LINER
NOTES FOR LOVE'S FALSE START
By
Richie Unterberger
Though
Love established
themselves as a premier California folk-rock-psychedelic group with
their mid-to-late-1960s albums on Elektra, the two LPs they released
after moving to the Blue Thumb label were much different from the
material with which they'd first made their mark. In fact, the Blue
Thumb LPs were considerably different from each other, both in sound
and personnel.
The first of these, Out Here, was actually recorded at
around the same time as their final Elektra album, Four Sail. Like Four Sail, it showed the group
exploring different directions than they had on their first three LPs,
with leader and chief singer-songwriter Arthur Lee the only remaining
member from the previous Love lineups. Recorded in 1970, False Start was another shift,
going into a harder-rocking mode than any previous Love release. There
was another lineup change between Out
Here and False Start
as well, with Gary Rowles replacing Jay Donnellan on lead guitar,
though Lee, bassist Frank Fayad, and drummer George Suranovich remained
aboard the Love train.
Rowles's history with Fayad and Suranovich
predated his enlistment into Love's ranks by some time. He was
playing with Fayad in Las Vegas in 1967 when Nooney Rickett—"an amazing
R&B singer and rhythm guitarist," as Rowles describes him
today—approached Gary and Frank to be in a new band he was starting.
Suranovich, who had drummed with Pittsburgh doo wop greats the
Skyliners (famous for the classic 1959 smash "Since I Don't Have You"),
joined to complete the quartet early the following year. As the Noon
Express, they were playing the Brass Ring club in Encino in the San
Fernando Valley in September 1968 when Arthur Lee, looking to form a
new lineup of Love after his latest Elektra version had dissolved,
checked them out.
"Arthur wanted that band to be Love," Rowles
explains. "So when Nooney's band broke up and I went up to San
Francisco, Arthur hired Frank and George and Jay for the Out Here album." But Rowles did
play on one cut of the Out Here
LP, as Lee "wanted something specific that was part of my style at the
time. I went up to San Francisco to play with a band up there for a
while, and when I came back to L.A., Arthur called me and said, 'I
really would like you to be a part of this.' He mentioned something
about a European tour and a record after that, so I was definitely
interested."
Love's metamorphosis into a more hard rock-oriented
outfit, Gary adds, "didn't come as a surprise to me because the band
basically had transformed from this eclectic group of individuals that
Love was before, [when] it seemed to me like there was some struggle
for identity within the group. You had different people writing,
different people saying 'this is how I want it to sound.' Certainly to
a listener, that's very appealing, because it gives a lot of colors to
the palette of the presentation. But Arthur realized that the future
was a little bit more hard rock, because that was when Zeppelin came
out, and all of a sudden, that was the beginnings of metal. It was also
an outflowing of the Jimi Hendrix presentation, which really changed
quite a bit of how guitar players thought and what the expanded
capabilities of the instrument could be. So actually the change of
direction was a result of Arthur being exposed to us—the Nooney Rickett
band—and him wanting that to be what he could identify his songwriting
and his presentation with."
Before most of the studio recordings were done for
the record, Love embarked on their first European tour in early 1970.
Indeed, Love were perhaps more popular in the UK than they were in
their native US at this point, 1968's classic Forever Changes album having
charted far higher there (peaking at #24) than any Love LP had in the
States. It was in England during this tour that Love would record two
of the tracks to appear on its forthcoming album, one of them being the
live concert recording "Stand Out." The other would be the most famous
cut on the record, "The Everlasting First," for the simple reason that
it featured some guest lead guitar by none other than Jimi Hendrix.
Hendrix and Lee had first met in the mid-1960s
before either musician became famous, Jimi even playing on an obscure
soul single written by Arthur, Rosa Lee Brooks's "My Diary." On March
17, 1970, as Rowles tells it, he came back from a walk in London to
find "Jimi Hendrix sitting on the couch in the apartment. I happened to
have an old '54 Stratocaster, and I wanted him to see it. He looked at
my guitar and played it a little bit, and then Arthur says, 'you know,
we should go jam.' Everybody thought that was a great idea, so Arthur
called Olympic Studios, and it just so happened that they didn't have
anything booked that night in the main room. I'd say we played a good
eight or nine hours that night. I don't know what happened to all of
the material. I do know that we did a version of 'Ezy Ryder' [Hendrix's
own version later showing up on his first posthumous album, 1971's Cry of Love] that was quite
spectacular. He wanted to show it to us, 'cause he liked our rhythm
section a lot. We did some jamming—there was a percussionist friend of
his there, I can't remember who it was—just two-chord stuff."
"The Everlasting First" itself, adds Gary,
"represents a dream of any guitar player who's ever played a
Stratocaster. I sat next to Jimi Hendrix, three feet away from him, for
almost eight hours, and none of us even got up to go to the bathroom.
When that song fades out, you have no idea what happened after that. No
one does—I may be one of the only people left alive who knows. That
thing went on for twenty minutes; I mean, we sat there for twenty
minutes and just played that riff. The roof came off of the building
several times that night."
Most of False
Start, however, was recorded a few months later, in June and
July, at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. Here again, there was a
strong Hendrix connection, as Record Plant co-founder and engineer Gary
Kellgren had done a lot of work with Jimi, who visited Love to hang out
with the band during the recording. Although Hendrix didn't play on any
more tracks to find release on False
Start, another old friend who did was Nooney Rickett, who
contributed some vocals and rhythm guitar. "Ride That Vibration" is a
particular favorite of Rowles as it was "a chance for me to do my
thing, and I loved the feel. There's that George Suranovich 16-bar
phrases thing, and Frank Fayad's psychedelic bass thing, and my just
kind of going out into my little place in outer space thing."
False Start
received a glowing review in Rolling
Stone by Mike Saunders, who enthused, "Arthur Lee is now a good
and unaffected singer, having both a soft and a screaming voice...[his]
songs are engaging in their simple structure, this album is engaging in
its whole, and I think I could rave on all day saying wonderful things
about it." But despite the praise, it could only struggle to #184 in
the charts, and the lineup that recorded it started to crumble soon
after it was recorded. "There were substance abuse problems," admits
Rowles. "Arthur had some issues, they're probably well known. It
started getting to the point that when we would go to play a gig, he
would basically almost have to be dragged on the stage. I couldn't be a
part of that, so I left; I was the first one to quit." Though he was
replaced by John Sterling, and Fayad and Suranovich carried on playing
with Lee in Love for a while, no more albums were recorded before this
version of the band broke up.
Rowles, who today runs Audio Media Services in
Oregon, remains proud of his stint with Love. For all Arthur Lee's
quirks, Gary emphasizes, "he was a very powerful singer, and his
writing was very good, timely prose and lyrics for the culture at the
time. He knew how to get good things out of people, and there were a
lot of good times working with him." He's also thankful that "my
opportunity to play with Arthur Lee afforded me probably one of the
greatest opportunities that anyone of my era could have experienced,
and that is the opportunity to play with Jimi Hendrix three times. Any
guitar player on this earth that's ever heard that from
me...immediately, their jaws drop." -- Richie Unterberger
unless otherwise specified.
HOME WHAT'S
NEW MUSIC
BOOKS MUSIC REVIEWS
TRAVEL BOOKS
LINKS ABOUT
THE AUTHOR SITE MAP
EMAIL RICHIE
BUY BOOKS