Gone and Missed (old and new)

I am not sure how I missed this news: the death of Arthur Lee, August 3. I did though. I suppose it wasn't covered all that widely outside the music press, and I read more movie news, on a day by day basis. Music news I tend to get from Mojo, which is where I saw this, a month after the fact. I had seen the stories that he was very ill...

I can't say he was all that central to my conception of music - I discovered Love late, in the last 4-5 years, and it wasn't an exactly earth shattering discovery. I liked them - good, brilliantly crafted pop songs, like a lot of the music I liked. (Beatles, Beach Boys, the Byrds.)... But for a while, the last few months before I got my iPod, I was obsessed with Love, and stuck one of their songs on every compilation CD I made. (For a while there was banging them out 3 a week.) Which is one of the things that makes Love more significant to me than they might seem - their versatility was, even by the heady standards of the High Hippy 60s, damned impressive. Sweet pretty folk pop (though always with an edge), garage rock, early Pink Floyd style experimental folk (though always with that edge: "they're locking them up today, they're throwing away the key. I wonder who it'll be tomorrow, you or me") - guitar freakouts. And even more than the Beatles, maybe even more than the Who at the best - all in the same song. This one, notably:



Enjoy.

(I was going to add something about Steve Irwin, but Lee got the better of me. There is some temptation to snark about Irwin - all that crocodile hunter crap, the way he built a persona on monkeying around with big mean animals. But I won't. I can't say I was too surprised to see that headline - I'm not too surprised when mountain climbers or race car drivers meet their end in the pursuit of their careers. It's actually more susprizing when someone living a dangerous lifestyle lasts past the dangers - see Mr. Lee, above, or Syd Barrett. There's frankly not much difference, when you think about it: wrestling crocodiles - wrestling acid. Arthur Lee (and Syd) made the world a better place. And I suppose Steve Irwin did too.)