Arthur Lee

Born: March 07, 1945, Memphis, Tennessee, United States
Died: August 03, 2006, Memphis, Tennessee, United States
Born in Memphis, the son of white trumpeter Chester Taylor and Agnes, a black schoolteacher with both African-American and Native-American roots, Lee - musically self-taught and with innate sensibility - came to attention as lead vocalist and leader of the band Love, It was one of the very few mixed-race bands in a time of limited cultural acceptance. A relatively short-lived but electrifying presence on the Los Angeles scene of the mid-sixties, no band at the time offered as charismatic and as striking a frontman as Lee. A singer and multi-instrumentalist, he was a lightning rod for the denizens of the burgeoning West Coast underground. “He cut an imposing figure,” says Jimmy Greenspoon, a future member of Love’s LA contemporaries Three Dog Night. “He had a mesmerising presence, a Pied Piper who would lead Love’s audience to a different form of consciousness.”
A swaggering teenager brimming with attitude, his musical tastes encompassed Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis to The Beatles, The Who and the The Rolling Stones (he once compared himself to Mick Jagger – “a black American imitating a white Englishman imitating a black American”), Lee's influence informed and inspired his contemporary admirers such as Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix in both attitude and dress. The Doors' drummer John Densmore was an early fan of Love and of Lee’s. “I was a jazz snob running round Hollywood,” he says. “I stumbled in and here’s this group who are mixed racially, deafeningly loud, wearing ridiculously tight pants and fringe jackets. My mind was blown. They looked amazing and they were brilliant on stage.”
Following the dissolution of Love, Lee's erratic solo career wasn’t helped by his struggles with drugs; he was (wrongly) jailed for 12 years in 1996 under California’s ‘three strikes’ law for negligent discharge of a firearm (he served five years). After a diagnosis of myeloid leukaemia that would eventually kill him in 2006, a group of celebrity fans, including Robert Plant, Ian Hunter and Ryan Adams, banded together for a tribute concert to raise money for his medical bills.