Love reissued
Love
Forever Changes (Collector’s Edition)
(Rhino)
One big difference between this version of Forever Changes and the last time Rhino reissued it is the event of Arthur Lee’s death.
Yes, an alternate mix of the posthumously celebrated album finds inclusion, but it is also a perversely worse incarnation; all we’re left with is another chance to extol a delayed classic for another generation.
I suppose that’s really Rhino’s hope. They probably figure the people who want this album already have the original, bootlegs, and first-wave reissue that solved loudness issues on their iPods. Yet Forever Changes has always been difficult to explain to anyone interested in something other than rock history. Lee and Love (Bryan MacLean?) would pen more accessible tracks (“7 And 7 Is,” “Always See Your Face”) in their time, neither of which was as impactful as the occasional nugget (“Break On Through,” for instance) from a far less desperate Los Angelino like Jim Morrison.
Forever Changes, we’re told, presaged the end of the hippie dream (in the middle of the Summer Of Love, no less) by exposing the alienation within, and brought Brian Wilson’s orchestras to the local musician. Sgt. Pepper was no more than a pickled jalapeño to Lee; the image he creates of himself sitting in a park with a pistol would have reverberated with or without his eventual incarceration. (The snot was caked on his pants long before Aqualung’s.) In this sense, a “Collector’s Edition” makes the album appear more intimidating than it already is. Once you unlock it you can’t imagine what life was like not knowing it, but that process demands patience; two discs and the usual-suspects extras (the “Your Mind And We Belong Together” single) ingrain a sophistication that has dogged Forever Changes for too long.
— Steve Forstneger
