Guest Listener - Desi Jedeikin
Who’s Desi when she’s at home?
I’m a writer, living in L.A. and working on several projects that’ll probably never be made. I have lots more ideas for things that’ll probably never be made, because writing things that appeal to a minority of people who have no power in Hollywood is truly my passion. In addition to that, I love wasting valuable time I’ll never get back tweeting disgusting NSFW things on Twitter @desijed.
Desi’s Top 3 albums ever?
These are all ones I love:
1. David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
2. The Clash, London Calling
3. Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis
What great album has she never heard before?
Forever Changes by Love
Released in 1967
Before we get to Desi, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Forever Changes
I asked the following question on Twitter this week -
“If you could live within any music scene in the ‘60s for three years, where would you live and what years would you pick?”
Before we get to my own answer, and this week’s album, let me just quickly rattle through some of the most popular replies.
London. 1965-1967.
Obviously has a lot going for it.
Half the best bands in the world are living there, playing there, and producing their best work. As if that wasn’t enough, it was apparently swinging all over the place and had become the global capital for EVERYTHING.
Even a World Cup came to town.
On the downside, though, people were eating lots of offal back then and the place was overrun with mods.
I think we can do better.
London. 1967-1970.
Or maybe we can’t.
This is basically a substandard version of the previous answer.
Everyone’s still mostly eating offal and the mods aren’t ageing well - because mods never do. To compound the situation, there’s no World Cup and Pink Floyd have started doing those gigs where everyone looks like they live in a massive lava lamp.
Besides, I’ve spent most of my life in London, seems like a wasted opportunity to go back there again.
Is there anywhere else?
Birmingham. 1967-1969.
Ok, not quite what I had in mind.
I asked the people who suggested this whether they were taking the piss and one of them replied with -
“No, there would have been The Move, the early days of Black Sabbath, and Planty (I assume that’s Robert Plant) would have still been around”
I concluded they were indeed taking the piss.
Besides, I’ve spent most of my life avoiding Birmingham …….
Any chance we can leave the UK?
Detroit. 1964-1966.
Sounds promising.
Obviously a city where The Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes, and Smokey Robinson played every night would definitely win this. But, by all accounts, that wasn’t the case. The only scene was in the studio and the bands were then sent on gruelling package tours to play the likes of The Gaumont in Wolverhampton.
I’d be left behind and forced to work in a car factory - with disastrous consequences.
No, not for me.
Greenwich Village. 1962-1964.
Well, I love Bob Dylan. That much is true. But there’s beatniks everywhere - an afterlife of roll-necks and goatee beards endlessly going on about Kerouac. And the minute they hear an electric guitar they all cry and run off home to their mums.
That bit sounds ok but I could do without the rest of it.
Sorry Bob.
San Francisco. 1967-1969.
Firstly, there’s no such thing as free love.
Secondly, there’s hills everywhere which is a nightmare if you can’t drive.
That’s basically my Tripadvisor review of San Francisco right there.
Hamburg. 1960-1962.
Without doubt, the best of the wrong answers.
Hamburg has a HUGE amount going for it - namely an abundance of speed and leather.
Ok, so there’s only really one band in town but they’re the ONLY band you need in town. Plus, it’s a unique opportunity to see the only part of the Beatles career where there’s no footage.
As if all this wasn’t great enough, I reckon I’d also become their mate or, even better, an actual Beatle. Remember, at this stage they had Pete Best on drums and Stuart Sutcliffe on “standing with his back to the audience pretending to play bass”
I could do that.
Yeah, Hamburg has a huge amount going for it.
But it wouldn’t be my answer.
“OK THEN MARTIN WHAT’S YOUR BLOODY ANSWER!!!”
Derby. 1966-1968.
No, only joking. My answer would be -
L.A. 1965-1967.
In early 1965, a load of garage bands emerged in L.A. with the best names ever - The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Guilloteens, Balloon Farm, The Common Cold, The Electric Prunes, and, my favourite of all - Ken and The Fourth Dimension.
And not only were the band names brilliant, but they came up with the greatest song titles I’ve ever heard- There’s a Girl in Your Eye, Get Me to The World On Time and, wait for it, I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night).
What’s not to like?
In my head it’s basically a massive episode of The Monkees - a self-contained world of healthy looking bands playing The Sunset Strip and getting embroiled in “capers” that involved lots of chasing. It was so wild that, at one point, the L.A.P.D. declared a 10pm curfew for anyone under 18.
That tells me all I need to know. Even Hamburg didn’t do that.
Seriously, though, the thing that fascinates me about this scene is how Anglophile it is. Whereas Greenwich Village drew on the American folk tradition, and Motown drew on gospel and R&B, L.A. was a collection of bands initially content just to re-write pre Rubber Soul Beatles - often to great effect, often with really good drummers. It’s the specific time and the place where the British Invasion starts to influence American music and take it away from its roots. Like all the best scenes it’s evocative, it depicts a transitory movement that could only happen there and then.
And in amongst the silly band names, the songs that got nowhere then and have only achieved cult compilation status since, there are those that transcended the moment - The Byrds, The Doors, Captain Beefheart, and of course - Love.
Here’s the potted biography - everything you need to know about Love.
In March 1965 Arthur Lee saw The Byrds perform on the Sunset Strip and his head fell off - he said their sound went straight to his heart. He was equally fascinated by an audience that the L.A times had dubbed “The Sherwood Forest People”. Sensing his time was now, he decides to form his own band with a guitarist who looked exactly like Johnny Mathis, another guitarist who had just recently failed an audition for The Monkees, a bass player called Ken (not the one from Ken and The Fourth Dimension), and a drummer called Snoopy.
It’s 1965 in L.A. - of course there’s a drummer called Snoopy.
There was also a fella called “Bummer Bob” who didn’t last long on account of always being late. He eventually joined the worst group in L.A., the Manson Family, and is currently serving life imprisonment for murder.
No one really talks about him.
But anyway …
Lee’s band were originally called The Grass Roots until he found out another band had the same name. So, inspired by a bra shop he used to work in called Luv Brassieres, they changed their name to Love. I should point out here that Love is, by some distance, my least favourite band name. In a city where the possibilities were endless, it’s just such a cop out, so obvious. They didn’t even misspell it to make it sound cooler which is, frankly, the very least I would expect.
Still, a winning combination of garage rock and good looks saw them start to draw crowds at Bido Lito on The Sunset Strip. It was on the strength of these shows alone that Jac Holzman signed them to Elektra in January of 1966 - apparently he knew within 3 minutes of seeing them. He would later say that the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life were there that night and they couldn’t take their eyes off the band. He also described Lee as the most bizarre person he’d ever seen in his whole life. That was all he needed to make a decision - he didn’t even ask for a demo tape.
Just two months later they release their first album - terribly titled Love. It’s good, a little patchy maybe, but it has the brilliant My Little Red Book on it - a song that Sterling Morrison said the Velvet Underground constantly listened to, trying to unlock its sound. It’s also around this time that Arthur Lee decides it would be good if the whole band lived in the same house. The band agree, because as I’ve already said, it’s like one big episode of The Monkees.
In November 1966 they release their second album, Da Capo, which is considerably more “jazz rock” than their debut but, remarkably, all the better for it. As a result, they graduate to bigger clubs on The Strip and Lee very much becomes the “Man About Town” - hardly ever going on tour because L.A. was such a great place to be and he thought everyone should come to him instead.
And then The Summer of Love.
Lee starts to sketch out a new orchestral sound in his head, far removed from the second album, and nowhere near the debut. Not a skilled musician, he imagined the songs in their basic form and hummed the melodies to the rest of the band. An arranger was then brought in to score the album with a full orchestra - which he did once Lee had hummed the string and horn sections to him.
Incredible really, when you listen to the complexity of the finished product, that most of the songs were built around one bloke humming to a load of other blokes.
But that was that, that’s how it happened.
Forever Changes was subsequently released in November 1967, on the cusp of the scene going dark. What should have been the crowning glory of L.A. drowned in its own setting and sank without a trace - taking Arthur Lee and Love with it in the process.
And I somehow wonder if that’s the secret to what’s happened since.
Despite being very much a product of time and place, Forever Changes has since found its audience and appreciation elsewhere – to great effect. That initial rejection somehow avoided the claustrophobic nostalgia that accompanies success and made the album simultaneously timeless, yet somehow personal. We remember the time when we first discovered it because it was exactly that - a discovery. It wasn’t handed down, part of the library footage of the '60s, so instead it becomes representative of your own experience - in my case the moment I realised there was more to the '60s than my parent’s record collection.
It felt like an achievement, a building block, and rather than being evocative of L.A. in 1967, it now takes me back to nights in South East London in the mid '90s - listening to it with close friends for the first time and trying to get my head around a song called Maybe The People Would Be The Times or Between Clark and Hilldale.
I still have no idea what that means.
And what of Arthur Lee?
Well, eventually it becomes one of THE happy endings. After years of obscurity, drug abuse, and prison, he emerges in 2002 to realise that everyone now loves the album that he recorded 35 years before. And this time he’s happy to tour, to come to his new audience and play the album in full. I eventually caught up with them in Nottingham in 2004 - with the actual Sherwood Forest People who I suspect were not as exciting as their L.A. counterparts.
Still, everyone I know that saw Lee on that Forever Changes tour says the same thing - it was like he was singing these songs for the first time. He was having his moment all over again – taking a victory lap and giving his audience a glimpse of what they’d missed the first time around.
And for all my talk at the start about an imagined past, maybe there was nothing better than what I saw that night.
An old man, shielding his age with adornments and accessories, and letting his youth shine through.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Forever Changes
Mojo readers selected Forever Changes as the 11th best album ever made
In 2003, the NME ranked the album number 6 on their list of greatest albums of all time.
Also, according to the NME, The Stone Roses’ relationship with their future producer John Leckie was settled when they all agreed that Forever Changeswas the “best record ever”
So, over to you Desi. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
Not only have l not listened to it, I’m pretty sure I’ve never even heard of it. Consider that my shout out to all the fellows on Twitter, who clutched their pearls over my SERIOUS oversight when my album was announced. I’M EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT.
I mean, sure, a ‘60s trippy rock band named Love sounded vaguely familiar to me, but why wouldn’t it? It has to be one of the more spot on band naming choices in all of human history. Basically the reason I picked it was because, of all the selections Ruth and Martin gave me, it was the only one I knew nothing about it. I can hear the screams, “HOW? WHY? WTF?! ” well…
Of all types of music, the type I’m least likely to listen to is anything remotely hippie-dippie, psychedelic pop rock-y etc… So there was no chance I’d even hear something similar to Love and say, “Hey I need to explore more bands of this ilk.” I’m going to blame my childhood. Not only was I not raised properly, but I have a real aversion to anything that reminds of the perverted hippie men that populated my childhood. Classic fuckboys using soaring harmonies and lyrics about ‘making love’ to get into a lady’s pants (in this case my mom’s) - admittedly an unusual prejudice. Just explaining why at the first sound of ‘Daisy Rock’, I usually roll my eyes and turn on something dark and/or glam, the preferred musical genre used to get into my pants. Different strokes!
The only time I can recall ever enjoying sunshine love ‘60s music, is maybe when the Strawberry Alarm Clock played Incense and Peppermints in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. So I suppose I can only swallow that ‘60s pop rock pill when it’s attached to something dark and depraved like a mod Hollywood fuckfest or a maybe a Manson murder romp? I need some contrast to all that Love!
Had I known exactly how beloved it was, it might have scared me off a bit. I’m just too tired to fight with music nerds online!! Also if I knew the type of music it was, that also might have made me hesitate a bit. I’m not a hater who goes into something rubbing my hands together looking to tear down an iconic thing just because. Please be gentle with me. I have enough people coming after me online for talking about feminism and sex constantly.
But here we are, and Imma say what Imma say!
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
So let me just say up top, like many, music for me evokes strong memories. It can make me like the cheesiest Billy Joel song, an artist I don’t like at all, it will make me cry during Space Oddity or get enraged when I hear a jaunty Spice Girls’ song. If I have a specific memory attached to a song or type of music it’s hard for me to change that. So with that in mind…
Oy. I actually recognized the first song, Alone Again Or, which I think I knew from The Damned cover. I KNOW I’M TERRIBLE! A friend reminded me that it was also in the movie Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson-approved!) and then told me this album was his Dad’s favorite from the 60s. (Sorry! Friend’s Dad!) It actually kind of reminded me of Pinball Wizard at first only not as good for me, but how can anything be as good as a song featured in a movie where Ann-Margaret gets busy in an explosion of baked beans? See? Attached memories rule me! This was the best track on the album for me. The lyrics are good and misanthropic, at least the way I took them, which is a nice contrast to the swelling orchestration. Good or bad, it has stayed in my head. Now we get to the rest of it…
A House is Not A Motel was also vaguely familiar, I’m going to say it’s in the Revolution Rock vein. I don’t exactly know what I mean by that but I know it when I hear it. I’m probably an asshole, but I hate things that seem like they are trying to be profound and enlighten me. If I wrote this song based on my life, it would be called A Motel is Not A House and it would be sort of like a lost Amy Winehouse track. Just FYI, I guess.
Let’s talk about Andmoreagain, shall we? Oh fuck, this is some 60s ass shit. You just know some ephemeral drugged out chick who lived in a flop house in Laurel Canyon went by this name for a spell. I read a bit about Arthur Lee (I tried to be thorough!), and he does seem like a badass, but when I listened to this track I pictured a troubadour-type singing this in second-hand velveteen at a Renaissance Faire in hopes of lining up his fuck card for the drug-fueled orgy later that evening.
The Red Telephone had some qualities I liked. It was darkly magical and had some cool minor chord stuff going on, that made me think it would be perfect played during an occult ritual celebrating the life of Aleister Crowley. I’m not going to lie, I wanted to get drunk and do an interpretive dance to it in my front yard. But that doesn’t mean my current favorite drunken interpretive dance song, Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights is in any danger. My neighbors are all relieved, I’m sure.
Apparently a good way to make me perk up after some imo dull tracks is to start a song off with the opening lyrics of Live and Let Live.
“Oh, the snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal
There’s a bluebird sitting on a branch”
Ugh, you lost me at the bluebird.
I want to know more about the snot! Is that a euphemism for something dirty? Can we skip the birds, sky and souls and get back to the snot? Those lyrics could be the starting point for one of my favorite short stories and have to be some of the more oddly delightful lyrics I’ve ever heard.
The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything, really ups the Burt Bacharach arrangement factor, it’s very plucky and the lyrics hit 60s hippie music bingo by mentioning hummingbirds, flowers, summertime, merry-go-rounds and la di dahs! I love Bacharach, so I feel like I should like this more. Maybe I just need to hear some busted vocals of women who have LIVED like Dionne Warwick or Dusty Springfield on the type of arrangements that have tons of horns and strings?
What I will give props to Love for is I definitely see the influence they had on several bands that I adore and there are elements that remind me of some of my favorites, like The Velvet Underground and The Animals, so I’m not a total hater. It’s just not my thing. But what do I know? I like Britney Spears’ Toxic.
I’m actually writing something right now set in the early 70s and was thinking some of the tracks on this would be perfect to play during the Yogaville retreat scenes, where the hippie guru spends most of his time doling out spiritual bon mots while trying to bed barely legal girls. Old prejudices die hard. I’m not proud, but in general, I prefer keeping free love ideals and psychedelic orchestrations away from my pussy and my ears.
Would you listen to it again?
Probably not, it did grow on me somewhat, but I like things a little darker and angrier sounding. As I said, I wasn’t raised properly, I realize this.
A mark out of 10?
5
RAM Rating – 8
Guest Rating – 5
Overall – 6.5
So that was Week 53 and that was Desi Jedeikin. Turns out she’d never listened to Forever Changes before because she hadn’t been raised properly. So we made her listen to it and she sort of liked it but sort of didn’t – her major complaint being there was too much Love and not enough snot.
That can happen sometimes if I’m honest.
Next week, the writer Linda Grant listens to something from 1985 for the first time. Until then, here’s that song from Forever Changes that I love but can’t bothered to look up its title again.