New Love & Arthur Lee Book -News & Updates

Hey everyone, I wanted to do another thread on Love, I've done a couple so far, but this one's about a book I'm writing and self-publishing with Amazon on the band. 'Keep On Shining: A Guide Through The Music Of Love & Arthur Lee' will be released this Autumn. My fandom got the best of me and I had a lot of downtime this year, so I decided to write something on Love. I was very lucky to have help and encouragement from fellow forum members @lemonade kid, @White Dog, and @The Freedom Man, @omikron and from Love drummer Michael Stuart-Ware, who was kind enough to answer a lot of questions.

The book perspective will be telling the story from inside the music out since most of the time, the music reflects Love's history. They'll be summaries on every song from Love, Arthur Lee solo, and Bryan MacLean solo amongst other side efforts. All the live and compilation releases are covered and since there hasn't been a book on Love & Arthur Lee since 2011, and the 2010s saw a lot of new Love releases, those are detailed in this as well.

I was able to research a lot of old and rare Love articles to flesh out the rest of the story outside the music since it's a unique tale and I wanted all the Love members to have a voice in this, so I researched a number of quotes about the songs and important moments in their history.

I know there are some Love fans on the forum, so I thought I'd do this thread to provide updates as the book is being completed for anyone that happened to be interested and thanks @Steve Hoffman for letting me give this heads up.

 

It will be great I am sure! Can't wait.

Let me know, Wes, when you want me to post the book cover/design--
and you could post a few interior text pages so we can get Love fans excited about this!

 

Lemonade Kid - you did a great design for the book covers and additional pages, thank you so much. Yes, the book will have a lot of information that the few Love books that came out didn't really dive into and I'll go through those books and how this one differs. It should appeal to a casual Love fan because of their unique story and for the hardcore fan, the music summaries and analysis get a lot more time so it's not just stuff you can find in the other books. Now that we have all the lost material, it changes the overall quality of the catalog and that's something that hasn't been covered before. 'Love Lost', 'Black Beauty', the live 1970s-2000s recordings, the unreleased songs/bonus tracks, the early pre-Love tracks, the Forever Changes box, the Electric Company expensive version that just came out- all that adds and changes their legacy.

 

Click to view full size...

 

Pro designer @lemonade kid provided the great artwork, and design and pro photographer @White Dog was very kind as well to provide the photo. So just click on the photo and you can read the synopsis in full size.

 

Awesome @WilliamWes, I'll definitely pick up a copy!

 

Oh thanks Revolver. This week I'm going to start just posting little factoids about the band that I've been learning that aren't as well known to Love fans from the research I did. It still will be some time until the release and next month I'll put up the pre-order on Amazon.

 

I've been writing and editing for the past few days, and tonight I will be doing a phone interview with Love drummer Justino Polimeni. He played with the group during the 1990s and hopefully can provide some insight on Arthur's comeback which started in the early 1990s. Justino is currently playing with the band Decry who released a single this year.

 

Nice. Can't wait to read all the tidbits you've uncovered, Wes...anything new concerning LoVE will be a treat indeed!

 

Oh yeah for sure, Justin Polimeni was great and it was fun to converse about Love for so long. Polimeni hasn't been noted in Love lore much at all and he played with the group in 1992 and 1993 right before Baby Lemonade became Lee's band. It's another strange detour in the Love saga. I mean this is really one of the weirdest histories for a music group I've heard of. He played for two years with Love but kept not getting credit. He's not credited on Love's final album in 1992 because the one song he played on was recorded and included at the last minute and they printed everything already. Then on reprints he's not credited either. He may also be on the live boxset 'Coming Through To You' as well but isnt' credited.

He had a pretty cool entrance into Love. He had known of the band when he and his girlfriend went to a secondhand store and got Da Capo for a $1. He was into more aggressive music and got into "7 & 7 Is". He said it took a couple of weeks to get into the rest of the album but he eventually got to like the whole first side. He didn't mention "Revelation". From there he got all the albums and learned how to play drums along with some of the tunes as a teen.

This was around 1990 and in late 1991, he went to see Love play - the lineup included Melvan Whittington and Robert Rozelle who both played on Black Beauty and Reel-To-Real were in the band and Lee was using a bunch of different drummers at the time. I heard a story once that he hired someone off the street once in the 1980s and taught them some songs in an hour before one live show. Anyway, so when Justin saw Love playing the tiny venue At My Place, the drummer looked bored and was leaning against a wall behind him as he played drums. He wasn't putting much effort in and Justin thought the other 3 were great but this drummer wasn't.

So after the show, Justin goes to the bathroom and Arthur is in there. Justin mentioned he was a confident kid and didn't mind approaching someone he admired like Lee. So Justin introduces himself and Arthur says 'hey'. Then Justin says, "Hey I love your music and the bassist and guitarist are great but the drummer sucks." See, at this point, if it was me in the bathroom, I'd be awkward to speak with him while he's doing his business or after or whatever but everybody's different. Justin told him he was a drummer.

Lee stared at him for a full minute in silence. Lee could be very intimidating at times and he liked to throw people for a loop and give them what they'd least expect. It's hard to approach him because he was physically imposing and after meeting him, you never know what he'll say or do next. After the dramatic pause of looking Justin over, Arthur says "give me your phone number and maybe I'll use you if I need you". Justin was only 18 years old at the time.

Justin said it seemed like Arthur was just being polite and figured he'd never call but six months later Arthur called Justin personally and told him he could try out. Sometime later, Arthur told Justin that the reason he invited him to try out with the band was because Justin exuded confidence on that first meeting. Arthur likened Justin to himself when he drove to Capitol Records as a teen and secured a record deal that his parents had to sign since he was underage.
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Justin shared a lot more stories I'll get into here and it was a blast speaking with him.

 

Very cool! I never knew about Justin as the drummer for Love!

 

Great story. When I met Arthur Lee in 1996 and 2002, he personified the word intimidating..Look forward to the book!

 

Thank you William, but I am a complete amateur in design and photography and look forward to buying the book!

 

Hey Dean, I haven't seen you some time. You never told us about meeting Arthur on the other thread! The book has a lot more info than the thread I did back then and I was able to uncover a lot more of the full picture. Glad you're excited about it - I am too.

 

I'm very much looking forward to the forthcoming insights and even more so for the actual book which looks terrific.

 

Hey White Dog, you were a big inspiration for the book and you're a pro but you don't know. LOL (I just heard that corny joke 'I'm a poet and I don't know it' -sorry he he)

I'm glad you stopped by because I wanted to explain how the book really started coming about earlier this year.

I had originally done the Love album-by-album thread in 2016 and I was kind of normal on the surface but I hinted that I was getting a little fanatical when I mentioned I had put together my own box set for Forever Changes by using a vinyl, the 2-CD 2008 set, stickers, fridge magnets, album cover pins, a T-shirt folded, my Love boxer briefs... whoops! (okay I made that one up), any Love trinkets I could find on Ebay for a few bucks. Then I bought a white box and put it in and used a poster as a cover. By then I knew my mind and I didn't belong together. I finished up the thread later in 2016 but was still looking at EBay. After scanning EBay non-stop that year, of all people I bumped into David P. Housden, the creator of the Castle fanzine. He had listed a set of 10 old Castle fanzines from the 1990s. I thought it was a good deal and I went for it since I'd never seen them on EBay before.

I got them and David sent me an e-mail saying he had another 10 if I'd like them. I said 'sure go for it.' So I got 20 in total. I remember opening up one of the two boxes of 10 and there was a bunch from the 2000s that had a lot of info about Lee's comeback and all the live shows he did from 2002-2005. I read through and thought it was great and learned but by the end of going through them, I was exhausted with Love. I overdid it and I finally decided to take a breather.

Moving on to 2020, all this craziness happened with the world and I had some downtime. So I figured if I did some project, it would take my mind off all the troubles around. Then our fellow poster White Dog came on to the 4 year old thread and mentioned that some of the photos I used were taken by him. That's when I started toying with the idea of doing a Love book because if he was willing to let me use a photo for cover, I'd might do it. When I asked, he was very kind like and agreed to.

The final thing that pushed me over the edge and committed was when I realized - it took four years to realize - 'Hey wait a minute! I had TWO Castle fanzine boxes. Doh! They were in storage so I go and get the unopened second box. I opened it and it was like I dove down to the bottom of the sea and pulled up a treasure chest and sat on the beach looking at gold. It had so much research and all kinds of things I'd never seen on the internet nor the Love books that had already came out. That's what made me go for this. The Castle's came from the 1990s and they had a lot more difficult info to find then the 2000s fanzines. So I was inspired and added my own research and from spring to now I wrote 400 pages (okay not really, I had a bunch of the writing done already but it sounded better that way he he) that I've since started editing down some. I owe a lot of thanks to David P. Housden.

Maybe my mind and I are still not together but I kept on rolling and now it's almost done and I might as well finish it.

So that's my VH1 Behind the Book episode LOL- when the real Forever Changes box came out, I finally disassembled my custom box.

 

EXCELLENT! I have to have this! : )

 

Hi @WilliamWes I'm really looking forward to your book. Will there be a hardback/paperback issue or Kindle issue or both?

Good luck and I hope it's a great success, Richie.

 

Thank you both, your checks are in the mail. He he No really, the positive feedback from everybody has been great and it's inspiring. The book covers the big albums big time and then gives more time to the lesser known material along with covering and ranking all the live albums, compilations, etc. I called it a 'guide' cause it really goes through everything up through this year. So for a casual fan, they'll get huge chunks of info and analysis of the first 3 albums that get a lot of the fame, and for the hardcore fan they can read summaries on all of Bryan MacLean's solo albums and even Snoopy Pfisterer's one album along with everything released. The story wraps around the music and along with the story is how their reputation grew over the years from LA fame to National Registry fame. It's been a lot of fun.

 

will it be available as an ebook? and, will it cover up to ALs death?

 

thanks for this!...Love is a favorite band of mine for many years...I'm sure it will do well!

 

Sounds interesting and a good read

 

Count me in - glad there will be more to read about one of my favorite bands!

 

Hey Richie Richie, nice to see you again, it's going to be released in paperback and Kindle. There won't be a hardcover or audio book of it though. So glad to hear from you and everyone, and thank you. I think I'll sit around all day and cry happy tears when this book is done. It's funny, I just don't get tired of the music - glad other Love fans feel the same so I know I'm not nuts. He he