Arthur Lee, frontman for '60s band Love, dies

Arthur Lee, who forged a legacy as one of rock's great visionaries and forbidding eccentrics while reigning briefly with his band Love as princes of the mid-1960s Sunset Strip, died Thursday of leukemia in a Memphis, Tenn., hospital. He was 61.

Mark Linn, a longtime friend, said Mr. Lee learned in February that he had leukemia and spent most of his remaining months in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy and an experimental umbilical-cord blood treatment.

Mr. Lee, who established himself as the first black rock star of the post-Beatles era, fronted Love through astonishing musical changes that have continued to resonate for other rockers and a cult of critics and fans.

Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant cited the influence of Mr. Lee and Love in his acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

But Love also became one of the first burnout bands of the 1960s, and with Mr. Lee's death, only three members survive of the eight who were in the band between 1965 and 1967.

Dogged by internal rivalries, substance abuse and Mr. Lee's reluctance to tour, the first version of Love was finished by 1968, although Mr. Lee continued using the band name to record and perform at least sporadically for the rest of his life.

He was imprisoned from 1996 to 2001 on a third-strike weapons charge, but after his release he had new energy and a new story to tell that led to a resurgence for a time in concerts, including a 2003 performance in London, available on DVD, in which Mr. Lee was able to re-create Love's masterpiece album, "Forever Changes," backed by a sharp, four-man rock band and an orchestra of horns and strings.

Love's first three albums were indeed forever changing. They yielded eloquent folk-rock on the 1966 debut, "Love," the first rock record ever released by Elektra Records, and jazz-inflected rock with a flute player added to the lineup on the follow-up, "Da Capo." That album also included the explosive hard rock of the band's lone Top Forty single, "7 and 7 Is" — a song that ended with the sound of an atom bomb exploding and foreshadowed late-'70s punk rock by 10 years. In 1967 came "Forever Changes," a gorgeous, haunting song cycle infused with classical horns and strings.

"Forever Changes" ranked 40th on a list that Rolling Stone magazine compiled of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Yet it has remained an overlooked treasure, reaching no higher than No. 154 on the Billboard albums chart after its original release, and selling 103,000 copies since 1991 on CD reissues, according to SoundScan.

Love played a crucial role in Los Angeles' early rock history. By 1965, the Byrds had created a Hollywood folk-rock scene at Ciro's. When Mr. Lee and his guitar-playing boyhood friend, Johnny Echols, saw the Byrds, they decided folk-rock was the way to go, rather than the Booker T & the MGs-style rhythm and blues they had been playing.

They quickly enlisted the Byrds' guitar-strumming road manager, Bryan MacLean, who became second-chair singer-songwriter to Mr. Lee.

Love's racially integrated lineup — Mr. Lee and Echols were black, while MacLean, bassist Ken Forssi and drummers Don Conka, Alban "Snoopy" Pfisterer and Michael Stuart-Ware (his married name) were white — forged a model that the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly and the Family Stone and War would follow to much greater stardom; Echols said he and Mr. Lee met Hendrix while he was still R&B sideman Jimmy James, and that Hendrix took fashion cues from the flamboyantly dressed Mr. Lee.

After the first version of Love disbanded, Mr. Lee found new musicians and made a pair of albums, "Four Sail" and "Out Here," that showed continued songwriting strength. Hendrix accompanied him on "False Start," from 1970.

Mr. Lee then fell from the spotlight for the better part of two decades. He re-emerged in 1989, booked on a Psychedelic Summer of Love package tour.

In 1993, he connected with a new set of young admirers, the interracial Los Angeles pop-rock band Baby Lemonade, who became the next and last incarnation of Love, billed now as Love With Arthur Lee. It became the steadiest, most enduring lineup of Mr. Lee's career. He toured regularly until his 1996 sentencing, then picked up with the same players after his release in 2001.

Mr. Lee was born Arthur Porter Taylor. His mother, Agnes, was a schoolteacher; he saw little of his father, Chester Taylor, who was a cornet player. At age 5, he moved with his mother to Los Angeles. Six years later, she married Clinton Lee, a carpenter and plumber. Mr. Lee began taking accordion lessons as a child, and was playing keyboards in Los Angeles clubs by his midteens.

In June, Plant, Ian Hunter and Ryan Adams headlined a benefit concert in New York that Linn said raised $50,000 for Mr. Lee's medical expenses. Linn said Mr. Lee married his longtime girlfriend, Diane, near the end of his life.