper-analytical for me.

Rating:
Summary: fantastic album : fantastic book
Review: To tell the truth, I was dreading reading this book. It's not often that a book is devoted to a band or an album about which I care so deeply, and it seemed very likely that this would be another well-meaning but shallow tome along the lines of Barney Hoskyn's disappointing Arthur Lee biog last year. But this little book, in the short space of 121 pages, blew me away.

For a start, this is a deeply personal book. If you have a problem with that approach, you will quite possibly hate it. To me, however, such an approach makes perfect sense with this album. 'Forever Changes' is not the kind of record that leaves people neutral - if it gets inside your head, inside your heart, then it will never leave. Astonishingly, it becomes more powerful with time, and when you see the re-juvenated Arthur Lee performing these songs after so long in the wilderness, it's almost like being born again. A phrase which brings me back to the book in hand...

Andrew Hultkrans, the author, does a remarkable job of digging into Arthur Lee's lyrics on this album. He writes beautifully about LA in the mid to late Sixties, about the whole scene of which Love were an integral part, and about the extraordinary mental state that Arthur Lee must have been in to create this masterpiece. There is a fair amount of religion and spirituality in here, specifically the concept of Gnosticism. It's entirely possible (as Hultkrans playfully admits) that he's reading too much into Arthur Lee's lyrics, but DAMN it's interesting, and it amazes me that people haven't latched on to this before. I kept catching myself smiling while reading this book - partly out of agreement with what Hultkrans was writing, and also out of sheer happiness that someone had taken the effort to express so well his thoughts about this incredible album.