Click images for desktop size: "Moonrise" by Daunity On Thursday the “big boss” came in and spent 5 hours with me. She was trying to talk me into rescinding my resignation.
I intend to quit. I have no other job lined up and little faith in temp agencies, so I agreed to extend.
On Friday I found out that while we were talking around my quitting Arthur Lee died in LA.
He had leukemia. Different strain of the same disease I'm coping with.
Some people might not know who Arthur Lee was, not some, most people not from LA in the late 60's don't know who he is.
Lee founded a band called Love.
Love was best known for their logo - the O in Love was replaced with a merged male and female symbol. They had it on their first 45, (those slabs of vinyl that only held two songs). Then that seemed like anarchy and was nothing less than cool.
Their first single was a garage punk version a Burt Bacharach - Hal David song; “My Little Red Book” all tambourines, beat and chunky power chords. It was great. It was so great that Bacharach had to make statements deploring what these new bands were doing to his mellow music.
“My Little Red Book” became a garage staple. It got covered everywhere and by everybody. Bacharach reversed his stance and Love was on their way to being the Number 1 band in LA.
They had the surfers, the hair boys, the car boys, the rich kids and the barrio strollers.
The apochraphyl story is about Jim Morrison of “The Doors” telling Crawdaddy Magazine that his ambition was to be as popular as Love.
I was just a kid but you could always see them walking the Strip, the same way you'd see Motley Crue and then Guns N Roses strolling the Strip and the Boulevard in their stage clothes. But I never saw anybody light up the street and remake the world like Arthur Lee when he walked down those sun stricken streets.
They had a house up in the hills. Once we rode up there on our bikes and listened to the band rehearse. It was kind of wonderful being young kids stretched in the ivy on the dirt peeking over the hills and listening to guitars and chords we couldn't name.
The odd thing that no one paid much notice too was that Lee was black. Love was a white group with a black frontman who wrote and produced all of the songs. Like Hendrix race was secondary, he was just a great songwriter, a good guitarist and a better than average singer. Nothing else mattered.
But Lee hated to tour. Who wants to leave LA during that golden time anyway? They didn't become world famous. They were just the most famous band in a town where the rest of the world comes to get famous.
The album that got them “respected” was “Forever Changes”. It had strings, acoustic guitars and lyrics. It moved with different rhythms and moving beats and chord changes.
Neil Young wanted to be a part of Love. Jimi Hendrix wanted to be a part of Love. . . We all did.
I read a comment someone wrote about Lee's passing. They wrote, “Love died today”.
I understand that.

My puppy is making steps to being my dog.
She doesn't like not being with me around the clock but she keeps being a good girl. She's always excited to see me and thinks their is no greater joy than teasing me or forcing me to pet her.
Other people tell me stories about their dogs and the problems they've had and all I can think is that my puppy doesn't do anything like that.
I've had some bad breaks in my life, some worse than most, and I don't understand enough about the world to really grasp why I've been so lucky in other ways.