Currently touring the UK, Echols harks back to the multiracial band whose Forever Changes was hailed as a masterpiece, but who faced chaos, false rumours, racism, drug addiction and more
‘We kind of romanticise things now,” says Johnny Echols in reply to my question as to how he experienced 1967’s Summer of Love in Los Angeles. “I recall we were scared to death that they were going to need more bodies for the Vietnam war and would pluck us from Hollywood and send us to some godforsaken jungle to die. There was violence and a kind of seething undercurrent of discontent. Now, people look back and romanticise the time as one of hope and love and all that. But it’s not that simple. There was a dark side.” No 1960s band were better positioned to capture that mix of dark and light than Love, the LA band Echols co-founded with the late Arthur Lee.
To celebrate the 55th anniversary of Forever Changes, the album Love recorded across that fabled summer, the group – now dubbed the Love Band – are touring the UK. Forever Changes’ beautifully odd blend of psych-folk and Latin instrumentation, rock and easy listening, sounded like nothing before or since. A failure in the US when released in November 1967 – reaching No 154 in the US charts, far lower than Love’s previous two albums – yet a success in the UK where Forever Changes reached No 24 and quickly became hailed as a masterpiece: in 1971 ZigZag magazine held a poll that saw Forever Changes voted best ever album, beating the likes of Sgt Pepper and Blonde on Blonde. Since then Forever Changes has continued to enchant listeners and inspire musicians – Primal Scream and the Stone Roses (among many others) all referenced it as a touchstone while artists as diverse as Robert Plant, the Damned and Calexico regularly perform numbers from this idiosyncratic album.
