Arthur Lee (1945-2006)

Hear a selection of essential Arthur Lee tracks.

Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were avowed fans of Love's Arthur Lee, one of the key figures in West Coast psychedelia during the 1960s. The legendarily wayward Lee, who improbably outlasted many of his peers, died yesterday afternoon in Memphis after a prolonged bout with leukemia. He was sixty-one. After his diagnosis became public, several artists -- including former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, Yo La Tengo and Ryan Adams -- took part in a benefit show for Lee at New York's Beacon Theatre on June 23rd.

Though never a great commercial success -- the band made the Top Forty just once, with the tough 1966 single "7 and 7 Is" -- Love was at the very center of the fertile Sunset Strip scene of the mid-Sixties. The group's ambitious third album, 1968's Forever Changes, still a critical favorite, stands among that era's seminal records. Lee was Love's driving force, hiring and firing collaborators at will and pushing them to explore their various musical inclinations. Love's first four albums ranged wildly, from prototypical garage-punk and jazzy experimentation to Spanish guitar, Broadway-style melodicism and deceptively "easy" listening. In later years, as he struggled with mental and physical issues and his own missed opportunities, Lee often complained about getting less than his due. "Without me there'd be no Jimi Hendrix, no Sly Stone," he once said. "I was the first so-called black hippie."

Arthur Lee Porter was born in Memphis on May 7th, 1945. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was a child. By his teen years, he was forming local bands. One of them, Arthur Lee and the LAGs (named in tribute to Booker T and the MGs), recorded an instrumental single for Capitol Records in 1963. The following year, Lee engineered what was perhaps Hendrix's first studio session, hiring the young guitarist to play on "My Diary," a song Lee wrote and produced for R&B singer Rosa Lee Brooks.

Although many of his models were black soul singers -- Sam Cooke, James Brown, Jackie Wilson -- Lee began to head in another direction when he recognized an affinity for Beatlesque pop and the folk-rock of fellow Angelenos the Byrds. Forming a band he named the Grass Roots, he recruited fellow Memphis-born guitarist Johnny Echols, bassist Johnny Fleckenstein and drummer Don Conka and began playing such L.A. fixtures as Brave New World and the Whisky A Go Go. Bryan MacLean, road manager for the Byrds, soon asked to join; he would became the group's second songwriter.