Ode to my license plate (or the song that I lifted it from)

When I was a boy, I thought about the times I'd be a man…

I have to admit something- I'm getting rather annoyed at people shouting "fourteen" at me. I brought it upon myself- here in Michigan, anyone with the old white on blue plates had to exchange their plates two years ago and rather than getting stuck a random jumble of letters and numbers on the back of my car for another ten years, I made up thirty combinations. All were associated with music I loved. Some were favored songs, others rare instruments, still others admirations for assorted musicians. I needn't have bothered make thirty. The first one I had queried, "7AND7IS", from the Love song of the same title, was available, so I took it.

To understand Love is to understand their leader, Arthur Lee. The son of a strict schoolteacher and an absent musician, Arthur Porter Taylor was born in Memphis, raised in Los Angeles, eventually adopted by his stepfather Clinton Lee and given his surname. Even before leaving Los Angeles' Dorsey High, Lee was performing, playing with groups like Arthur Lee and the L.A.G.'s (the name an homage to some band from Lee's birthplace), the American Four and the Grass Roots while writing songs for others. Shortly after the Grass Roots changed their name to Love, the five-piece (Lee, guitarist/vocalist Bryan MacLean, lead guitarist Johnny Echols, bassist John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Conka) became the first West Coast rock group signed to Jac Holzman's Elektra Records.

After replacing a departing Fleckenstein with Surfaris bassist Ken Forssi and dropping the drug-addled Conka, the group began recording their debut album in earnest. Adding classically trained keyboardist Alban "Snoopy" Pfisterer on drums after Lee himself had briefly assumed the drum chair, their self-titled debut album was cut in less than a week. The sound of the album showed a group influenced to a degree by The Byrds, perhaps with a heavier edge at times than Jim McGuinn and Co. could effect. The lead single was a garage-band run-through of the Bacharach-David number "My Little Red Book", an interpretation that supposedly horrified the songwriters due to the group's dropping of the major seventh chords that made the original from "What's New, Pussycat" easy listening. Love was a minor American hit, opening the doors for Elektra to consider expanding to include more rocking acts, the biggest of whom were certainly a bass guitar-less quartet from L. A. fronted by a film school graduate named Morrison.

A few months before the Doors commenced recording their debut album, Love went to Sunset Sound to record a non-album single. Going through dozens of takes in a row, the group managed to create a track that was light years ahead of its time, a rocker with Lee singing a rapped vocal, Forssi adding a bass line full of fuzzy glissandos, MacLean and Echols going around one another as if in a gunfight, a slowed down gunshot as a climax (perhaps an anti-war statement?) and an improvised coda to bring about a peaceful conclusion. The ferocious drumming driving the song along was so intensive that Lee and Pfisterer took turns behind the kit, with Lee directing Pfisterer as he had during the Love sessions. Whether it's Pfisterer or Lee on the final track is still debated.

The inspiration for the title was a high school girlfriend of Lee's who happened to have been born on the same day as Lee, March 7, 1945. Unable to prove himself to either her or her family, he saw the failed relationship as yet another disappointment in a lifetime full of disappointments. It says a lot for Lee that he ended up dropping out of high school in spite of the fact his mother was a schoolteacher. Any dreams he'd had of playing basketball (and he was a star player at Dorsey High) fell by the wayside after an injury sidelined him. Music then took hold of his life and it would remain with him, with the occasional lull, until the end. At eighteen, he was playing the organ and had a record out on Capitol. "7 And 7 Is" was out just three short years later, a million light years away aurally from the somewhat derivative rhythm and blues stomp that was "The Ninth Wave".

In just over two minutes and with only two verses, Lee condensed a lifetime of the frustrations of youth into two verses. Frequently exiled to his bedroom as a boy, he was left to dream about the future. Neither parent was much help- his mother the one doing the exiling, his father passing the time by hypnotized by the roaring fireplace. Wearing the metaphorical dunce's cap, Lee grew to resent his world, becoming determined to escape societal views of what and what should not be. It not only came out in the song, but in the way that Lee otherwise conducted himself. In a racially charged era, the biracial Lee was in interracial bands with whites (lead guitarist Echols was also biracial). Lee was among the first to embrace the hippie lifestyle, known for walking around in über-cool threads a full year before his friend Jimi Hendrix was and living communally with the rest of the group in a massive Los Feliz castle that had seen better days.

The song, cut in late June 1966 and out within a month, proved that the group was equally capable of producing wholly original material. If a critic could point to all of the influences that the group wore on their sleeves with the material on Love, they had to have been startled to hear "7 And 7 Is", for it was unlike anything that had ever been released up to that point by anybody, a decade too early to be classified punk but punk nonetheless. It should have been the breakout hit that the group needed to take them to the next level, but it ended up stalling at thirty-three during its ten week run. Yet even if its chart successes were rather minimal, "7 And 7 Is" would go on to be a staple of sorts, covered by numerous acts including the Ramones, Rush and Alice Cooper.

Love was forever changing and by the time the group went in to work on their second album, Sons of Adam drummer Michael Stuart had been recruited with Snoopy gravitating to keyboards and saxophonist/flautist Tjay Cantrelli adding jazz-infused lines. Over the course of one week, the group cut six tracks for Da Capo, "Stephanie Knows Who", a harpsichord-driven waltz from hell, opened the album. MacLean's "Orange Skies", a light, airy showcase for Cantrelli's flute came second, with vocalist Lee channeling Johnny Mathis above all others. Third came "¡Que Vida!", an oblique pop song beyond definition. "7 And 7 Is" came fourth. "The Castle", inspired by the group's home, came fifth. "She Comes in Colors", supposedly inspired by a girlfriend of Lee's menstruation, closed side one.

As for the album's second side, the group cut a version of their endless eastern-tinged boogie number "John Lee Hooker", awkwardly integrating Snoopy's harpsichord and Cantrelli's sax into the mix and re-titling the nineteen-minute mess "Revelation", the longest of the sidelong rock tracks upon its release. Unfortunately for the group, the basic form of "John Lee Hooker/Revelation" had already been interpolated and released by the Rolling Stones (a group who were always in the audience for Love whenever they were in town) in the spring of 1966, leaving Love to appear the thieves. The Stones obviously heard Da Capo, too, for they went on to interpolate lines from "She Comes in Colors" into Their Satanic Majesties Request's "She's A Rainbow", issued as a single in America.

With the group looking for yet another direction, Snoopy and Cantrelli were dropped and the band recorded a truly classic LP, Forever Changes that was a hit in Britain but did nothing at home. It was just as well, Love was imploding by then… they had initially been replaced by session musicians at the start of the sessions for Forever Changes and after one more single that may or may not have included MacLean, the band finally fell apart. After the dissolution, Lee set about reforming the group and cutting three records with three different lineups before embarking on a solo career, occasionally reforming the band with various line-ups and working the occasional odd job. MacLean was offered a solo deal but saw it fall through, he eventually had a breakdown and became a Christian. Echols and Forssi supposedly stuck up donut shops with water pistols (Echols eventually retreated to the desert to air out, Forssi to the world of conspiracy theories). Snoopy became a bon vivant and world traveler. Stuart changed his name and became a photographer. As for Cantrelli, nobody's quite sure… he was in the early-'70s group Geronimo Black with Jimmy Carl Black, thereafter falling off the face of the earth.

Arthur Lee remains a criminally underrated musician in the United States among the masses, though perhaps it was entirely his fault. He never effectively capitalized on his group's growing fame when it was necessary to do so. Love was based out of Los Angeles, and they rarely strayed from there during their classic period- they turned down an invitation to the Monterey International Pop Festival due to the distance it would have put between them and their dealer. Never a stable group, they went through at least six lineups during the time period that their first six albums were released, with only Lee remaining through to the end. None of the other members made any significant waves outside of the group, leaving the criminally undiscovered group as just about the only place a music fan who digs deep (as I like to think I do) can enjoy their talents. And as for the average "fan" of music with little more than a three minute attention span to expand their musical tastes, "7 And 7 Is" might just help them realize there's a whole world of music as yet undiscovered by them.