Arthur Lee and Love – "You Set the Scene" (1967)

You look so lovely

You with the same old smile

Stay for awhile

[NOTE: Arthur Lee and Love's 1967 Forever Changes belongs on pop music's Mt. Olympus along with Pet Sounds and a very few other near-perfect albums.  It's lovely from start to finish, but "You Set the Scene" – which closes the album – is particularly breathtaking.  What follows is a lightly-edited version of a 2010 post about "You Set the Scene" – I was tempted to edit it much more severely after I read it, but we eschew all temptations to rewrite history at 2 or 3 lines.  Once a post is published, our policy is to leave it alone – even if it produces douche chills upon re-reading.]

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I started writing this one night just after I finished dinner.  These days, that means I've had a glass of red wine – just following doctor's orders, of course. 

As the philosopher said, "In vino, veritas."  So perhaps I was a little more uninhibited and unguarded than I usually am when I started to write this.

Especially because the glass that night was not the usual six ounces, but more like eight – maybe even nine.  (I'm driving to Cape Cod tomorrow for a well-deserved vacation, and I needed to finish off the magnum of Barefoot shiraz I opened a couple of nights earlier before I hit the road.  Waste not, want not!)  

The extra vino would have meant some extra veritas if I had finished the post that night.  But I didn't, so this has a little less veritas than it might have.  That's probably just as well.  

Anyway . . .

I listened to this song while I was biking last weekend.  The lines quoted above brought to mind a number of women I knew in high school (some well, some barely at all), but hadn't seen for  many years until recently.  This is my little tribute to all those lovely girls of 40 years ago who are now what the French call femmes d'un certain age – "women of a certain age" – and still lovely.

When I see one of those women, I don't just see her as she is now – I see her as she was 40 years ago as well.  She's really the same person deep down inside, after all.

You may all look your age.  (So do we men, of course – heaven knows I do.)  But that's fine.  It's better than having plastic surgery or otherwise trying too hard to turn back the clock.  

Hey, I like women my age – actually, I much prefer them.  It's a lot easier to talk to them than women who are 20 or 30 years younger, and they really do look just as good – they look different than younger women, certainly, but that's OK.  It would be awful if all women were lovely in exactly the same way.

One final thought before we go to the music.  I was absolutely clueless about women when I was in high school.  Actually, that's an overstatement – I wasn't completely clueless, just mostly clueless.  I really would love to go back 40 years and do some things differently.  Knowing me, of course, one chance to go back and follow a road not taken wouldn't be enough.  I'm guessing I might need a dozen or so do-overs to get it right.

Aren't you glad I waited until I was perfectly sober to write this post?  Just think how much more incoherent it might have been if I had sat down at the keyboard immediately after pouring that supersized glass of red wine down my throat.

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A brief word about the music.  Arthur Lee and Love are one of my favorite groups of all time – eccentric, eclectic, and wonderfully all over the place.  They are everything you want from a sixties band.

And Arthur Lee was everything you want from the frontman of a band like Love – he was Jim Morrison (the Doors were big fans) before Jim Morrison was Jim Morrison.

Or maybe he was Jimi Hendrix before Jimi Hendrix was Jimi Hendrix.  (Lee claimed that Hendrix stole his style of dress from the Love frontman.)

Arthur Lee and Jimi Hendrix

Whichever it was, you've gotta love a guy who wears glasses with one lens tinted red and the other one tinted blue in order to purposely screw up his vision and see the world like no one else sees it.

"You Set the Scene" is one of Arthur Lee and Love's more complex songs in terms of both the music and the lyrics.  It's really two songs in one.

Click here to listen to "You Set the Scene."

Click here for a stunning live performance of the song.

And click on the link below to buy "You Set the Scene" from iTunes: