Love's Lost 1973 LP 'Black Beauty' to be Released in June

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Love's unreleased 1973 LP Black Beauty will finally hit shelves on June 7th, according to a statement released by the new label High Moon Records. Produced by Paul Rothchild – who worked on The Doors' first five albums – the R&B-infused album was meant to be the first record by a new line-up of Love three years after frontman Arthur Lee quietly disbanded the Sixties psychedelic band. Lee's record label went bankrupt before the LP was due out and album was shelved.

Arthur Lee And Love's Essential Bootlegs

For the past four decades low-quality bootleg versions of Black Beauty have circulated among Love fans, but this release by High Moon features all 10 songs with remastered sound and bonus tracks. The new edition will come packaged with previously unseen Love photographs and new liner notes by Ben Edmonds.

"Black Beauty might have been received as a strong comeback for Lee, a turn to steamy R&B with heavy-guitar punch — if it had come out," Rolling Stone's David Fricke wrote in a review of the bootleg. "Lee's writing and the power-funk arrangements lack the provocation and complexity of Forever Changes, but 'I'm Good & Evil' is frank cocky rock, 'Midnight Sun' sounds like something Lee could have written for his friend Jimi Hendrix and 'Stay Away' would make a hip cover for Living Colour."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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