If you’d been hanging out in Los Angeles any time in the summer of 1966, there would have been a high chance of stumbling across Arthur Lee. He might have been wearing just one shoe, or swimming trunks; he’d almost certainly be peering over a pair of psychedelic sunglasses. But then Lee could do what the hell he wanted. Barely 21 years old, he was the undisputed King Of The Sunset Strip: the most arrogant, brown-eyed, handsome man in Hollyweird. Lee and his band, Love, were helping usher in a whole new era of Californian music.
Sure, there were more commercially successful bands: The Byrds already had a run of hit singles and a European tour under their buckskin jackets by early ’66, and Brian Wilson was taking the Beach Boys to new creative heights even as his psyche crumbled under the weight of it all. But neither had such a charismatic, striking frontman as Lee. A singer and multi-instrumentalist, he was a lightning rod for the denizens of the burgeoning West Coast underground. “He cut an imposing figure,” says Jimmy Greenspoon, a future member of Love’s LA contemporaries Three Dog Night. “He had a mesmerising presence, a Pied Piper who would lead Love’s audience to a different form of consciousness.”
