My "Love Story"

It all started in about 1986 or 1987 when I leafed through a friend's copy of a Rolling Stone history of rock 'n' roll (I can't remember the exact title or edition). There was a group photo of five or six scowling young guys in front of either a crumbling stone chimney or large boulders, half of the guys were white and two (or three--if it was the Da Capo era) were Black. The accompanying caption identified these guys as a band called "Love." 

Around this same time, I flipped through a book called The Doors: The Illustrated History, which includes a promotional Q&A with the four Doors, they type of fluff that was common in that era and that bands likely hated having to do. One of the questions was something like, "What are your goals?" Jim Morrison's answer was essentially, "To be as big as Love." I had to find out more about this band called Love.

A year or two later, I found myself at Jocundry's Books (R.I.P.) and on the shelf in their music section as a coffee table-sized book that was one of those 100 (or 200 or 500) best albums of (all time? The Sixties? I can't remember anymore). In any case, it cost more money than I could afford on my meager college student budget. However, I enjoyed browsing it, and was intrigued to see its contents included an album called Forever Changes by that band Love. The book also reproduced a full-sized photograph of the Forever Changes album cover. 

In the summer of 1989, I lived in an apartment off campus and when I had free time, I'd poke around the record stores in East Lansing. (I still poke around the record stores in East Lansing, even though there aren't as many of them these days). At the dearly departed Wazoo Records, I found a still-sealed cassette copy of Rhino Records' Best of Love. I don't think I had to think twice about buying it.

The music of Love was just as beguiling and beautifully eccentric as I could have hoped for. The Best of Love opens up with three stripped down garage rock gems, "My Little Red Book," "Can't Explain," and "Hey Joe." And then there was the harrowing "Signed D.C.," the psychedelic punk/garage rock freakout "Stephanie Knows Who," and then fragile, delicate "Andmoreagain" and "Alone Again Or." The range and audaciousness of this music astounded me, and still astounds me.

When I think about that Best of Love cassette, I associate it with late nights in my dorm room listening to it with all the lights off. My roommate in Mayo Hall during fall term '89 was a frat guy who spent most of his time either at his frat house or working as a waiter in a nearby restaurant. Consequently, I got the room to myself a lot and was able to listen to whatever music I wanted to whenever I wanted to. The Best of Love made for appropriately dark and mysterious music for late nights alone in my room.

That same fall of '89, I was in the dearly departed Wherehouse Records and found Love's second album Da Capo on CD. Little did I know that Warner/Elektra had just reissued Love's first three albums on CD the previous year. Da Capo was yet another layer of the Love onion to be peeled away and revealed more facets of the band, including but not limited to the 18+ minute, side-long instrumental "Revelation."

Before the days of Amazon, Discogs, and eBay, music collecting was a hit-or-miss, catch-as-catch-can proposition. A fortuitous trip to the enormous Tower Records in Ann Arbor in 1995 produced Love's debut album on CD. A year earlier, I was finally able to procure a copy of Forever Changes, an album that thoroughly blew me away in a manner that not many other albums ever have. I put together a more than adequate collection of Love albums by simply being in the right place at the right time.

Love, the band, remained somewhat of a mystery to me until the dawn of the on-line era, when all this information became easier to come across, and I was finally able to connect with other people who shared the same passion for this strange L.A. band.