Arthur Lee Dead at 61
Arthur Lee, founder of L.A.’s great proto-folk-psychedelic band Love, died of luekemia Thursday in his hometown of Memphis.
The L.A. Times’s Mike Boehm has the obit and an excellent overview of Lee’s career and his and Love’s outsized influence on the mid-Sixties L.A. rock scene and far beyond.
Lee always claimed he was the first rock musician to live in Laurel Canyon, and he may very well have been so.
In the course of conducting interviews for LAUREL CANYON, I spent several hours at Lee’s former house, featured in this short film, at the very top of the canyon. It’s a comfortable, spacious place with the filip of an indoor-outdoor swimming pool that divides the house into halves spanned by a bridge.
It was early winter the day I visited and as afternoon faded to night a thick fog blanketed the house, obscuring the views and making it nearly impossible to drive back down the canyon.
The house has the feel of an aerie, better approached on wing—just the place for a visionary to see the sights.