Circa the mid-’70s Arthur Lee was in the midst of tough times; never a marketplace powerhouse, his critical reputation took a long nosedive post-Forever Changes as his album Black Beauty was languishing in the can. Offered a contract by Robert Stigwood’s RSO Records, Lee reassembled his band and set to work. Detouring from the hard rock of his preceding releases, Reel to Real disregarded familiar garage or psychedelic territory for an unexpected and for some perplexing soul/rock milieu. Few heard the final product, but on February 19 its underrated contents are available again on vinyl and compact disc with bonus tracks through High Moon Records.
A little punkish and considerably Byrds-like, Love’s self-titled arrival from March of ’66 endures as one of the stronger debuts of its decade; opening with the emo-purge throttling of Bacharach and David’s “My Little Red Book” and following with over half a dozen gems and no clunkers, the LP consistently wields aspects of Los Angelino garage beginnings as an advantage. For evidence, look no further than “Hey Joe,” a burner arguably on par with the ’65 version by the Leaves and the famous slowed-down take that introduced the world to the Jimi Hendrix Experience in ‘66.
Roughly eight months after Love appeared Elektra unleashed Da Capo, an expanded lineup pursuing psychedelia and baroque pop while retaining the punk edge on “7 and 7 Is,” though it bears noting that particular song, issued as a classic single in July of ’66, derived from an earlier session. Its second side taken up with a 19 minute blues jam (working title: “John Lee Hooker”), many peg Da Capo as half great; irrefutably an indulgence, “Revelation” is nowhere near the blunder its biggest detractors claim it to be, instead illuminating the breadth of the group’s rapid-fire metamorphosis.
A year did elapse before the emergence of Love’s consensus masterpiece, and given its level of ambition, it’s not difficult to see why; Forever Changes ranks amongst the most vivid and boldly scaled epics produced by the ’60s pop-rock renaissance, and if a commercial failure in relation to expectations, it’s become an undying cult item and a frequent entry on lists of the Greatest Records of All Time.
But back then, Forever Changes’ lack of success (it did chart and actually performed pretty well in the UK) basically inspired Lee to break up the band and start from scratch with all new members; recording three albums’ worth of material in one big spurt, the best of it fills Love’s last disc for Elektra, the harder-edged and intermittently terrific Four Sail; a few months later in December of ’69 the Blue Thumb label rounded up the leftovers onto the qualitatively erratic 2LP Out Here.
Both signal a redirection into hard rock deepened on ’70’s False Start; an improvement upon Out Here, it features guest Jimi Hendrix on opener “The Everlasting First” and marked the end of Love’s relationship with Blue Thumb. Lee’s rough patch continued: First, sessions for Columbia came to nothing, at least until 2009 when Sundazed dusted them off as Love Lost.
In ’72 Lee stepped out solo with Vindicator for A&M, the musicians backing him credited as Band-Aid; the platter confounded many as he persisted in dishing out the hard stuff and with an increasingly Hendrixian blues angle. Numerous Love lineups came and went during this era, and post-Vindicator Lee formed a fresh incarnation and set to work on Black Beauty for Buffalo Records.
The independent label of Michael Butler (best known as the producer of the musical Hair), Buffalo went bust and left Black Beauty on the shelf; it saw belated release in 2012 courtesy of High Moon and was quickly established as Lee’s strongest record since Four Sail. Finally getting the proportion of hard rocking and quality songwriting into sustained balance, Black Beauty also introduced funkiness effectively foreshadowing a sharper change in direction.
Reel to Real found Lee gaining strength by using the same core personnel, namely guitarist Melvan Whittington, drummer Joe Blocker, and bassist Robert Rozelle, with the latter replaced by Sherwood Akuna. Astutely described by Lee as “cats who can play funky and rock,” the lineup was completed by guitarist John Sterling, notably the only white member of a band reflecting the increased black musical consciousness of its leader.
This is immediately apparent on Reel to Real via the undeniably R&B-inclined “Time Is Like a River.” Lee’s calm-toned exhortation at the outset leads to a brightly tinted passage of organ uplift and an engaged, focused vocal. Along the way smartly employed horns and backup singers ride atop sturdy but unruffled momentum.
Crisp rhythm guitar and soaring rock-inclined solos fill out a scenario leaning closer to Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, and even contemporaneous moves by George Clinton than Lee’s Hendrix jaunts, and “Stop the Music” expands this new wrinkle with a hunk of slow burning Stax-styled soul as injections of slide guitar and Lee’s grinding harmonica remedy any notions of reverence.
The blend of rock thrust and soul-catharsis deftly avoids strain or bluster and emphasizes Lee’s eccentricity as it concludes with a left-field vocal goof; the anticlimax underscores the daring of “Who Are You,” a fast-trucking number fusing a funky-soul core with hints of disco, spacey keyboard swooshes, and some hearty guitar soloing. The whole makes plain Lee was keeping abreast of trends as “Good Old Fashion Dream” ladles out another heaping serving of Stax.
David Fricke’s in-depth notes relate Memphis as Lee’s birthplace, thus rendering the non-hackneyed soul less surprising. But “Which Witch is Which?” delivers a concise cloud of guitar-focused psych helping Reel to Real to evade a narrow approach as the horn-laden groover “With a Little Energy” carries a lyrically positive if not especially profound message fueled by Rozelle’s buoyant bass.
If all this seems a rather drastic shift, please keep in mind that it was the first time Lee had acquired a significant recording budget since his Elektra days. 200 thousand dollars was reportedly spent on the disc, a sum registering in hindsight as a huge amount for a guy who’d hit the Top 40 exactly once and had never managed a Top 20 album (or even Top 50 in the US), but as Fricke’s notes clarify RSO exec Skip Taylor was trying to orchestrate a comeback as others at the label were hoping for another Forever Changes.
What they got was a funky-fresh take on Four Sail’s “Singing Cowboy” and an enjoyable but straight-ahead cover of William DeVaughn’s ’74 smash “Be Thankful for What You Got,” tracks highlighting Lee’s desire to tinker with prior forays amid a general mood of relaxation, qualities intermingling with Reel to Real’s stylistic departure and eluding desperation. But it’s not a total break; those enamored with Lee’s rock side should dig the slide-guitar drenched “You Said You Would,” though it also reinforces its author’s way with slightly oddball pop nuggets.
Upon consideration, Reel to Real is a remarkably surefooted effort, which is probably why its bold moves lack a reputation in lieu of shouldering a bad one. Overall it’s maybe a mite too casual as the smoldering funk-rock of “Busted Feet” culminates in a jump cut into a closing campfire sing-along of “Everybody’s Gotta Live.”
As both tunes resurface from Vindicator, they can insinuate a dearth of new songs; however, High Moon’s dozen bonus cuts illuminate the matter, holding five then-new selections not sequenced on the record proper. Thy include “Graveyard Hop,” a “Jailhouse Rock” shakeup linking the eternal audaciousness of prime Little Richard to the eruptions of 1977 just around the corner.
Lovers of Forever Changes should find the version of that album’s outtake “Wonder People (I Do Wonder)” of interest, but fans of early Love who exited the scene after Four Sail might want to check out Black Beauty before dipping into Reel to Real. On further thought, the amped-up, soul/R&B/funk laid down here hangs pretty well in a rotation with Curtis, Osmium, Inspiration Information and There’s a Riot Goin’ On, so folks with a penchant for such sounds shouldn’t hesitate to inspect Love’s swan song.
Had Out Here been sensibly reduced to a single LP and Black Beauty came out as planned, Arthur Lee might potentially be viewed not as a brilliant figure suffering a loss of luster (and retrieving it via late-career comeback) but as a restless genre chameleon. Over 40 years after Reel to Real’s completion it returns to assert its status as far more than a footnote.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
