Love’s Arthur LeeMarch 7, 2025 was the birthday of singer/songwriter Arthur Lee. Love’s co-founder.    High Moon Records has slated for 2025 release, Just to Remind You. It’s a compilation album sourced from Arthur’s trove of tapes, recorded during the last fifteen years of his life, most of these songs are being heard here for the first time ever. Arthur asked his wife Diane Lee to issue them after his death. Having been hospitalized for several months, Lee realized he was losing his fight with Leukemia, and asked Diane to oversee the release of a final record of his unreleased songs. Although many of the tracks were in various stages of completion, Lee left some specific musical notes to execute his vision. High Moon Records previously issued Love’s Reel-To-Real and Black Beauty. Guitarist Johnny Echols is the co-founder of Love.   In 2012 and 2017, I interviewed Echols about Arthur Lee and Love, and Johnny’s memories of Love’s Forever Changes.  Portions first appeared in my books Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972 and 1967 A Complete Rock History of the Summer of Love.   HK: How did the concept of Forever Changes begin? JE: We started with kind of an idea after hearing the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers. And we decided that we wanted to do something that had horns and strings and we knew from the very start how this album was going to be. And what we were going to do and that we were going to try to make this what we would consider our magnum opus. This was gonna be the thing that defined us. And it was either we were gonna take off and just go all the way or something was gonna have to happen. We were going to really leave the three-minute pop song format. We were getting bored of the three-minute rock tune and wanted to push it. We knew with Sgt Pepper’s there was a whole new sonic thing going on. Absolutely.  “The material and concepts of an outline of it were written before we went into the studio. Arthur was not very much of a guitar player. He could play a few chords and basically would sing the songs to me and basically play the outline of them and then I would get together with Kenny mostly and we would work out some structure for the song. Bryan had a way, kind of a counter point that he would do with his finger picking that would work against what we were playing. We would always have the rehearsals with Kenny and me first and then Michael Stuart. We would rehearse with acoustical instruments, or sometimes at a friend of ours who had a house, Joe Clark. He lived in the Valley and we’d go to his place. Sometimes we would rehearse in the daytime at the Whisky. But mostly at one of our houses.  “My role with Arthur and Bryan was basically an ombudsman to kind of keep these two personalities happening. “So, I knew that from the very start to keep. Because they would have been at loggerheads all the time. Because they liked the same chicks, if you listen to some of the songs. That is rock ‘n’ roll. That’s tight, of course, but there was always that strong tension between the two of them and I was always stuck there in the middle kind of keeping the peace but also drawing the best out of them that I could. Because otherwise, you know, Bryan was very much a show tune kind of guy and I knew we could not release show tunes so we had to do a lot of work on his songs to meld then into something that was acceptable to an audience that we were developing.”  For the full interview, visit https://cavehollywood.com/loves-arthur-lee/The post Love’s Arthur Lee first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.