If you ask Uncle Sam, “Hey Joe” was written by Billy Roberts, who copyrighted the song in 1962 but never recorded it.
Some people believe Roberts based “Hey Joe” on “Baby, Please Don’t Go to Town,” a song written by his girlfriend, Niela Horn Miller. (You can click here to listen to her recording of that song and judge for yourself whether Roberts stole “Hey Joe” from her.)
Billy Roberts
David Crosby of the Byrds somehow heard about the song, and Bryan MacLean – who later became a member of Love – learned about it when he was a roadie for the Byrds. Both the Byrds and Love eventually recorded “Hey Joe” using the lyrics copyrighted by Roberts – including the lines quoted above.
According to Johnny Echols, Love’s guitarist, the Leaves – a garage band from Southern California who Echols was friendly with – asked him for the lyrics after hearing Love perform the song. Echols decided to play a trick on the Leaves and told them the song began with “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” rather than “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that money in your hand?”
The Leaves used “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” when they recorded the song in November 1965. The group didn’t like the way that recording sounded, so they recorded a second version of the song a couple of months later. That version flopped, but the Leaves didn’t give up. They recorded it one more time, and that version made it to #31 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.
Jimi Hendrix supposedly became interested in recording the song when he heard Tim Rose’s cover on a jukebox in New York City. I have to wonder about that because Rose’s version used the “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that money in your hand?” line, while began his cover with “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” That seems odd.
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“Hey Joe” was subsequently covered by dozens of other recording artists.
Click here to listen to the Byrds’ 1966 recording of “Hey Joe,” which David Crosby later characterized as “a mistake.” (No sh*t, Sherlock!)
Click here to listen to the Standells’ 1966 version of “Hey Joe.”
Click here to listen to the Music Machine’s 1966 cover of “Hey Joe.”
Click here to hear Johnny Halladay’s 1967 French-language recording of the song.
Click here if you want to listen to Patti Smith’s virtually unlistenable 1974 cover of “Hey Joe.”
And click here to watch a video of 7273 guitarists setting a Guinness record by playing “Hey Joe” in Wroclaw, Poland.
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Click here to listen to Love’s recording of “Hey Joe,” which was released on that group’s eponymous debut album in March 1966. (Bryan MacLean is the lead vocalist on that track instead of the band usual lead singer, Arthur Lee.)
Love’s Forever Changes, which was released in 1967, is one of the few albums – perhaps the only album – that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
The “Forever Changes” album cover
Yet Forever Changes peaked at #154 on the Billboard 200 album chart in February 1968.
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Here are some of the other albums that were listed ahead of Forever Changes on the Billboard 200 that week:
#153 – Clear Light (by Clear Light)
#152 – A Kind of Hush (John Davidson)
#138 – Valley of the Dolls soundtrack
#129 – Encore! More of the Concert Sound of Henry Mancini
#125 – The Best of Herman’s Hermits, Volume III
[NOTE: The only two songs I recognize that are on that album are “There’s a Kind of a Hush (All Over the World)” and “No Milk Today,” which both suck donkey d*ck.]
#122 – Bill Cosby Sings/Silver Throat
#104 – Hawaiian Album (Ray Coniff)
#101 – Groovin’ with the Soulful Strings
#92 – My Cup Runneth Over (Ed Ames)
#62 – Please Love Me Forever (Bobby Vinton)
#46 – Snoopy and His Friends (Royal Guardsmen)
#41 – Clambake (Elvis Presley)
#12 – It Must Be Him (Vikki Carr)
#10 – The Last Waltz (Engelbert Humperdinck)
I could go on, but I’ve probably beaten that dead horse quite enough for one night.
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Actually, let me beat it just a bit more and make absotively, posilutely sure it’s dead.
Can you believe there were no fewer than eight different Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass albums listed ahead of Forever Changes that week?
One of the eight
(I like “The Lonely Bull” and “A Taste of Honey” as much as the next guy, but EIGHT albums ranked ahead of Forever Changes?)
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Love’s biggest hit single, “7 and 7 Is” – which is the quintessential stick-of-dynamite record – topped out at #33 on the BillboardHot 100. It was the group’s only top 40 “hit.” (No Love single ever charted in the UK.)
Today’s featured song was the B-side of “Alone Again Or,” the only single from Forever Changes to chart in the U.S. – if you can call peaking at the #123 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 “charting.”
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Love’s admirers included Robert Plant, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors.
Arthur Lee with Jimi Hendrix
“Love was one of the hottest things I ever saw,” Ray Manzarek of the Doors told an interviewer in 2017. “The most influential band in L.A. at the time, and we all thought it was just a matter of time before Love conquered America.”
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“A House Is Not a Motel” (and most of the other songs on Forever Changes) was written by the group’s lead singer, Arthur Lee. Lee was all of 22 years old when the album was released. (He died of leukemia in 2006, when he was 61 years old.)
A lot of musicians and critics thought Arthur Lee was a genius. I hope Lee believed them, and that the praise they lavished on him made up at least in part for the total lack of public recognition and commercial success that he achieved in his lifetime.
Lee and Love are clearly underrated. In fact, Love may be the most underrated group of all time.
Click here to read what 2 or 3 lines had to say about “You Set the Scene,” the best song on Forever Changes. (“A House Is Not a Motel” is tied for second place with all the other songs on the album,)
Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:
I'm not sure I ever heard "What You're Doing" until I listened to Love, a remix-mashup album of Beatles music by legendary Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his son, Giles.
Love was created to be the soundtrack for a Cirque du Soleil show of the same name, which opened in June 2006 in a specially-built theater at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas and has been running there ever since.
Here's a trailer for Cirque du Soleil's Love that should give you an idea of what the show is like:
The Love album is almost 79 minutes long and incorporates elements from 130 Beatles songs. Some of its tracks consist primarily of a single Beatles song, always remixed and often shortened, but sounding relatively similar to the original.
But there are several tracks (like this one) that splice together two or three songs, throw in brief snippets from other songs -- perhaps just a single guitar chord -- and are more accurately described as mashups, although they differ in significant respects from the music created by mashup artists like Girl Talk or Super Mash Bros. (The mashups in Love aren't quite as mashed up as most regular mashups are.)
While this track is titled "Drive My Car/The Word/What You're Doing," the actual order is "Drive My Car/What You're Doing/The Word."
The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas
Things kick off with a verse and chorus from "Drive My Car." The verse is relatively unaltered, but the chorus is enhanced with some "Savoy Truffle" horns.
Next comes part of the guitar solo from "Taxman," which segues almost seamlessly into the guitar solo from "Drive My Car." (One reviewer called it a "sleight-of-hand edit," and that is a very apt description.) Fifty seconds into the song, you're ready for the second verse of "Drive My Car," but instead you get the first verse of "What You're Doing" -- once again, the transition is almost seamless.
At about 1:23 if the track, there's a brief drums-and-handclaps bridge that drops us into the middle of Rubber Soul's "The Word." We get another taste of those "Savoy Truffle" horns before the track fades to black less than two minutes after it begins.
Here's a little background on "What You're Doing." It was released in the United States in 1965. It led off the second side of Beatles VI, which was actually the Beatles' seventh Capitol Records album. (The group had previously released two other albums on other labels in the U.S.)
Beatles VI is a real mishmash of an album -- it included covers of songs by Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, and Lieber and Stoller, and several originals that had been released in the UK the previous year. The only really well-known Lennon-McCartney song on the album is "Eight Days a Week."
Love is an album that any Beatles fan should own. Unlike covers of Beatles songs recorded by other artists, you're getting the real McCoy here -- but a little different from what you're used to hearing. The majority of the tracks are more remix than mashup, and much of the remixing is relatively subtle.
Sir George Martin with his son, Giles
But just about every remixed song sounds better to me than the original. Perhaps that's because a sophisticated producer like Martin has more electronic tools at his command these days than he did 40-odd years ago.
Or maybe it's because we've heard the originals so many times that even a subtly different mix sounds fresh.
Here's "Drive My Car/The Word/What You're Doing":
Here's a link you can use to buy the Love CD from Amazon:
A few weeks ago, I described another song as "a stick of dynamite," a phrase I borrowed from a client of mine, who used it to describe one of his wildly successful infomercials. (Actually, he used it to describe all his infomercials, whether they were profitable or not.)
This song goes that song one better. It's not just a stick of dynamite, it's an effing ATOMIC BOMB!
I say that because the song's climax is the mother of all simulated explosions. The sound is said to have been created by a band member dropping or kicking a reverb unit. Regardless of how they created that sound, it worked.
Arthur Lee
The late Arthur Lee, the frontman and primary songwriter for the band Love, is a card-carrying member of the Association of Underappreciated Musical Geniuses. Like Alex Chilton of Big Star and others of that ilk, Lee was a cult figure who was appreciated by his fellow musicians and some of the critics, but never got his due from the public at large.
Lee was born in 1945 and formed his first group while he was still in high school. He wrote a number of songs for other performers in the early 1960s – an unknown guitar player named Jimi Hendrix played on one of those records – and formed a folk-rock band called the Grass Roots (which had to change its name to Love) in 1965.
Love played in a number of small clubs in Hollywood before getting a gig at the legendary Whiskey a Go Go club on the Sunset Strip in L.A. That led to a recording contract with Elektra Records.
The Whiskey a Go Go (circa 1970)
The Doors, who were playing the same clubs as Love, signed with Elektra at about the same time and were far more successful than Love in terms of fame and fortune. But as much as I like the Doors, I think Arthur Lee and Love's music is far more original and compelling.
Love's eponymous (!) debut album featured Burt Bacharach's "My Little Red Book," which was a minor hit single for the group in 1966. Shortly after that, Love released "7 And 7 Is," which made it to #33 on the Billboard "Hot 100" – their highest-charting single ever.
I think this song deserved to be a #1 hit, but I have to admit that I'm surprised it got as high as #33. This was 1966, folks – the #1 single of that year was "Ballad of the Green Berets," by Sgt. Barry Sadler. Other big hits from 1966 included "Born Free" by pianist Roger Williams, Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," and the retro novelty tune "Winchester Cathedral."
Like "Eight Miles High" by the Byrds – a band that Lee greatly admired – "7 And 7 Is" sounds like nothing else from that era. It's folk rock, psychedelic, and protopunk all at once.
The music is as intense and propulsive as anything recorded before or since. Just as you settle into the two-chord guitar pattern and the repeated sixteenth-note drum figure, there's an abrupt shift to an exaggerated one-two-three, one-two-three rhythm in the last measure of each verse. (It's when the lyrics go "Oop-ip-ip, oop-ip-ip" or whatever.)
It's kind of like playing tag on a summer evening in a friend's backyard when you were a kid. You're running along at full speed and suddenly the clothesline catches you right in the neck. Your bottom half keeps running for a second after your top half comes to a sudden halt and you go ass over teakettle (or perhaps vice versa). The next thing you know, you're lying on your back and asking yourself WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED???
"7 And 7 Is" was included on Love's 1967 album, Da Capo. Later that year, the group released its masterpiece, Forever Changes, a genre-defying album that has a much softer sound than "7 And 7 Is." (Lee's singing style on Forever Changes is often compared to that of Johnny Mathis.)
I wrote about "You Set the Scene," one of the songs on Forever Changes, in 2010. It is a gorgeous song – it and "7 And 7 Is" couldn't be more different. If you missed that post, please click here to listen to "You Set the Scene" -- you won't be sorry.
Forever Changes was recorded in only 64 hours. Love was already falling apart when the album was released, and its commercial failure was probably the group's coup de grace.
It eventually became recognized as one of the greatest albums ever recorded. In 2006, one critic wrote that it is "the ultimate example of a record that might not find its listenership right away, but eventually comes to be appreciated as a timeless masterwork."
Forever Changes is routinely included in top-100-albums-of-all-time compilations. One critic argued it was the greatest single album ever recorded:
The Beatles are the best and most influential act of the rock era, but even their best work – the trilogy of Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's – falls short of Forever Changes. [It is a] dark, innovative and melancholy masterpiece . . .
Here's what another writer had to say about it:
Inside these songs are ideas about guitar soloing that Lee's friend Jimi Hendrix rode into the stratosphere; hints of the mysticism and transcendence that became the calling card of the Doors; and the seeds of goth, orchestral pop, and other subgenres. Few records of the era cast such a wide (and still lengthening) shadow.
That's all well and good, but these encomia came a little late for Love's members, who never recorded together again. Two of them become drug addicts – neither of those two lived to see the year 2000 – while another moved to New York City and became a studio musician. Lee put together a reconstituted version of Love in 1969, but none of the new band's albums got much attention (despite the appearance of Jimi Hendrix on one of them).
Arthur Lee in 2006
Lee didn't do much with music during the 1980s. He re-emerged in 1992, releasing a new album and touring in Europe. But he spent 1996 through 2001 in prison for illegal possession of a firearm.
A couple of years after his release from prison, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. There were a number of benefit concerts to raise money to pay his medical bills – one in New York in 2006 featured Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Ian Hunter (Mott the Hoople), Nils Lofgren (E Street Band), and others.
But despite aggressive treatment (including three rounds of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant), Lee died in a Memphis hospital in August 2006. He was 61.
"7 And 7 Is" has been covered by Alice Cooper, Rush, and the Ramones, among others. Cooper's version is very odd. Rush really has no business doing this song. (Rush may not have any business doing any song, now that I think about it.) The Ramones' cover isn't bad – I like the way they end the song immediately after the simulated explosion (unlike the original) – but there's really no point to anyone covering "7 And 7 Is." There's no chance it will come close the the Arthur Lee and Love original.
Here's "7 And 7 Is":
Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:
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