Love Singer, Arthur Lee Dies at 61

[Manticore]

Here's one for anyone who is into '60's music. I just found out about this today but it may be old news to some.......

From the Deadbolt:

Love Singer, Arthur Lee Dies at 61

Arthur Lee, the founder of the 1960’s band, Love, has died. Lee, who was known as the so called “first black hippie”, succumbed to acute myeloid leukemia in his hometown of Memphis on Thursday. Arthur Lee was 61.



Arthur Lee, the lead singer of the influential band, Love, has passed away after a battle with leukemia. Lee was a patient at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis when the news broke of his death. Reuters reports that Lee’s manager, Mark Linn, relayed the bad news on a fan website, as well as Lee’s MySpace page. ”I am very sad to report that Arthur Lee died this afternoon in the hospital with his wife, Diane, by his side.” The death was a shock to everyone, and Linn was confident that Arthur was going to be fine. ”This is still very much a shock for me as I had hoped Arthur would recover."



The eccentric rocker was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia earlier this year. In May, Lee became the first adult in Tennessee to undergo a bone marrow transplant using stem cells from an umbilical cord. Unfortunately, the procedure wasn’t enough of an advantage for Lee. According to People, who quote The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal, doctors revealed that the operation only helped Arthur Lee’s chances for survival minimally.



Arthur Lee and Love helped shape the music scene back in the mid-60’s and influenced such bands as Led Zeppelin, Siouxsie, The Banshees, and Echo and the Bunnymen . As the first multiracial group of the psychedelic period, Love’s first three ground breaking albums, “Love”, “Da Capo”, and “Forever Changes”, were a blend of folk, blues and punk. In regards to Lee’s eccentric behavior and mental state, the singer was sometimes compared to Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. In the 1980s, this type of behavior landed Lee in a California prison for six years, as a result of firing a hand gun into the air. An interesting fact about the band’s second album, “Da Capo” is that it was one of the first albums to feature a song, “Revelation” that took up the entire B-side. In addition, the third album, “Forever Changes” has been voted by Rolling Stone at number 40 of the best 500 albums of all time.



[Additional Sources: Reuters, People, Wikipedia]