Arthur Lee: All you need is Love

After six years in jail, one of rock's wildest children is touring again with his old songs. But Love's Arthur Lee is determined to prove he can still cut it. As he tells Tim Cumming, he's not just some old novelty act

Few rock artists carry as heavy aburden of past glories and apocryphal stories as Arthur Lee, leader of Love. In the mid-Sixties, this legendary Los Angeles group of unstable elements was a harbinger of West Coast psychedelia. The band Jim Morrison and The Doors looked up to as gods created one of the era's supreme achievements, Forever Changes, an album that continues to inspire generations of musicians and listeners, despite having barely troubled the charts in the course of its 35-year history. With devotees ranging from Robert Plant, through The Damned, to Belle and Sebastian, the band is one of rock's most resilient survivors.

By the mid-Nineties, however, its composer was facing a 12-year prison sentence for shooting off a gun during a dispute with a neighbour. Although no stranger to the courtroom, or to outlandish tales involving guns, drugs and violence – he was jailed in the Eighties for "the malicious setting of a fire" – the severity of the sentence meant the world would hear nothing from Lee for more than six years.

Five months after his release last December, he is in London for a series of rare press interviews to mark his return. Just the fact that he is alive seems a small miracle to him. "Dyin'," he says at one point, "I don't know if it would be a relief or what."

It's been a long, strange trip from the Gothic splendours of the band's Sixties-era Laurel Canyon base of operations, The Castle, to the gates of Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga. "We're all normal," he once sang, "And we want our freedom." Free at last, and back on the road, he is even considering moving to Britain from LA. "I don't have a home there," he says, "I can just pack up my bags and go."

Looking every inch the outlaw rock star, Lee carries an imposing presence and a formidable reputation before him. "I'm cooperating," he says softly, "... this time." The stories of Lee's non-cooperation are legion, from refusing to tour outside LA in the Sixties, to pulling a knife on former bandmate Bryan MacLean a decade later, on stage at the Whisky A Go-Go. "I haven't had a manager in I couldn't tell you when," he admits later, "But nobody's going to be let down, unless I break my legs or something, or some freak stuff." Fuelled as he is by a missionary zeal for his new band and his music, what he calls his "time away" may well turn out to have been his resurrection.

The focus of cultish devotion for decades, Love – and Lee in particular – have always been surrounded by rumour and mystery, by tales of death and disappearances. Garage punks par excellence, spikily aggressive and spookily laid-back, the band included the future Manson family murderer, Bobby Beausoleil, on guitar in one of its early line-ups. In those days, the band were known as The Grassroots, with Lee and his childhood friend, Johnny Echols, soon joined by ex- Byrds roadie Bryan MacLean. With the chunky bass sound of Ken Forssi, and Snoopy Pfisterer taking over on drums from a heroin-addicted Don Conka – hard drugs came early to Love – the classic line-up was in place. They recorded their first album over four days in January 1966, its cover depicting not only rock's first racially-mixed group, but the West Coast's archetypal hippie look, one that would soon be duplicated on city streets around the world.

Lee has declared: "I was born in Da Capo," referring to the band's second album, released early in 1967. The album was dominated by the 19-minute Revelation, but cherished more for the Byzantine, shifting structures of songs such as Que Vida, or the arcane punk thrash of 7 & 7 Is. It also revealed Lee's unrivalled genius for combining musical opposites – garage punk, easy listening, acidic psychedelia, Baroque harpsichord – to create an entirely new musical entity. The producer Harvey Kubinik dubbed it: "Dance music for the mind, cerebral, both musically and lyrically." Lee's love of jazz and classical forms stood out as clearly as his early debt to The Byrds and The Rolling Stones. As for his vocals – imagine Johnny Mathis rising to a primal scream, and delivering stream-of-consciousness lyrics as oblique as oracles and as hard as nails.

But the darkness was already descending. Despite having established themselves early on as LA's biggest live act, by the time they made it to Elektra's studios to record Forever Changes, in the autumn of 1967, the band had more or less opted out of live performance. Lee excepted, they were so untogether for the first session on Forever Changes that the producer, Bruce Botnik, brought in members of the legendary Wrecking Crew of session musicians to help out. If Botnik's intention was to shock them out of drug-hazed apathy, it worked.

Drenched in acid, ennui, dislocation, alienation and a fixation with death and decay, Forever Changes stands apart from its contemporaries, and all that came after. Mixing mariachi horns, philharmonia strings, acoustic guitars and a handful of searing solos with lyrics that rivalled Captain Beefheart's for out-and-out strangeness, Forever Changes is the ultimate postcard from the edge, an LA soundscape, summing up an end-of-days clarity from the seclusion of The Castle.

They had reached their zenith. Soon after Forever Changes, the group effectively disbanded, though rumours persist of a "lost" Love album, Gethsemane. When I show Lee the supposed track list, he laughs and says, "It's so lost even I don't know about it." Though, in a tantalising aside, he remarks: "They may be songs – but with the wrong titles.". Further albums followed under Love's name, featuring Lee with different musicians – including his old friend Jimi Hendrix on the incandescent The Everlasting First. But, by the Eighties, depending on which, if any, rumour you believe, Lee was a house painter, a fire-starter, a drug-addled pan-handler. Or simply out of the business and out of luck.

The Nineties saw a revival of fortunes when he toured with the British band Shack, playing as Love, and his 1996 gigs with LA four-piece Baby Lemonade have become legendary. But soon after returning to California, it all went horribly wrong for Lee, and, not for the first time, it looked as if his musical career was over.

Now, after less than five months of freedom, he is garnering adulatory reviews from a European tour of clubs and theatres that will take him through 25 cities and 11 countries. Hungry for an audience and a stage, Arthur Lee is back with Baby Lemonade, playing as Love.

When I ask how he approaches the songs from those first three classic albums, he answers without hesitation: "Just like I did 'em last night, just like yesterday. I tell you man, this is a high-energy band. Every old song sounds like we just recorded it last week, or as if they were the original band line-up. That's how it is with these guys."

For the first gig, at LA's Spaceland, "I was kind of nervous, actually," he says, speaking softly, "But, after the first song, I was back at home, man.I've done more rehearsing now than since the first album." There are plans for a complete Forever Changes, "with an orchestra and everything. But what I'd love more is to do my new songs." Of which there are dozens, composed and orchestrated in jail. "I just haven't taught them to the band yet." He plans to record them in England later this year. "But, right now, I have to concentrate on getting back into performing. I don't want to be seen as a novelty act or someone who used to be. I wouldn't do a tour like that. When somebody who I consider my heroes, like the Beatles..." He tails off with a shrug. McCartney might be wowing the stadiums in the States, but Lee is unimpressed. "People probably don't think I can cut it any more," he remarks, "That's one reason to do it. I'm out to blow minds."

With the European tour already under way expectations are soaring. Much of the tour is already sold out, and the word is that Lee is at his peak. At the end of the interview, when he's heading out of the door, he turns before he leaves, grins and says, "I'm gonna show you."

Love with Arthur Lee tour the UK 3-16 June. 'Da Capo' has been re-released on Elektra/Rhino