Danny Brown, Johnny Echols, and Rick Rubin on Love’s “Forever Changes” | Broken Record

[Music] pushkin hey everyone today we're closing out black music month by celebrating one of rick rubin's favorite albums of all time forever changes by the band love love was a groundbreaking la group formed in 1965. while their name isn't usually mentioned alongside popular california psychedelic bands like the birds or the grateful dead love's influence is vast they were the first interracial rock band predating even slying the family stone up in san francisco their charismatic fashion forward black front man arthur lee inspired jimi hendrix's look and in the mid 60s love was the hottest band in hollywood they lived together in a castle and played sold out shows on the sunset strip where die hard fans like jim morrison came to see them play in 1967 the band recorded their third album forever changes it was the last album for the original core of the group with guitarist johnny eckles and co-writer brian mclean the album ushered in an entirely new sound for the band combining baroque sounding instruments and horns with folky instrumentation and poetic lyrics on today's episode we'll hear some of rick rubin's conversation with detroit rapper danny brown who like rick places love's album forever changes at the very top of his greatest albums ever then we'll hear rick in conversation with lovely guitarist johnny echols about the intense turmoil surrounding the recording of forever changes eccles who grew up straddling both black la and the psychedelic strip explains how love was responsible for getting the doors the record deal only to be quickly overshadowed by the door's mainstream success echoes also recalls first meeting the beatles when they were an opening act for little richard this is broken record liner notes for the digital age i'm justin richmond before we jump into rick's conversation with johnny echols let's first hear from the one and only danny brown of all the music you listen to where do you put forever changes in your whatever change my favorite album i've heard number one album yeah because i still like i told you i still hear i still hear new things to this day and i still haven't under i don't understand yeah still what i'm listening to i just know i'm not listening to it with my brain like because i know a lot of time i hear music and i love it and then three months later it was like your brain tricked you to like that you don't understand because feeling wise it does nothing for me you know what i'm saying so it doesn't stick but forever changes no matter like how much a lot of the [ __ ] i don't even understand for some reason just stick with me emotionally beautiful but i guess the the first thing that caught me about the album was that i didn't know he was black like hearing some music like that because it was like i don't never want to put race into music and stuff but you know growing up in detroit it almost have like a motown feel to me in some sense to it but he was like doing stuff other like black artists wasn't doing at the time you know what i'm saying like almost like stepping out of his ram in some sense but even listening to a noun like coming on my way over here is so california too like like i get that vibe like i know that was made in the 60s but it's like it's like a soundtrack to here absolutely almost and and i know music plays a big part for me with environments like me like growing up and being like a big knives fan and like ill-matic was like but my first time you know seeing queensbridge projects and they're like this is the and do you know this is the scene that this [ __ ] was painted to you know what i'm saying absolutely and i guess you know drugs too because there's a lot of like i said i got questions too about the album like the only song i can figure out that means something is the um and the titles too are so all over the place the one about the um you know the snot drying up on his pants and stuff and all that like i feel like that song is about war obviously you know about going into service and stuff but after that like all the songs are like open for interpretation for i think a lot of different people you know what i'm saying absolutely how does the music of it strike you that's the one thing that i think is the big deal too about it like as good as the um songwriter arthur lee was i think everybody was like at the top of the game first instrumentation and then i think too they did it in four months like like you talk about me someone that take years and stuff making out i'm just like what the [ __ ] am i [ __ ] i got it they do this in four months and then with they working on on reels and stuff like that and we have pro tools you're just pressing the button did you know so it's like they had no room for error especially when you're dealing with okay i already have a full band you know and then you want to add in horns and you want to add in string arrangements and stuff like that it's like it's so hard to make a make stuff like that cluttered like you know what i'm saying so it was like certain parts like he didn't have drums or but when he did it would always like kick ass though it wasn't like nothing that just set there to just hold the tone you know what i'm saying everything was there to stick out which is so cool about you know production and [ __ ] too because a lot of times you know you can just fall back on the songwriting and as strong as those songs was that he's writing it's like yeah you could have just not really had could have been oh yeah it could have been a folk that she could have just been acoustic guitar and i still we still would've knew those were amazing songs i mean like but to go that [ __ ] hurt was just like why and then just to hear like the to cost the element that time is like [ __ ] man but for that album to come on it didn't sell any records it wasn't like a [ __ ] big deal or anything like you know what i'm saying but now we're sitting here and [ __ ] 2019 and talking about it you know so that gives me 52 years later yeah it gives me hope like you know what i'm saying good music never dies no matter what no you know how long ago was it that you you first heard it i always judge stuff by um what i've listened to i was listening to j dilla donuts so when donuts came out 2006. yeah that's a long time for an album to hold you and same for me i probably started listening to it in the early 2000s and still anytime i fly that's what i listen to on an airplane always because this has a subtleness to it too cause like you know playing music is a different thing you want something you can sleep too and still wake up and not freak you out so i think for every change is a subtle album that has that but i get so caught up in the lyrics of it like the only other album i can like compare forever changes to for me in some sense it's like a mad villain like to me like i can just take that out and just read it yeah and i think i would still feel a personal connection just from the lyrics just from reading it like and that's why i said i can compare it to emma because like i had went to um i had did like a year in county jail and you know with being in jail you don't have no music or nothing so i would have my brother like print out mfboom lyrics for me yeah and that was the way and like i connected with mad villain just just from reading the words reading words so and i feel like forever changes definitely has that same type of appeal because i had to read those lyrics too make sure to keep an eye out for danny brown's new joint album with rapper producer jpeg mafia when it drops later this year now let's hear rick and johnny echols talk through the making of love's forever changes i want to understand why this beautiful album is so unique okay sure should we go through song by song sure we can do that whichever way is i'll put them i'll bring them up and we can listen to a little bit of each song and you can just tell me who did what or what was going on at time or what what what memories come up when you hear it okay so let me let's start with this what do you think about what do you remember about okay this was a song that brian wrote call alone again arthur added the ore to it yes now when we first started working on this song it the introduction and i'm doing the finger picture spanish guitar yeah it was meant to be a banjo so the song was a different song it was a blue grassy kind of song when he first wrote it and we were young and naive and thought well we play guitar we can play banjo too so we rented banjos uh and we came into the studio and we tried doing the introduction and playing banjos well banjo's entirely different instagram art instrument yeah and so if you don't know how to play it you can't play him so we were at the verge of just mixing that song all together and i was sitting in the corner warming up so i'm just playing they're not flamenco they're just spanish riffs you know and david angel hears that so why don't we just kind of transfer those kinds of riffs to brian's song and do it that way and so he went over and talked to brian at first brian was against it but he says well if you want the song on the album from what i understand you're gonna have to do something and so brian said okay let's do it that way and so we changed the feel of the song to a spanish song and the mariachi trumpet in the middle of the song was done by david angel he came up with that part because initially i was doing just uh spanish runs and that's what you hear playing behind the trumpet is what would have been there but then i was playing certain runs and the trumpet base basically followed those runs and so he played what i had played on my guitar as a trumpet solo amazing yeah it is it is really fantastic the way it turned out i listened to that and thought boy this is really a good song it's really good before it was kind of a you know a so-so song a throwaway song basically because you know we were basically trying to put the song together with with uh a totally different feel and this was it was just perfect for the song the spanish feel how did it end up being the first track on the album that was done by the record company they put together and mastered it and and the order of the songs that was totally done by jack olsen it was a bold decision because based on everything we know about love at that moment and now here's the new album and you put that on you wouldn't know it was the same group no you wouldn't and the fact that brian's song is opening the album had arthur been involved in that it wouldn't have been that way i understood and if you notice on this song there are different versions of this the same music but there are different versions and some arthur's voice because he see arthur wasn't even at the studio when we record it alone again and he comes in later and he hears it and he likes it and so he sings harmony with brian all of us sing harmony and later on arthur he says he didn't do it but i don't see who else would have done it he put his voice ahead of uh brian so you hear more of arthur than you do with brian on some of the releases they re-released the album just recently and they remastered it and you can hear it the way it's supposed to with brian's voice more prominent it still sounds almost the same but you just hear brian there's different balance yeah okay next song basically acoustic songs again which is coming from what we've heard before from love shocking yeah it is shocking this song has a very interesting back story we were playing up in san francisco the place at the time was called the warehouse w-h-e-r house and um janice joplin was billed with us and she is really really loud and our dressing room would have been right behind the stage and so we decided that there's back then they would break up clubs and there would be section where people that are under 18 could go that they didn't serve alcohol and they could be there and on the other part of it is where the adults went and they could buy alcohol so we went to the adult party even though at that point i was still you know probably 19 or something wasn't supposed to be in there but we go over to that section just to get away from the screaming of janice i loved her she was a good friend of mine but she could really really get your ears vibrating so we're sitting in in this place and some guy just walks up and he sits down at the table where arthur and me and brian are sitting and he puts a big huge gun on the table and so we what's going on and he starts to telling us about he was an awol soldier from vietnam and he tells us about blood mixing with mud turning gray and he's talking about all these things you can call my name is where um one of the soldiers would be hit and the vietcong or whatever would booby-trap that soldier and so he would be screaming all night long and the people couldn't his his comrades his buddies couldn't come and get him and rescue him because he had been booby-trapped and so he's telling us all of these stories and all of that and you know as arthur's mind we're listening to it fascinating his mind is working entirely differently he's got lyrics he's got those lyrics and he's doing poetry from what this vietnam vet is telling incredible and that turned into a house is not a motel incredible and did the the music come first or did the words come first and then you put music too the words came first this was basically poetry and then arthur would sing it and he started arthur not only did he write the words but he wrote the melodies to his son he just didn't have the ability to put music to it and when he would if he would sing you a song would it all be in one key like he would he sing it like as if there was music to it already sort of sometimes he would meander as far as the key is concerned but yeah and sometimes as once we started uh putting music to it and actually playing it would change a bit you know the the the uh melodies the phrasing and to work with the music yeah so he would do that but um this started out as i said as poetry so would you say all the songs started as poetry before the music yes basically all of them as a rule yes fascinating yes i would say less music is made that way as well yeah that's why it sounds different because the the music kind of compliments because we got to hear how the poetry went in here so it's almost like you're scoring the poem basically yes that's what we're doing and um you know any thoughts about the music in that one the direction of the music how it how it evolved again that was interesting because there's two guitar solos yes when i'm playing the first one the earphones the headphones are working great and i can hear the backing track and then laying down the solos and when i'm ready to do the second one something goes wrong and there's a glitch and i can't hear the first guitar solo so there was a plan to do the two guitars oh yeah they were going to play off each other yeah i would play off myself i see and when we were playing backing track back in the first guitar solo i couldn't hear it and so we're going to nix that song too because well you know maybe you're not going to do the second solo but we figured out arthur and me talked and arthur was in the booth and we thought of me going in the booth and playing it but i needed the amp to be really loud in order to get the sound that it got because i didn't use pedals everything you saw was the amp or you heard from me it was what was there and so what was the equipment just so that was a vox ac30 yes and what guitar then i'm playing a gibson les paul 1952 gold top with p90 pickups so i'm trying to do it and arthur comes up with an idea he says i will give you signals from the booth so i'm there and i can't hear it i can hear the backing track but i can't hear my other guitar and so he tells me when to go up and when to go down and that's what basically how i did the second part of it and it fits amazingly when i listen to it but i'm trying to follow him and so i'm not really concentrating on playing yes i'm more concentrated on what he's doing yes and that's why that probably made it more free he did it it's probably some of the best guitar work i've ever done yeah and i did amazing how that works now yeah and amazing also how it works not by planning but almost by working around a problem that's exactly what happened that was like the universe wanted that song so beautiful that way great yeah let's do the next one it's fascinating and it sounds so again unlike anything else even guitar stylistically it just feels like another it's coming from another world and that was another song aren't many of arthur's songs are about this particular lady anita billings he called her pretty and the song and war and the first album this is and more again so i'm speaking about the same lady in the anita billings and um arthur i think his whole life because he really loved her and um she was as high school sweetheart and and um her mother found her diary and she had i've obviously um bared her soul in the diary and the mother for made her not see arthur anymore and so basically the rest of his life he's pining for really for real for this lady and um he got to see her one more time when we're at the castle she comes there and he had that's the song i see your pictures and the same old friend speaking of her again wow you know at the the castle so many of our songs are about this lady amazing mm-hmm anything else you could think of about the song this one uh billy strange is the there's uh the guys in the reagan crew remember they played on two songs on um um daily planet that's hal bling playing drums and billy playing the guitar with me and brian so billy's playing with us so that's brian me and and billy strange playing the guitar parts on that and the arrangement that david angel did is just really really beautiful the song sounded great without because he showed us the arrangement after we had played because we're initially going to leave it alone and just leave it without the strings but then when we heard what his arrangement yeah it's so good and so interesting that that little guitar moment right where we stopped i think of it as a string solo even though it's not right you know it's just this but the strings make their entrance and it feels like oh that's what's happening but it's really just a a backup support part yeah that he really doesn't get the credit he deserves david angel but he would was able to insinuate the violence answer that yeah yeah really great okay it's magnificent that's a very dark song you know speaking of the times in which we lived back then but again that's poetry put to music you can just listen to the poetic and then we went to see uh uh was at the art house it was marat sod it was a about the people in the the mental institution they're locking them up today there was a line from that that film and um so arthur was able to to put that together into this song you know it also makes sense now that talking about the way the songs came about why the doors would have been so influenced by love because she was basically a poet with a band yes no we were you know we still because we couldn't blame them for their success of course we got upset with the record company but we were always tight with them and um we you know even after not playing anymore jim and i often talked we're going to put together um you know group and stuff of course we never did but we were um good friends and and always really we felt kind of proud of them because we knew had it not been for our just to tenacity rather and and uh the doing the things the way we did with jack there probably would have been no doors because they were on the verge of going their separate ways until they got a record contract and also i had spoken to him and i think one of the things that that helped keep them together is rather than having to continually want to receive credit i did this or i did this and people at loggerheads they decided that if whoever wrote the song they would all split they would always be the goalies yes so uh and that worked perfectly for them because they didn't have to argue with each other over who got credit for what you know they all got credit beautiful anything about the lyrics or uh the poetry again that was poetry and it was shocking poetry in the beginning the snot is caked against my pants you know you can get the image of that that one is jarring in that the lead guitar player lead guitar is rather out of place it's you got a soft really orchestral song and all of a sudden you've got a kind of really raucous guitar in that even the style of the vocals seems like uh old english you know like uh do you know what i mean yeah yeah some of the songs especially on decapo had that feeling and yeah which really uh helps diffuse the lyrical content because of the sort of formality of the way it's being delivered yes the words are easier to take and this it is so clean the way it was done you know everything like as i mentioned earlier we started out as raka's wanting to have distortion to a very clean and even the guitar solo there that's just the vox ac30 without anything added that's just the way it sounded yeah amazing it's really interesting yeah bummer in the summer yeah yeah that was the one um don randy's playing the piano on that and um it david crosby had told us that music was going to be changing and country was going to be very influential and so we kind of did a little country-ish bow diddly country kind of song that's what that is yeah and and coming out of the bo diddly into the more classical like just the way the pieces go together and the counterpoint of brian's guitar is there's actually two guitars brown doo doo doo doo doo doo doo and i'm playing so they kind of mixed together as those one guitar but it's two guitars playing off of each other and almost reminds me like the kind of energy of like uh in the context of the wrecking crew like glenn campbell's kind of driving guitar vibe country related in pop music he was great i learned a lot from him because before love we were assigned to arthur me arthur was the songwriter and i played sessions with bob keane at delphi records and so glenn campbell worked there as a studio guy and so learned a lot from him yeah it definitely feels like related you know it's beautiful okay we have one last song okay little backstory here this was three separate songs that we'd started working on and never finished and kenny on his own initiative put those songs together and got them in the right keys and made the this into one song much of it is talking about anita billings you know i see your picture in the same old frame and that was we meet again was when i'm meeting her at the castle and it not being the same as he expected it to be you know they've both grown up by then and they were that also has a little bit of the country feel in the guitar playing as well yeah yeah and and that was difficult in the beginning because i would uh finger pick the fur and i was continually missing a beat so i had to pick do that with a picture in order to get it i took them out right i see and that was probably one of my favorite songs to play on stage because it goes through all of these changes let's skip to the changes a little bit was this uh prior to or inspired of david david axelrod's music because this feels very i don't know what came first though i'm not sure which came first either but i this as i said these were unfinished songs put together into one and then the arrangements that again i have to give credit to david angel because he was able to seamlessly put these things together and so it was it was meant to be that way it was meant to be this album because had it had the other influences i don't think it would have had the same impact that it has because everything every song on this album fits it seems like they were meant to be there and the order then again jack holzman they did a great job of putting the songs in the proper order so even after the frustration of it not being the double album when you finish this were you pleased with it yes yes and everybody involved was feeling good about it everybody was feeling great and we thought this was our magnum opus and this is going to be it and it's going to take us to the next level yes and the record company for some reason still wasn't you know we had a billboard there for a while but we weren't getting the kind of promotion that we felt it we deserved or the song deserved but then again the song was a bit he had because at that point in 68 you know this isn't martin luther king he's assassinated bobby kennedy and so much is happening at that time that i think the song just kind of got lost because people were more you know interested in protests and in the barry maguire's stuff and you know uh understood so i i think that had this been released just a little earlier it might have done better yes and it did well in europe especially in the uk it was when shot up the charts it's just here it it did okay but not nearly as well as it should maybe those events that you're talking about that were a distraction here maybe those weren't felt as strongly and they were okay it would make sense they weren't and so because at that point we were having a lot of turmoil happening you know riots in the streets and people burning [ __ ] down and so it was uh it was a tough time normally most of our music reflected the time but it took a while you have to listen to this album it's not one that you just put on and dance to you really have to sit back and listen to it and you have to listen to the words because they have meaning you know the whole album and as i said people were ready for you know just loud rockers in your face stuff and this was a very subtle and it told a story and it told it in a way that was not in your face the way some of the the music was at that time so it was something you'd listen to in your introspective and you say wow that's that's right or you know it gives you a different perspective than what was happening you know people were really uptight that's you know the best way i can put it is just you look at the 60s as all peace and love and harmony and you know there were some times like that but then there were other times that were just you know really really wrong there have been other great albums that have come along that in their wake will may have started a whole new movement and for whatever reason this beautiful album is well loved everywhere everywhere in the world yet it's the only one nobody continued the path and i've been thinking about it as as someone who um helps support artists make music and i don't know who could even make it like i don't know who else knows how to make it it's such an unusual thing we have to go back to the the beginning days of of the recording and then you can kind of see how it progressed and how it actually uh came to be what it was because it initially was meant to be an entirely different album arthur was a premier vocalist and wordsmith he wrote wonderful poetry but he wasn't a musician he kind of played a little bit on keyboards and that was it but arthur would sing the songs and and uh we i mean we always would hear him singing every we lived in a place we called the castle so we lived together and all day long arthur would be singing these songs right and so brian and me put the music to these songs and once we started recording the first album everyone received their writer's credit and it was cool the second album even though the method was still the same brian and i put the music to arthur's words now they were giving arthur credit for this and it was pissing everybody off because that's you know there's a lot of money first of all besides the recognition and publishing and songwriting actually that's where most of the income comes from and so we were upset and we were brian and i were talking about just splitting up and going our own ways and arthur convinced us that he had spoken with jack holtzman and that we would do a double album forever changes which it was called um the gethsemane project in the beginning what was it called gethsemane gethsemane right and you know what do you know why well it was a lot of chaos going gethsemane is where jesus was basically betrayed and so we were looking at ourselves as being betrayed by our friend because when we started out we were all together we were friends as i said we lived together work each other's clothing dating the same chicks so uh and then all of a sudden once love was becoming successful we noted a change and then one person is being singled out and given all the recognition and we were not happy with that so arthur had convinced us that we were going to have a double album as i said and brian would have one side i would have one side and arthur would have the other two sides so basically four sides and so we agreed to that and we had been working on these songs for months and months and when we got to the studio everything changed we were told that it was too expensive but the doors had broken and they were selling you know quite a few records and the doors were were label mates yes yes and so they the electra said that they were doing a new project with the doors and it was too expensive because when we started electro was a very very tiny folk music label and the reason we signed with him was um i was a friend or my parents were friends of little richard and little richard would say always own your music don't let anybody take the copyrights or own them you should so jack holtzman was the only one out of all of the record companies that wanted to sign us that allowed us to own the publishing and so that's why we signed with them even though we were offered much much more money to sign with other labels and so we did so thinking that you know after we went to candace and had to talk with him and he seemed cool so we decided to sign with them so now i get to the point where we uh get to the studio and they decided that it's going to be a single album and we'd do the other part later as a second totally different album well now everybody's pissed off brian especially because you know brian is a really a gifted songwriter and he wanted his stuff heard and he was only getting one song here or two songs there and so he decided that he would lay back on arthur's stuff in other words instead of doing the little things that he did that made this stuff sound really cool and like off he would just lay back and have arthur tell him what he wanted to play well arthur not being a musician didn't know what to tell him so it was kind of chaotic when we were in the studio after getting this information from uh bruce botnick and then the day we get to the studio there's neil young there and neil is our friend we hang with him smoke dope with him he's you know and uh bruce tells us that neil is going to produce the album now we were not you know that was funny so we all started laughing and stuff because you know we're not going to listen to neil and neil's one of us and so they uh bruce calls back to new york and speaks to the record company and and then so we all of a sudden are on the outs with the record company because they had this whose idea was it for neil to produce it that was bruce botnick bruce was neil's friend also and neil was broke at the time i mean he was getting kicked out of his apartment or house i guess and so the money from producing the album would have really helped a lot and they had given him an advance bruce was so you know into him doing it that he'd managed to get him in advance and when he realized that it wasn't happening that we were not going to do that arthur had been slated to produce this album and arthur knew what his song sounded like he knew what ours sounded like so we thought that's cool because basically we all would do that together anyway and arthur would just be the one out front uh the record company decided that they wanted to have an adult in the room so they brought had bruce who normally was our engineer they had him act as producer even though he produced nothing but he was still part of he was already part of your team he had um or engineered the first album the second album he had nothing to do well interesting okay yeah so uh we were not that pleased as i had mentioned before because the first album didn't turn out the way we wanted it to you know we were a hard rock at that time a hard rock driving group and we wanted it to sound like that yes and it didn't to us yes so we weren't happy with him so the next album we went to rca and um dave passenger who had worked with the stones and many other hard rockers i was the engineer so bruce was kind of on the periphery we knew him but we were not all that enamored with him you know so anyway they work it out and he's going to act basically as the adult in the room and we start the album uh brian and me are both still pissed off and so as i said before brian lays off and he just kind of phones it in and it's not happening everybody can see that wow this doesn't sound like a completed record which it wasn't you know it was just you know stuff that um arthur had written in you know the words as i said and normally we would really get behind it and do the best we could with the music and this time that wasn't happening and um so it sounded really not very good initially so the record company brought in uh the guys from the wrecking crew and they were gonna lay down the basic tracks and then we would add the flourishes and our little things that that made us sound like love and so they came into the studio and started to play and it was soon realized that they sounded nothing like us they were fantastic musicians but they didn't sound like us of course and that wasn't gonna work so uh after a lot of back and forth we took a break and decided to go back and work on these songs and do a little bit better and i said brian is this how this may very well be our last album is this how you want to be remembered it's how you want to go out and he said no man and so let's let's just do it so we started rehearsing and we put the music together for arthur's words and the album is what you hear now we all along knew that it would be uh a different album so we were going to do strings and rock and roll at that time wasn't necessarily uh heavily involved with strings and horns and stuff so we decided that we're going to push the envelope a bit and the beetles were a huge influence on us you know the sergeant pepper and how they put all of that together so we thought we would go in that direction how recently was sergeant pepper released from the time you were making your album oh gosh a little bit before we actually got to the studio the first time to start maybe a month or two but we had been working on these songs but they sounded different until we decided we were going to do strings and horns and have a understanding more of a an eclectic feel and so i had i'm very much into blues old school blues so my things are going to be in that vein and brian dug folk music and broadway shows and stuff and his things would be in that vein and arthur would be arthur you know the amalgam of all of us putting our musical abilities together to come up with the sound that was recognizable as love and so that's basically what we did we went into the studio and laid down the basic tracks but this time we were doing it with purpose and uh and decided to do it right rather than phoning it in how did it end up being so acoustic based considering the fact that as you described love previously had been a really hard driving rock band this album has a much softer side too it does because back then if you listen to the radio everything was eclectic you could hear frank sinatra and then you would hear the birds or bob dylan or barry sadler you know you'd hear different kinds of music so that's what we were trying to do with the album is reflect the times in which we lived so the album sounds the way it did but serendipity it wasn't meant to sound that way it was meant to be a very eclectic as i said album yeah so we get to the studio and this time as i said we're doing it right and we have david angel and we didn't know him at the time but he was about in the same age group as us and the man was a genius he could just listen to little parts of stuff and just weave it and it sounds as though it was all a cohesive thing that was meant to be that way but you know when we started it even though when we initially were putting the music together we didn't know if the record company was going to follow through because they had already burned us by not doing the double albums so we were leaving room for strings and horns without knowing whether or not they would actually be on the album so that in itself was difficult to do and i think it turned out it's very interesting i love the previous love albums as well it's it's just interesting how different this one is than the ones before it and again just that question of why does this thing stand in time all by itself and it's interesting yeah as i mentioned the singularity the universe seemed to just at that point decide that it was going to do that because all of these things if you uh the chaos that was going on the hard feelings the darkness that was happening the fact that the album really was very close to not being done at all and for it to come out that way with all of these things going against us yes and to turn out that way because had it been the album that we initially envisioned it would have been entirely different yes and i don't know if it would have had the impact that this one had we by the time forever changes was finished and uh we were basically at each other's throats you know we did tour but the we were starting to distrust each other and and uh because of the way that went down you know because uh we felt we were being played we felt that they had lied to us telling us we were going to do this and was was arthur equally upset with the no double album or no he was that that was fine he was fine with it because yeah we're playing stuff he got stuff his way and then but you don't think that he politicked to get it that way i don't know i i at times think that he may have because he had friends sycophants hangers on that were telling him how great he was and and they didn't know the inner workings they didn't know that um arthur wouldn't know a suspension cord from you know a hole in the ground so he um had you know as i said sycophants who would would continually uh burnish his ego and tell him he's called that lsd lead singer disease yeah so um arthur by this time you know is um thinking that he doesn't really need the rest of these guys so that's the attitude that he's kind of uh projecting to us and then we find out that brian unbeknownst to any of us had worked out a separate arrangement with a lecturer in order for him to finish his parts on forever changes they were going to give him a solo deal to release a solo okay and but we were going to still keep love but he would have done that and he they offered us the same kind of arrangement so brian calls me and tells me about it and i said wow that's great let's go ch chat with arthur about and see what he thinks and brian says arthur i've got a record deal with the lecturer i'm going to release a single and all of that and arthur says wow brian that's fantastic you're fired so that was the end of basically um ryan's involvement forever just like that wow would you say as a rule was arthur an unreasonable person arthur was becoming more and more he was becoming the kind of a caricature of the arthur that i knew because he was uh in success yes the success was affecting him and he also was an attention hawk he loved to be the center of attention so arthur would um in the summer he'd wear a fur coat on stage you know and do stuff like anything to get attention he would do what was life like in love pre putting out even the first album okay well free we go back now okay from high school billy preston and i were in high school together and so is marilyn mccoo of the fifth dimension and ron townsend was the janitor at our high school so billy and i had the first group so billy preston and henry vesting later of canned heat was a friend and so we had a group and we played bar mitzvahs and and funerals weddings whatever you know to get paid so we played those and arthur came to one of the um assemblies in high school and he saw the group playing now arthur at that point was into sports and i'd known arthur my entire life my our families go back to before we were even born before our mothers were even born that's how far they go back amazing and so i'd known him all my life and i knew arthur you know wrote poetry but i had no idea he could sing yes and was because he couldn't play an instrument he learned accordion and then he switched over to oregon because there was a guy that was going door to door in our neighborhood selling music lessons and so arthur took accordion lessons and my father was put on the hook for a 300 guitar which back then was an absolute fortune yes and so i started playing it and i took lessons from adolf jacobs who was in the coasters he was a friend and so my uncle managed a place called the california club and all of these acts it was on the chitlin circuit so that's how we knew little richard and adolf and many other musicians even though my parents were not musicians per se my father was she just loved music and uh so anyway with billy preston uh and henry we did frat parties every week and who billy obviously played keyboards you played guitar did billy sing oh yeah billy cause at one point we see we were different groups we were uh billy preston and the soul brothers and that was when we we played cinnamon cinder and all of these um frat parties and stuff up and down the coast well billy had a gospel thing happening and it started to take off so he was going to split and leave the group and arthur had asked if he could join now not being a musician the guy said oh man why are we going to have him he doesn't play anything so we put him on bongo drums arthur played bongos and conquered drums and uh when billy left arthur kind of moved over to to trying to play oregon and his parents bought him a little wurlitzer or something and uh he played that so arthur now is part of the group and then henry left because he wanted to do blues he was really into blues as well so now it was arthur and me and john fleckenstein who later was with the standels he was a friend of ours too and so uh he joined that what did he play in the standoff he played the base great uh-huh and then don conka was our drummer and that was the we named ourselves the grassroots and we were the first grassroots we were also the american four and i think we called ourselves after we heard the birds we were the weirds with the ywy so when you first started tell me a little bit about the music scene then like what would you hear on the radio in that time when you were just forming well we were a cover band as as everyone was because um this was 63-64 i'm in high school and just getting out of high school then what would be some of the songs you'd cover oh gosh twist and shout or shout we would do um eisley brothers yeah lisley brothers things and so whatever was on the radio that time whatever rocking songs were we would do those and um little richard was going on tour and uh this guy jimmy james who was later jimi hendrix was going with him as is basically his gopher he was richard's driver and his chauffeur and all of that so billy and i were part of that initial tour and we went to uh england to liverpool and we met these guys the quarrymen and later we find out that these guys are the beatles but you know we didn't know that at the time yes we just you know uh met these guys and i had to come back because a grandmother had died and so i had to leave so i didn't tour that much with them i just met these guys and went back to los angeles the quarrymen opened for little richard didn't they is that yes i feel like i've seen that poster yes they opened for for a little richard and basically they followed him around like little puppies they loved him and then you know so richard was being richard and so he would you know and jimmy as i said was was the gopher i had met jimmy earlier so jimmy wasn't playing in the band oh yeah he was in the band playing as well yeah he played as well books when i first met him he i think he was with the isley brothers and auditioning for a job with um the ojs and we were kind of billy and i and a couple of other people michael oliver the huge jazz guy now we had a we were part of the backing band and so we would uh the house ban is so to speak and we would play behind zz hill or bb king whoever sam cook they were performing at there and we were part of that so that's how i first met jimmy james so as i said when i had to leave and come back to los angeles so couple months later billy and i are playing at a place called the nightlife and of all things there was a telegram sent there because they knew we were playing there so it was a telegram and um brian epstein said i didn't know brian but billy did he said to be on the lookout there is a package coming for us and uh so we wonder what the hell is this so a few days later sure enough package comes and billy opens up and there these passes backstage passes to the hollywood bowl and we hadn't figured it out yet that those guys that we met in england that followed richard around were the beatles and then he says there'd be no way to know yeah there'd be no way to know of course so we get to the hollywood bowl and we see these are those dudes and all of these chicks and screaming it was just amazing and that's when we decided hey we're going to do this you know and so arthur and i he came along too and we decided to go in that direction so basically love started that night we were at the hollywood bowl incredible yeah and that's when you decided to write your own songs yeah until then it was only coverage yeah basically only cover and so we would um write our own songs fleckenstein had started writing songs and so he would add to it and so we were probably maybe 10 of our songs were original and the rest of them were covers and we carried on like that and then we get a job at a place called the brave new world now the brave new world was initially a gay bar and the owner of it wanted to switch over because uh he i think uh they had found a new hangout and so his place wasn't in place anymore and so he brought us down to play and uh we used to go over to a place called ben frank's in hollywood where everybody hung out so we went on sunset yeah it's on sunset and so we went to ben franks and we saw david crosby and the birds and these guys are holding court had been frank sitting and everybody's going back and forth from their table and we met like 65 yeah this would have been 65 or 66 i think 66 and we met brian and he was fascinated with us because it doesn't appear that way now but at that point hollywood was fairly segregated so you didn't see black people that often in hollywood so brian sees us and we're kind of wearing the you know the hippie outfits and our hair had grown long and stuff and so he just came over and sat at our table and wanted to chat with us because we looked interesting to him you know he was a gadfly kind of guy that was this thing he just knew everybody was he in bands as well he was the roadie for the birds i didn't know that either oh yes yes so he introduced us to david crosby and we invited them to come down to the brave new world to hear us yes and david didn't come but brian did and brian asked if he could sit in with us and so of course we let him sit in now at that time which maybe you didn't know bobby beausoleil who later of the manson thing was part of that group he wasn't getting paid he would just come in and sit in with us and um when brian came we asked brian to join the group and told bobby he wasn't needed any longer because brian just fit right in you know yeah so bobby was in the group prior prior to bro and then brian replaced bobby bosley brian replaced him and uh so they had hard feelings but i i didn't see why because he just was uh he was right he was the right fit yeah and so when brian came he brought with him the people that came to see the birds this was veto and carl franzoni and the guys that ended up following the mothers followed us first and so we go from having a reasonably good crowd to having an overflowing crowd just within a couple of days of brian joining the group because he brought all those people with him yes and that's when we decided that that was the direction that we were going to go you know we were going to be a kind of a folk rock birdsy kind of group and so we started playing that type of of music and brian he basically influenced the transition for us and he was a major influence on how we behaved and all of that because you know we looked up to him and thought it was cool and we came from a different area yeah so we started um dressing more and more like they did you know in that area and um as i said the fire marshal was there just about every night because there were too many people in the club and uh so we basically took off from that point from there it just uh it just continued to go so at this point the birds were still still making music and still popular so just so we have the landscape what else was going on like if you were to go out one who would you be excited in that era of the band who would you have been excited to go out and see who was playing around um iron butterfly we would see them and during that period this is when everything kind of melted we'd see the buffalo springfield they were we all lived up in the canyon basically and the turtles and turtles yeah and laurel canyon yeah the turtles were basically one of the first um groups that that we would see and go out and paddle the turtles the whole band or really just the two singers no they were a full band they were full yeah and the people that later became red bone patent lolly vega they were friends and we'd see them and um the whiskey uh basically was a kind of a square club we'd call it street that's what the term was and johnny rivers was performing there i see and the lady that booked the place ronnie herron was a friend and she used to come and hear us at uh we moved from brave new world to beat olitos and where was that was in uh cosmo's alley which was near wilcox between hollywood and sunset it was in that area and so we had uh been offered an opportunity to play there and so we left the brave new world and and um because we would have been the first group we were the first group to play there so they allowed us to basically set up the sound system you know that that kind of was the way we want it to sound and uh anyway so ronnie having met her at vidolitos she was the booker at the whiskey and whiskey had a horrible reputation for not paying musicians then so she asked us to come and play and we said hell no we're not going to play because those guys are we all thought that they were mafia that's what everybody thought those guys are mafia it might have been i think they were okay but um and in those days how long would you play for like what would what would a knight's entertainment we would play basically four or five um 45-minute sets per night so we'd start would they be the same songs over and over again no no no no we played different songs so we had a repertoire so you could play for three or four hours yes all different songs yeah and again at this time it's mostly covers yeah just 90 90 covers and then we started playing um some adding a few of our own stuff in would people dance oh yeah they tried they were you know packed in there but yeah that's that's what it was dance and um as i mentioned earlier i was kind of blues jazz oriented so um right across from us was shelley's manhole it was the back of shelley's manhole was the front of betolidos and so these musicians they see all of these people and they would come by so i met paul horn and miles davis and coltrane and stuff and so on our breaks we would go and listen to them and charles lloyd i'd known charles lloyd also he was one of the band directors in high school so anyway we noticed that these guys would take these long extended solos and so we did a song we titled uh john lee hooker that later became revelation and we would play this one song sometimes for a whole hour that's just the whole set and you know trying to emulate the jazz musicians now so we would have been probably one of the first jam bands and people started coming just to hear this us play one song the whole set and um as i said the jazz guys would come in and every now and then charles would sit in with us or gabors a ball would you know sit in on one of the songs so we started getting a reputation among musicians as well as as the hippie crowd was it unusual also that it was an integrated band yes it was because at that point i think we were i believe the rising suns may have been mixed race i think of taj mahal was part of that and then there was rye cooter and then but but uh i think that was probably the only other mixed race group and so that again was a calling card and uh being that we were mixed race and we're dealing with people that you know consider themselves enlightened and you know and it's it's hard to describe this but they wanted to come you know they couldn't go over to the other side of town without necessarily getting into trouble or having some problems so meeting black musicians and was was something that was a a huge calling card for us is having people meet us and the fact that we basically spoke the same language we were relatively articulate and they could speak with us as you know we weren't talking street slang then nobody could understand yeah and so and really the common language was the music right like that was the real correct and being that we were safe dangerous you know these young girls from the valley would come to see us and you know and and so that's how we got this huge crowd at one point they would block off the street cosmos alleys was basically a private street and they'd block it off at both ends and then they would charge admission for people to come in even though they could never get in the city it was like almost like a block party yeah basically you couldn't see the band yeah you didn't see the band but they put these huge voices of the theater speakers out there oh nice and uh yeah so it sounds like it sounds like a great event yeah it sounds like it was fun to come to yeah this was really fun and as i said we were starting to get a reputation amongst musicians because all the jazz guys came to see us and and wanted to do something with us so we had basically taken off and then we moved to the whiskey you know we still stayed at the beatles but we played at the whiskey and then later the trip and um we played there the first night i think we played there with um the velvet underground and i think we played once with the birds i believe i'm not sure if they played there with us and we played many gigs with the doors of course so that's basically when that whole music scene in hollywood started because then as i mentioned before the iron butterfly and uh the electric flag so there were many many groups and we all lived basically for example lived on the same street and that that's something that probably will never happen in life again and all of these houses in laurel canyon you could rent a house there for 60 a month would you say that there was a sense of camaraderie with the artists yes less about competition and more about friendship right and there was kind of a friendly rivalry in that everybody wanted to to do his best that they could especially when we started making records everybody wanted to kind of do a little bit better than the other guys so um and then i'll mention how we got the doors yes okay um after love had become quite popular in hollywood of course jim morrison became our friend and he would come every night is this still pre-recording no this is after we we've done the first love album and by then we've really taken off now and uh so we're playing much much larger venues around uh hollywood and um jim as i said became our friend he was mostly my friend and brian arthur didn't particularly care for him but anyway he was a an interesting person he he was also a poet and that was his big desire in life is to have his group become as big as love was and um he had mentioned to me several times that he wanted us to introduce him to our record companies to get him hooked up and of course we didn't want to vouch for jim because jim was a handful jim was he was full of drink all the time so he was uh that was his thing his drinking so we got an offer from mca which was a rather large record company back then and since we weren't happy with elektra because of the way that first album turned out and they weren't able to promote us because they just didn't have the money at the time and they were also mainly folk labels you might not have even known how to promote this that's the thing we had no experience with this kind of music they didn't have the experience so when mca came up and they offered us like 50 000 a signing bonus which would be about 500 grand now and so that was a humongous sum of money back then and so we had spoken to jack olsen about leaving we didn't tell him it was mca we just told him we weren't happy he went to leave and of course he was having none of that so we came up with a brilliant idea he said if we hook him up with the doors and he has a rock group and and he says he's still in the game he'll let us go and mca offered to buy us out of the contract and no such luck so he came down the first night and heard the doors and he hated them and we managed to talk him into coming back to see him the second time and he hated them even more and he was kind of getting pissed off at us for wasting his time so a month or two goes by and jack is here for something else and we speak with him and we said please come back and see these guys one more time we're still working and trying to get him to cut us loose and this time he brought paul roth's child with him and paul had just gotten out of uh prison paul had gone to prison for selling grass and so we thought that was so cool that you know street credits yeah he had street creds so um he came down again and he with uh with paul and this night uh the iron butterfly was on the bill with uh the doors at the whiskey and uh he came back that that third time and jim was on his best behavior he wasn't drunk and he did the songs you know properly and uh jim was a very charismatic uh good-looking guy and he could see the attention that the young ladies were paying to him and um he saw what we saw and so he decided to speak with ronnie or she had become our manager by then and she hooked him up with the doors and made the introductions and uh they signed within a day or so of meeting them and we thought cool now he's going to cut us loose and let us go which uh that's no such thing you know basically what we did was we shot ourselves in the foot because the money that would have been spent promoting us now was spent promoting the doors and we were so proud that we had this huge billboard outside of chateau merma and uh within a few days they had the doors was right across from us so now we've got a rivalry amongst friends and they were doing really really well they were selling records and uh so more of the record company's attention was focused on them now of course it would be these guys are you know they've got a number one song with like my fire and they are much more malleable than we were you know as far as as listening to the advice of jack holtzman because wasn't there also an issue with touring i i don't know the details but i've always heard that arthur didn't want to leave los angeles well see that that was kind of a misnomer we back then being a mixed race group there were most more places in this country that we couldn't play than we could we could not play the south at all other than we did play at texas once other than that we couldn't play the south and much of the midwest and middle america we were off limits there as well fascinating so even though you know music was our livelihood that's how we survived so of course we wanted to tour and play but we played where we could and los angeles we were getting bookings and bookings and and uh it turned out because the record company didn't back us the way and promote us by sponsoring tours the way they did for the doors uh it was rather than like we could play in new york and chicago and detroit and places like that which we did later but initially we found it better to play here because we made more money staying here and not having to pay the travel expenses and you were in great demand right and we were in demand here so uh after forever changes was finished uh they did sponsor tour uh elektra did and as i said we went to detroit chicago and cleveland and new york and just about anywhere on the on the east coast we could play we played boston and so many different places and how were those experiences those were great because it was basically the same it was like going from here to san francisco it was the same same type of people they look the same dress the same talk the same so it was basically the same type of people this is a question i don't know the answer did jimi hendrix look like jimi hendrix before arthur no he looked like he would wear these cardigan jackets and real skinny ties yes and the processed hair the pompadour that's how jimmy looked that's the jimmy james that i knew he looked nothing like that so he basically co-opted some of arthur's style yes you know and because he was just so impressed out because love it it's hard to over or exaggerate how huge that group was just in in los angeles hollywood so everybody was looking up to us at that point and um we didn't even know when we first heard of jimmy hendricks we didn't know that he was jimmy james and we were coming down from pre-internet everything was information was hard to get that's correct we came from san francisco and a friend of ours name's johnny also said then there's this dude jimi hendrix he's playing at the whiskey you guys should go and see him so we came from san francisco and we went to the whiskey expecting to see somebody that we didn't then we see and arthur says man that's that dude from the california club and he was entirely different he's dressed in full regalia and um now he's doing all of the old chitlin circuit tricks you know playing behind your back you know people think that uh that uh jimmy invented that but that was just an old staple of johnny guitar watson and and people like classy baloo and those guys did that all the time and albert collins they always played behind their back or head or you know so that was new to the people in hollywood but it was old hat as far as we were concerned but he was playing stuff and he just you know he goes from being a journeyman guitar player just a so-so guy playing guitar to being this monster and and i always say man did you you must have taken a trip to the crossroads man something just you know so we would laugh about that often but and i still wonder how in the space of a little over a year he goes from being just a so-so guitar player to being god basically what do you think and you think i mean as a guitar player was your perception wow he went from so-so to unbelievable yes not just the perception but in reality what you saw as a musician yeah in reality though the way he played music the stuff that he did you know was different than anybody else at that time no i'm not talking about the flashiness but talking about the way he played was different and he was using effects you know because they had given me one of those things before they did uh jimmy uh we were signed with vox and thomas organ and so kenny and i went down and they gave me this thing it was called a huawei tape and this pedal i still have the pedal as a matter of fact and uh it was supposed to emulate the sound of a trombone you know what with that mutant i never knew that's what it was interesting and i thought well hell if i wanted to do that i would play the trombone i don't you know i'm trying not trying to emulate a trumpet or trombone i'm a guitar player so i put the damn thing in the closet and never never bothered with it and jimmy gets the same thing and uh you know he turns it into you know never thought of that before the idea that uh that part of jimmy's breakthrough involved using new technology yes that's exactly fascinating it's a fascinating point without that there would have been no jimi hendrix jimmy was the effects that's what made him sound different that's what made everybody look because he didn't sound like every other guitar player he sounded different and it was because of those effects of course he embraced the technology yes the technology he knew how to use it and he made it his own and he was so identified with that that that's who he was but he also uh you know had the foresight and and the musicianship to use it properly because i saw the same damn thing and um you know yeah i didn't do it so he did it so i had to give him his props for what he did so we saw him and and uh arthur and him started hanging together because you know they were closer than because i think jimmy well there was a song called my diary that arthur had written that rosalie brooks recorded and i think that was one of jimmy's first recording gigs as playing on that so they were they were closer than the two of us were but you know we were friends did jimmy look up to arthur yes he did yes he did yeah and at that time he was as the doors the doors had the number one record in the country but they were deferential to us and that that they played second billing you know and they uh have a number one record normally when you got a number one record you're top billing but you would see some of the old posters would be love and huge letters and then the doors and their number one hit light my fire underneath it so yeah uh yeah and so jimmy had basically the same kind of deferential attitude toward the crew because we were able to like you know we could play the hollywood bowl or the palladium or any place and outdraw just about anybody and people that had you know records out so couldn't yeah they couldn't do it yeah even if they had hits they couldn't do it because you you had really built up a grassroots following from the beginning that's what it wasn't based on a song it wasn't based on the song it was based on the persona of the group the fact that you know the the lifestyle and the fact that uh we lived in the castle so we you know and we drove around jags and sports cars and stuff around so you know they it just kind of set us apart from the other musicians and so they were all trying to to emulate that yeah beautiful thank you so much for coming and doing this my pleasure thanks to johnny echols for taking us back in time to talk about the creation of forever changes you can hear that full album plus some of our other favorite love songs on a playlist at brokenrecordpodcast.com you can follow us on twitter at broken record broken record is produced with help from lea rose jason gambrell vent holiday eric sandler and jennifer sanchez with engineering help from nick chafee our executive producer is mia lobel broken record is a production of pushkin industries and if you like the show please remember to share rate and review us on your podcast app or theme music by kenny beats i'm justin richmond

Channel: Broken Record Podcast

Views: 19,263

Keywords: Broken Record, Podcast, Interview, Music, Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Love Forever Changes, Johnny Echols Love, Johnny Echols Interview, Danny Brown Interview, Danny Brown Love Forever Changes, Danny Brown Rick Rubin, Forever Changes Album, Rick Rubin Interview

Id: BycdGjVjtLU

Length: 74min 16sec (4456 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022