On June 9th. sensing someone was ripping-off my idea for a musical, I sent my friends in New York the following e-mail.

“Hey Chris and Stefan! I am back on track, and got our hit tune! I watched the Tony awards and they suck. They made a musical about Rocky.  Stefan, you know folks in NY. Sell our musical. A three-way split.

Cute and Disorderly

Watching the ‘Chalk Graffiti Is Harmless’ video, and seeing Alley Valkyrie doing her Mary Martin pose under the Broadway sign, I think I have been inspired to write the hit song of my musical ‘My Big Beautiful Blue Bicycle.

Muse of the Love Dance

Last night on CBS news I saw aspects of my idea for a Broadway Show come to fruition. ‘Holler if Ya Hear Me’ is inspired by Tupac Shakur’s rap music. ‘Love Dance’ would be a tribute to the music of the rock group, Love. Some claim Arthur Lee invented Rap. However, I consider James Joyce, Antonin Artaud, Mississippi Delta pickers, and Ballad Singers. Bryan Maclean’s ‘Hey Joe’ is inspired by the ‘Ballad of Little Sadie’ that my friend and I listened to at the New Balladeer in West Los Angeles. Bryan was doing a Bad-ass White Ballad Boy involved in gun-play. Consider the guns of the Civil War, the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Folks Singers of Greenwich Village.

“A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French chanson balladée or ballade, which were originally “dancing songs”. Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of the British Isles from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad

The producer of Holler suggests the cost of a ticket will be around $200 dollars. What he is going for is a Hip Hop Black Limo Scene. In Oakland, Huey Newton opposed the Bling-Bling Black Pimp Scene going down at a Drive-in on McArthur. The in depth discussion about black-bullying in Oakland is worthy of a book because it took in the Hippie Love and Peace scene who were Dead End Kids, too.

Being a Punk in America is not a black invention. Here is the group ‘The Leaves’ doing Hey Joe. Here are the grandchildren of bad-ass European immigrants, the Dead End Kids who have found Black Blues Music down where the road comes to an end. This is Dusty Shack Music to go with Ash Can Art.

The off-Broadway hit ‘Fela’ was inspired by the relationship Fela had with a female Black Panther he considered his Guru, his teacher. Huey went to Oakland High and learned the power of words in his English class. Words had empowered the white man, why not the black man? Tupac Shakur’s mother was a Black Panther. The Panthers, along with leaders of the Hippie Peace and Love Movement, were oppressed by white men with guns, who were severely oppressing and murdering the People of Vietnam, a nation that honors it poets.

http://rapgenius.com/2pac-holler-if-ya-hear-me-lyrics#note-123681

Holler is influenced by the Oakland’s Black Panthers appearing on the Oakland Courthouse steps carrying rifles. My first girlfriend, Marilyn, went to live in France with her radical sister who later disappeared for seven years. M’s mother wrote a letter to Eldridge Cleaver after seeing him on Pat Robertson’s show. Eldridge found her.

Here is a photo of M on the boat to France with Jeff Pasternak, the son of Joe Pasternak, who made musicals for Hollywood.

hear me – PUMP PUMP if you’re pissed
To the sell-outs, livin it up
One way or another you’ll be givin it up, huh
I guess cause I’m black born
I’m supposed to say peace, sing songs, and get capped on
But it’s time for a new plan, BAM!
I’ll be swingin like a one man, clan
Here we go, turn it up, don’t stop
To my homies on the block gettin dropped by cops
I’m still around for ya
Keepin my sound underground for ya

‘Love Dance’ morphed into ‘My Beautiful Blue Bicycle’ after I ran into
Belle Burch and Alley Valkyrie, who together are the embodiment of Lucia Joyce, a modern dancer and muse to her father. When I learned my friend, Stefan Eins, had moved into the Woodstock Hotel, I had him come in as Fred Astaire, who is another candidate for the inventor of Rap. Fred is a product of Jazz, Art Deco and Dada-Surrealism. Stefan is the founder of Fashion Moda that recognized Graffiti as a work of art, and promoted Hip Hop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_Moda

“Fashion Moda was a major force in establishing new venues. In 1980, Fashion Moda collaborated with the downtown progressive artists organization Colab (Collaborative Projects Inc.) on “The Times Square Show” (June 1980), and Now Gallery which introduced uptown graffiti-related art to downtown art and punk scenes.”

In 1968, Stefan’s muse, Chris Wandel, and I lived in a ten bedroom Victorian in the ghetto of Oakland with the Loading Zone, a mixed-race Acid-Rock Blues Band that played at the Fillmore. On any given day we thought and talked about how to end the War in Vietnam. The Zone was Berkeley’s band and was expected to be reverent to the cause, many causes. The Loading Zone spawned The Tower of Power.

Here are the Dead End Kids. I was the artist in residence struggling to render what was pertinent. There was death and danger all around us. We were bad. We had a Mafia whacko living with us from New York named Max. The Zone jammed with old Oakland Blues guys that heard we were in the hood. A musical about a Hippie House of Flower Power is called for. There is a Hippie Museum in Vancouver. Here is Gustav Nagel, who gets my vote for the first Hippie.

Gustav Nagel – The First Hippie?

I lived in another commune with the two daughters of Jirayr Zorthian who at first was a Ashcan Artist inspired by Thomas Hart Benton. Jirayr was a good friend of Jazz Artist, Charlie Parker, who jammed at the ranch, where in 1965 I dropped LSD and watched beautiful young women bounce on the trampaline to ‘Gloria’ that had just come to America. True Freedom is not found in dodging bullets. Jirayr survived the Armenian massacre, and went skinny-dipping with a Jazz legend.

Last night I told Chris about this post on 2Pac and she told me she loves his music, she digging his lyrics when her daughter lived with her, and played his record. Chris is the Muse of Ashcan Art, she living in the Village for forty years. I call her ‘The Godmother’. She was a friend of Bill Graham, and spent many evenings backstage at the Fillmore. Jirayr is titled ‘The Last Bohemian’.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2014

The Dead End Kids were a group of young actors from New York who appeared in Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway play Dead End in 1935. In 1937 producer Samuel Goldwyn brought all of them to Hollywood and turned the play into a film. They proved to be so popular that they continued to make movies under various monikers, including the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys, until 1958.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_End_Kids

Arthur Lee invented rap. Listen also to “Bummer in the Summer” from the same album. He also invented jazz fusion and punk among other things. I cannot truly imagine any rock artist who can be compared to Arthur other than John Lennon. Play a few especially outrageous Love songs for someone who’s never heard of them and watch the reaction.

stefan
To Me
Jan 20
Hi,
The picture of your Muse looks like Christine. Your email – to me – below refers to Stefan and Chris (!), I thought the end of your autobiography might be you actually visiting New York and joining me and Chris having a magical time. How about it? After all: you found your muse! Tootle-oo!
Stefan Eins

Fashion Moda

Belle Burch
To Me

Apr 19 at 9:41 PM

Hell yes I want to see a dance show on Broadway. I’ve always wanted to see a Broadway show. I’ve been in NYC twice but failed both times to get overpriced tickets to any Broadway shows enough in advance to make one. Why do you ask?

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 6:59 PM, John Ambrose wrote:

Belle, my big project in Love Dance, a Broadway musical based upon the music of LOVE. Bryan was my best friend in HS. He was a roadie for the Byrds when he was 17. We hung out in a coffee shop in LA in 1963.

I about choked when you told me your were a dancer! Belle! You ring all my belles and set off all my whistles. It is just the way it is.

I want to see the hippie dance extravaganza on Broadway! How about you?

Jon

My Big Beautiful Blue Bicycle

https://rosamondpress.com/?s=cyber+bully

Cute and Disorderly

by Jon Presco

Copyright 2014

Hey you sanitzing
dehumanizing cop on the beat
You can’t tell me what to do
where to go
and how to brush my teeth
because
I’m Cute……and Disorderly!
I got dimples on my butte and cheeks
I know every ragamuffin on these streets
Hey Mr. Straighty
are you checking out my tiny fairy fanny
You better watch out
because
I’m Cute……and Disorderly
If I want to take a puke
in a city planter
Or piss in some dark alley
What is it to you
you dumb-ass yuppie?
I can do anything I want
because
I’m cute…..and disorderly!

Lucia Joyce

Above is a photo of Marilyn Reed with her half-sister, Shauna, who gave Marilyn the black doll she is holding. Shauna would live with Carlos Moore and help him write ‘Fela – The Bitch of a Life’. Fela was a charismatic African performer who was befriended by the Black Panthers. My daughter’s half-brother was fathered by a Black Panther. He named his son after Malcolm X.

On our third date, Marilyn took me to see the movie ‘Black Orpheus’. My first girlfriend was introducing to me the black culture she was exposed to. This culture would change music in America, forever! The first album I ever bought was a Bo Diddly album. I danced before I went to school, and when I came home. I shop-lifted an album called ‘African Drums’. I choreographed my own moves. I watched the black dancers in High School. I invented dancing without a partner. When I did the Pony, my peers formed a circle around me to watch. One day I put on Balero and danced for Marilyn.

Here I am with the son of Carlos Moore who wrote ‘Fela’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur

His mother, Afeni Shakur (born Alice Faye Williams), and his father, Billy Garland, were active members of the Black Panther Party in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The infant was born a month after his mother was acquitted of more than 150 charges of “Conspiracy against the United States government and New York landmarks” in the New York “Panther 21” court case.[25][26]
“On December 29, 2013, I posted this on the Facebook of Charles J. Shield who wrote ‘And so it goes’ the biography of Kurk Vonnegut, my idol…..

“If Lucia had her way, she would go with a Dance Drama, a tale of how a classic Anglo-Saxon novel is assimilated into the Hippie Dance Music Culture. The Grateful Dead will do Finnagan’s Wake, and, here come the Lucettes! Turn down volume on India dance and leave Love song.”
The full title of Vonneguts most famous novel is ‘Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death’. I then introduce then idea Antonin Artaud would befriend Lucia, take peyote, and do a peyote dance together. Here is the apex of the Cruel and Absurd Theatre.

Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_Joyce

To Be Young, Besieged and Black

‘Holler if Ya Hear Me,’ Inspired by Tupac Shakur’s Rap

By CHARLES ISHERWOODJUNE 19, 2014

The beats are sweet, and the words often have an electric charge in “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” a new Broadway musical inspired by the lyrics of the popular but troubled rapper Tupac Shakur, who was shot and killed at 25 in Las Vegas in 1996. Unfortunately, much else about this ambitious show, which opened on Thursday at the Palace Theater, feels heartfelt but heavy-handed, as it punches home its message with a relentlessness that may soon leave you numb to the tragic story it’s trying to tell.

Saul Williams in a scene from “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” a new Broadway musical that weaves songs and poetry from the rapper Tupac Shakur into its story.

‘Holler if Ya Hear Me’ Uses Songs by Tupac ShakurJUNE 4, 2014

Written by Todd Kreidler and directed by Kenny Leon, a Tony winner this year for the revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” the show admirably yanks the jukebox musical, which has mostly been mired in the hit parade of the baby-boomer years, into the last decade of the 20th century. It was then that Shakur’s raw, propulsive music struck a powerful chord, especially among disaffected black (and white) youth living in poverty amid explosive violence, while America was supposedly firing on all economic cylinders.

Tonya Pinkins plays a former drug addict and the mother of a drug dealer, played by Christopher Jackson, in Todd Kreidler’s “Holler if Ya Hear Me.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

But while Shakur’s songs retain their scorching ability to paint pictures with words, describing the challenges faced by Americans living in urban slums then (and now, when the show is set), they tend to cover a limited range of themes: the diminished opportunities for young blacks; the unholy trinity of poverty, drugs and violence; the enduring strength of black women. (Mostly not included are Shakur’s braggadocio-laden celebrations of what he called the “thug life.”)

Perhaps as a result, Mr. Kreidler’s book falls into a few predictable grooves, while the characters never emerge as more than thinly drawn types: the ex-con trying to shake his criminal past; the drug dealer who harbors a deep affection for his mother; the girlfriend who looks on with a mixture of hope and despair; the hotheaded would-be gangster bent on avenging a friend’s killing. (No one character is meant to represent Shakur himself.)

Drawing on themes that Shakur rapped about in his scabrous, four-letter-word-filled lyrics (no one has taken a kid-friendly Magic Marker to them, I’m glad to report), the musical attempts to draw a vision of black life in urban America that acknowledges the danger, the violence and the self-destruction but also the hope, the courage and the potential for transcendence. To this end, it employs more than a dozen of Shakur’s songs and a couple of his poems. But the lyrical density of rap — in words per minute, many of the songs are off the charts — makes an uneasy fit for theatrical presentation, since the sizzling phrases fly by almost before you can grasp their meaning.

The musical’s obvious antecedent is “West Side Story,” the 1957 classic about rival street gangs in Manhattan. “Holler” is set in an unnamed city in the Midwest, but it, too, focuses on the violence that eventually erupts between two free-form gangs (one unseen) competing for supremacy. The unofficial leader of one is Vertus (Christopher Jackson), who sees drug dealing as the rare economic opportunity available to him. When his former friend John (Saul Williams) is released from jail, Vertus tries to give him a leg up by cutting him into a big deal.

Chastened and embittered by his years in prison, John has decided to go straight. He opts for a low-wage job at the car-salvage company where Vertus’s brother, Benny (Donald Webber Jr.), works, which is run by Griffy (Ben Thompson), the lone white character in the musical. Griffy and Benny have a plan to head out to California and start their own business, but in a somewhat blurrily staged sequence (following the song “Dopefiend’s Diner,” about the accidental shooting of a girl), we learn that Benny, glimpsed only briefly in the show’s opening scene, has been shot and killed by members of a rival gang.

An excerpt from the number “California Love” from the new Broadway musical based on the lyrics of the rapper Tupac Shakur,

The remainder of the musical depicts the divergent reactions to Benny’s death. Each of the central male characters, who also include Benny’s aggrieved best friends, Anthony (Dyllon Burnside) and Darius (Joshua Boone), fights a war within his soul that pits the impulse for revenge — and the tug of violent nihilism that spreads like an unseen poison through the neighborhood — against the knowledge that more killing cannot salve the wound of Benny’s loss. From the sidelines, the two principal female characters — Corinne (a vibrant Saycon Sengbloh), John’s ex- and Vertus’s current girlfriend, and Mrs. Weston (the veteran Tonya Pinkins, in strong voice), Vertus’s ex-addict mother — both urge the men to forsake the dead ends of drugs and guns.

Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.

Greg Presco: My other grandmother was a friend of Joaquin Miller and lived up the road from Gertrude Stein. Her best friend was an Isadora Duncan freak. https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/…/viola-duncan-of…/

Greg Presco: Finding herself stuck between two droll and dusty bookends, two avant guard writers who expect at least one avant absurd poem from her, Lucia finds her breakout moment when she meets Antonin Artaud at the Moulin Rouge. Back at his garret they do mescaline together, in the form of Peyote buds Antonin has brought back from his trip to the States where he witnessed the Ghost Dance. Teaching her some of the moves, Lucia goes into a trance and into the future. In her vision quest she finds herself on the dance floor of the Filmore West gyrating to the Grateful Dead. The first Dead Head is born!

“Messianic madman, founder of the Theater of Cruelty (a limiting misnomer), Antonin Artaud’s most immediate impact was on Genet, Brecht, Beckett, etc. But he continually searched for a suprareality far older and larger than the state of “”conscious chaos”” and triviality he saw in modern times. In this small book, based on a journey in the mountains of Mexico to an inaccessible tribe who “”live as if they were already dead,”” and through the peyote rite they practiced, Artaud found many of the transcendent concepts he had earlier articulated–the Great Ancient Myths he here relates to Plato, the “”no God”” but Male and Female principles in Nature (which he certainly, castrated man that he was, never found in life), even if later at the end of his peyote transfiguration there will be mention of both the doctrine of Grace and Jesus-Christ-Peyote. Artaud wrote much of this, with additional later comments, in the various Maisons de Sante where he spent his last years. He had always been deranged, and prefiguring Laing, he commented earlier in The Theater and Its Double, “”everything that disturbs the mind without causing it to lose its equilibrium is a moving means of expressing the innate pulsations of life.”” And those innate pulsations–expressed, for example, through motion and sound, by “”act and perpetual emanation””–were his essential contribution. Here on the via dolorosa, further heightened by peyote, there were also the emblems (“”trefoils, spears, crosses””) of the penitential ritual and symbolism so much a part of this demon-ridden, metaphysical genius “”guided by the Invisible”” toward an early death. A small but significant addition to the canon and the claque.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lee_(musician)

Muse of the Love Dance Again

Muse of the Love Dance

Love Dance 7

The Hey Joe Dance Freak-out

The Real Beat Girl

On May 10, 1964, my first girlfriend, Marilyn Godfrey, was issued a green card by the French government. She was
seventeen years of age and living with her sister, a famous French Radical, who was once married to Les McCann’s drummer, Ron Jefferson, and later would co-author the biography of Fela.
Marilyn introduced me to Les who married Charlotte, a French woman who adopted the love of my life. She was a blond cabaret singer who had a Marilyn spend the summers in her home so she could have a reprieve from her mother who was a strict Baptist who forced me to go to church and several Billy Graham Crusades. If our Love Story were to be made into a movie, than I would be the Beat Elvis who is forbidden to see my Beat girlfriend after I refused to go down on to the playing field of the LA Coliseum, and be saved.
When we broke up in April of 64, Marilyn told me her mother had forbidden me to see her again, and if I tried, I would be arrested. If I had told my mother, Rosemary, about this threat, Marie would have been dead, and Mighty Mo, a Catholic, would be rocken in prison, she doing the Jailhouse Rock to a chorus line she choreographed.
Marie and Rosemary were Madonnas in their own right. Both mothers were sinners who transferred their sins on to their beautiful children who were hopelessly in love. All we wanted was to sip tea by the fireplace in our Coffeehouse, as I sketched my Parisian Bohemian. We talked about living in France. We were very hot for one another, but, would not go all the way, because, Marie, Rosemary, and Billy Graham forbid this. While Elvis was encouraged to be sexual and free – with many women – the Beat Elvis was oppressed, hounded, then hunted down.

The Transmutation of my Muse, Rena Victoria Easton, began with an idea that I ran past Charles J. Shields about I possibly authoring the story of Lucia Joyce, the muse of her father, James Joyce, and lover of Samuel Becket who was inspired by Antonin Artaud.
“On December 29, 2013, I posted this on the Facebook of Charles J. Shield who wrote ‘And so it goes’ the biography of Kurk Vonnegut, my idol…..
“If Lucia had her way, she would go with a Dance Drama, a tale of how a classic Anglo-Saxon novel is assimilated into the Hippie Dance Music Culture. The Grateful Dead will do Finnagan’s Wake, and, here come the Lucettes! Turn down volume on India dance and leave Love song.”
The full title of Vonneguts most famous novel is ‘Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death’. I then introduce then idea Antonin Artaud would befriend Lucia, take peyote, and do a peyote dance together. Here is the apex of the Cruel and Absurd Theatre.
“In this small book, based on a journey in the mountains of Mexico to an inaccessible tribe who “”live as if they were already dead,”” and through the peyote rite they practiced, Artaud found many of the transcendent concepts he had earlier articulated–the Great Ancient Myths he here relates to Plato, the “”no God”” but Male and Female principles in Nature (which he certainly, castrated man that he was, never found in life), even if later at the end of his peyote transfiguration there will be mention of both the doctrine of Grace and Jesus-Christ-Peyote.”
Rena Easton is Montana Wildhack who lives in Montana. She is also Helen of Troy who is the embodiment of Mnemosyne who lay down with Zeus and begat the Nine Muses. For over ten years I have owned a theory that the Greeks held a poetry contest in Troy. All the great poets, porphets, and sages showed up, including King David who confounded King Saul with a riddle he recited while playing his harp. What was the nature of this riddle? I am almost a master of Robert Grave’s ‘The White Goddess’ that Rena resembles.
That Helena Rena Victoria Wildhack has a million poems stored in her head that she can recite, tells me this ancient poetry contest – is reborn! That she falls in love with Troy the cow-man from Radiant Engineering, is her final avoidance of me, her late consort, Zeus.
Rena sends Radiant Engineering a handwritten thank you, where she says;
“Troy was such a nice guy!”
“I truly appreciate your emergency service.”
On the envelope Rena Montana Mnemosyne sent me she wrote ‘Rosemond’. Was this a letter from Billy Pilgram to his friend, Eliot Rosewater, giving him divine permission to carry on the Children’s Crusade?
I do not need to be with Rena in Montana, because we go each night to our dome on the planet Tralfamadore where we work on saving the universe.
So come all ye brave-hearted warriors who have the guts to write a beautiful woman a poem. Come to Troy where Beautiful Helen is held captive. And in her head all the poems have been taken hostage. And in her womb are the nine muses waiting to be reborn.
Here’s a hint, King David created a amazing animal.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2014

Helen of High Noon

BarrosSerrano
1 month ago (edited)
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Joe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Knows_Who

The song was inspired by a woman about 18 years old named Stephanie Buffington who both Lee and Love’s guitarist Bryan MacLean had affections for.[1][2] Parts of “The Castle”, another song on Da Capo were also inspired by the same woman.[2] Love drummer Michael Stuart-Ware claims that when Lee wrote the song, Stephanie was with him but by the time the band recorded the song she was with MacLean.[2] Stuart also believes that the romantic triangle helped lead to the deterioration of the friendship between Lee and MacLean, to the point where Lee tried to expel MacLean from the band.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Zulu_Nation

The Universal Zulu Nation is an international hip hop awareness group formed and headed by hip hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa.[1]:101 Originally known simply as the Organization, it arose in the 1970s as reformed New York City gang members began to organize cultural events for youths, combining local dance and music movements into what would become known as the various elements of hip hop culture. By the 1980s, hip hop had spread globally, and the Zulu Nation has since established (autonomous) branches in Japan, France, the UK, Australia, South Korea and the Cape Flats in Cape Town South Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapping

Oh, what’s in your life, dear Stephanie?
What’s in your life for me?
Aches and pains, they cloud your sight
But tired you did, you said you did
Oh, what can I say, dear Stephanie?
Who shall I next inform?
Of love and poetry that you bring
Your eyes, your hair, your everything, yeah, uh
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Come on, come on, come on, oow
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Come on, come on, come on, come on
What am I now, dear Stephanie?
Am I you in disguise?
The words, they come so naturally
I save them all for Stephanie, yeah, uh
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Come on, come on, now, come on
Hey, all right
Talk to me all the time
From A to Z and in between
Say it sweet, all the time
All the time, yeah

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/blogs/alternate-take/arthur-lee-and-loves-essential-bootlegs-20100625

Love[edit]
Lee said when he first heard The Byrds he felt vindicated since he’d already been writing music that had a similar folk rock sound. In 1965 the Grass Roots, his folk rock unit, changed their name to Love because there was already a signed act called The Grass Roots. Several other names were considered including Bryan MacLean’s choice of Summer’s Children as well as others, such as the Asylum Choir, Dr Strangelove, Poetic Justice and the Love. The name Love was chosen after a club audience voted it the best choice. According to Barney Hoskyns’ 2001 book Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or, Manson Family member and sometime Grass Roots guitarist Bobby Beausoleil claimed that Arthur had named the band Love in honor of one of Beausoleil’s nicknames, Cupid.
Lee’s early appearances were at clubs in Hollywood. He played them all including the Brave New World, Hullabaloo, Bido Lito’s and the Sea Witch. At Bido Lito’s, a tiny hole-in-the-wall club located on a cul-de-sac known as Cosmo’s Alley, Lee first showed he had superstar potential. The Bido Lito’s audience was sometimes dotted with celebrities, including actor Sal Mineo, and rock stars Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, who would go on to collaborate with Lee on future recording projects. Lee then got the opportunity to play the larger Whisky a Go-Go on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, after which Love received a recording contract by Elektra Records.
Love’s music has been described as a mixture of folk-rock, psychedelic rock, baroque pop, Spanish-tinged pop, R&B, garage rock, and even protopunk. Lee has been regarded as “the first punk rocker” but wasn’t flattered by the phrase as he thought the term punk meant “being somebody’s bitch or something like that.”[2] Though Lee’s vocals have garnered some comparisons to Johnny Mathis, his lyrics often dwell on matters dark and vexing, but often with a wry humor. The group’s cover of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition “My Little Red Book” (first recorded by Manfred Mann for the soundtrack of What’s New, Pussycat?) received a thumbs-down from Bacharach: Love had altered the former Marlene Dietrich bandleader’s chord changes. Nonetheless the record was a Southern California hit and won Lee and Love a spot on American Bandstand.