Arthur Lee: Summer of Love

He discovered The Doors, nurtured Jimi Hendrix and fronted legendary Sixties band Love. Now, after six years in prison, Lee is back on the road again. Simon Price meets the king of psychedelia

'What's this for?" Arthur Lee asks me with ill-disguised irritation. "Why am I doing this?" Well, at least he's talking. At first, as I entered the room, he barely acknowledged me. Sat at the end of a long sofa in his publicist's office, with black shades welded to his face, a stars and stripes bandanna wrapped across his brow, and a big fedora hat jammed down onto his head, he could barely be a less welcoming presence, and only shook my hand because I practically forced him to. Later, he'll lower the shades, make eye contact, and lighten up. He'll explain, punching me jovially in the bicep, that "answering questions in an interview's not really my thing. I'd rather play music and do a good show. But I know it's needed, so I do it." For now, Lee, who famously doesn't suffer fools gladly, is still undecided whether I fall into that category, and he isn't taking any chances.

If he was any other way, I'd be disappointed. In the Los Angeles of the mid-1960s, Arthur Lee and his band, Love, were a dark, brooding spectre at the hippie love-in. They may have had the sweetest of names, but Lee was no utopian. Observing the Summer of Love high above the city from an ivy-clad gothic mansion known as The Castle, Lee wrote songs about the flipside to the hippie dream, describing alienation, loneliness, urban decay, and social breakdown. Every now and then he'd venture into town, walking the streets in one moccasin and one bare foot, scaring the hell out of the flower children.

Love's self-titled 1966 debut was punchy and proto-punky, suggesting an American cousin to The Who. In five short months, they'd moved onto Da Capo, and made a quantum leap into a more expansive, Spanish-influenced sound. But it's their third album, Forever Changes, which is the most revered. Although Love were quickly outstripped in sales terms by The Doors (whom Lee discovered) and Jimi Hendrix (whose career he nurtured), Forever Changes is always listed alongside them in polls of the greatest albums of all time.

Its most famous song is the opening "Alone Again Or", a beautiful and intricate piece of flamenco romance. But Lee didn't write that one: it was his pretty-boy sidekick Bryan Maclean. Lee's far from blissful state of mind – he was convinced he was about to die – was better expressed by the couplet "Sitting on a hillside watching all the people die/I'll feel much better on the other side", and often terrifying lyrics like "And the water's turned to blood, and if you don't think so, go turn on your tub" ("A House Is Not A Motel"). This was one seriously bad trip.

"That's what you get out of it?" he ponders. "Interesting. I just tried to call it as I saw it... Because what I was talking about is still happening, and always happened. Except for the love your neighbour thing. I think that has to get better. Can't get any worse." And thereby hangs a tale. In 1996, not doing well on the "love thy neighbour" score, Lee was arrested after allegedly firing a gun into the air during an altercation with one of his, and charged with grossly negligent discharge of a firearm. Lee was sentenced to 11 years in Pleasant Valley State Prison, California.

Despite the extremely shaky nature of the conviction (Lee's manager, Doug Thomas, came forward and admitted that it was he who had fired the shot), and despite a campaign among fellow musicians to have him released (he's never heard Make-Up's single, "Free Arthur Lee", but he'd like to), Lee served nearly six years, and was released last December, aged 56.

I've been warned that I must not mention prison or guns. His manager says this will be a red rag to a bull, and he will not only terminate the interview, but will quite possibly run out of the building and down the street. Given that the most interesting events in his recent life have been a) getting arrested for a trumped-up firearms offence and b) spending several years in jail, avoiding these topics entirely may prove difficult.

In practice, when Lee refers to his detention, he employs the euphemistic phrase, "While I was away...". Apart from the fact that his record company, Elektra, remastered Love's classic albums without his input (much to his dissatisfaction), the most frustrating part of imprisonment, he tells me, was the inability to make music. In this respect, however, one of Lee's weaknesses – he can't write music – became a strength. "I hum, and I'll sing a song with somebody, and tell them what to play." In the Sixties, Lee would routinely hire and fire musicians when he became frustrated at their inability to turn the music he heard in his head into reality. In prison, his ability to mentally store music kept him sane. "I wrote a lot of songs in the mid-Nineties, and since I've... been away, I've had a chance to arrange these songs. I had to do it all in my head. It was a challenge to me to see if I could do this." The songs were literally going round and round his head for six years? "Not quite! I have a lot of pockets in my head... A song might come to me in a dream, I'd wake up, and [say] 'I won't forget that', go back to sleep, wake up and it's still there."

With the exceptions of his six years in prison, and a five-year hiatus during which he cared for his dying father, Lee has never quit. As soon as he was released (once he'd been to visit an elderly aunt in Memphis, where he still has many cousins), he hooked up with Mike Randle of LA indie band Baby Lemonade (Lee's backing group since 1992) and set about recording his new songs. "They fit like a hand in a glove. There are lots of horns and strings, like Forever Changes... The music is some of the best work I've ever done." His other new project, he reveals, is an autobiography.

Inevitably, for such an enigmatic figure, mythology surrounds Arthur Lee. Rumours abound that he nearly died of a heroin overdose, that Love shared same-sex inter-band relationships, that members of the Forever Changes band were involved in holding up a doughnut van. Presumably he's hoping to correct some misconceptions? "SOME?!" he roars. "You have a way with words, buddy, I tell you that! There are a lot of rumours I want to address. This will be from the horse's mouth... I just want to straighten out a few things."

Among the wrongs he feels need to be righted are the production on Forever Changes (Bruce Botnick receives a co-credit, Lee insists it was all his own work), and the myth that Jimi Hendrix played on several Love songs. "I knew him very well. He played on one song, 'Everlasting First', but he definitely did not play on 'Midnight Sun'. That's a lie. That was Melvin Williamson. "

One accolade Lee won't argue with is that Love were one of the first multi-racial bands. Lee knew all about racism, and saw doors that needed kicking down. "I knew the score. I lived in Tennessee until I was five years old, and it was segregated. A multi-racial band was my thought from the beginning. Don, the original drummer, was a great drummer, but when he stopped showing up and stuff, I got Alban 'Snoopy' Pfisterer in – not because he was great on the drums, but because he was white. And a white face in the band was what I needed, to be accepted, to get your picture on record sleeves. Before that, black artists of the time, like The Temptations, had great album covers but their pictures weren't on it. It was a thing that... needed to happen."

Can Lee hear Love's influence on contemporary bands? "All the time. I've heard it all along. From Moody Blues to Led Zeppelin to... I'm grateful to Robert Plant for thinking of me the way he does, musically and as a person," he digresses. But he could as easily have mentioned Super Furry Animals or Badly Drawn Boy.

Does he see imitation as flattery, or theft? "No, I think they're thieves. I think they're stealing." In a nice way? "No, not in a nice way! I think some of them are very good at stealing... If you're gonna be a thief, be a good one, you know? I'm sure I've got licks and ideas from other people as well..."

For the first time in over half a decade, Lee has been back onstage. He felt comfortable almost at once. "We did one show that went very well... The stage is my home. That's how it felt after the first song." In the autumn, there are plans to stage the Forever Changes album, start to finish, with a full orchestra. "That'll be a treat," he says. For the moment, the stripped-down Baby Lemonade line-up is about to tour the UK. "I think this tour is definitely going to be mind-blowing." With that, he excuses himself to visit the bathroom.

As he leaves the room, he turns around and gives me a mischievous, print-this-if-you-dare grin. "I'm off to take some of that cohhh-caine!"

'Da Capo' is re-released tomorrow. Arthur Lee plays King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow (0141 221 5279), 4 June; Stables, Milton Keynes (01908 280800), 5 June; Concorde 2, Brighton (01273 207241), 6 June; Brook, Southampton (02380 555366), 8 June; Lomax, Liverpool (0151 707 9977), 9 June; Manchester University (0161 275 2930), 10 June; Boardwalk, Sheffield (0114 279 9090), 11 June; Robin 2, Wolverhampton (01902 497860), 12 June; Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (020 7960 4242), 14 June