In 1967, Love’s third album, Forever Changes, was a flop. It barely dented the charts or exerted much impact beyond the Los Angeles scene it so pessimistically chronicled. Frontman Arthur Lee wrote much of the album while the band was holed up in a mansion once owned by Bela Lugosi, which afforded him a distant view of the city below and an opportunity to imagine the biblical destruction that would surely befall humanity.
The resulting songs are psychedelia at its darkest and most apocalyptic. Trading electric guitars for acoustics and chamber strings, the music can be startlingly gorgeous, yet Lee’s songs are full of literal double-talk: strange voices intoning words over his own lyrics, as though censoring his thoughts even as he thinks them. The album takes a cynical view of hippie piousness and has remained horrifically relevant in America. In true psychedelic fashion, Forever Changes changed with the times, regenerating itself for Watergate in the ’70s, for the Cold War in the ’80s, and again for modern times and the war on terror, where these songs sound especially prescient.
