Author: fgt

Fronted in LA by the magnetic Arthur Lee, Love emerged from the Sunset Strip scene around the same time as The Doors – but where Jim Morrison and co went on to stardom, Love snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at every step. In 2016, former band members and associates looked back on the brief but brilliant career of one of the greatest American bands of the era.

If you’d been hanging out in Los Angeles any time in the summer of 1966, there would have been a high chance of stumbling across Arthur Lee. He might have been wearing just one shoe, or swimming trunks; he’d almost certainly be peering over a pair of psychedelic sunglasses. But then Lee could do what the hell he wanted. Barely 21 years old, he was the undisputed King Of The Sunset Strip: the most arrogant, brown-eyed, handsome man in Hollyweird. Lee and his band, Love, were helping usher in a whole new era of Californian music.

Sure, there were more commercially successful bands: The Byrds already had a run of hit singles and a European tour under their buckskin jackets by early ’66, and Brian Wilson was taking the Beach Boys to new creative heights even as his psyche crumbled under the weight of it all. But neither had such a charismatic, striking 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.”

Love were the unsung heroes of the musical Big Bang that took place in 1966, although they have long been overshadowed by bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and especially one-time acolytes The Doors. If Love are remembered today, it’s for their third album, 1967’s Forever Changes, a masterpiece of baroque psychedelia. But a year before that, they blew a hurricane through Los Angeles. And Arthur Lee was at the eye of the storm.

In the sun-bleached Los Angeles of the 1960s, Lee stood out from his peers. An only child, he was born in Memphis to a white jazz-musician father and a mother with both African-American and Native-American roots. He was unambiguous about ethnicity. “I’ve been black my whole life,” he said in the 70s. By the time he was five, his parents had divorced and he’d moved with his mother, Agnes, to the historic West Adams district of Los Angeles.

As a swaggering teenager brimming with attitude, his musical tastes encompassed Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis to The Beatles, The Who and the Rolling Stones (he once compared himself to Mick Jagger – “a black American imitating a white Englishman imitating a black American”). One big influence close to home were The Byrds, who he first saw at Hollywood club Ciro’s in 1964. “I heard Mr Tambourine Man, and didn’t have to hear any more,” he later recalled. “I’d been writing things like that for a long time, but they didn’t fit the shows I was doing. Now here was something not quite dance music but definitely folk rock.”

Lee’s early attempts at music were naïve. As Arthur Lee And The LAGs (the acronym stood for ‘Los Angeles Group’, in the same way that Booker T’s MG’s was a shortening of ‘Memphis Group’) he recorded a single, the Booker T-inspired instrumental The Ninth Wave, for Capitol Records.

Lee wasn’t just keeping songs for himself. In 1964 he wrote My Diary for R&B singer Rosa Lee Brooks. Searching for musicians to play on the session, he enlisted a little-known guitarist from Seattle called James Marshall Hendrix, who had recently been playing with the Isley Brothers. “I wanted someone who could sound like Curtis Mayfield,” he later said of Hendrix.

The pair had a mutual respect, but also an uneasy relationship. Lee would claim that the guitarist took some of his cues from him. “Jimi’s brother told me Hendrix took a look at my first album and said: ‘I think I’ll try it this way’. He stole my dress attire, and I don’t appreciate that shit. But then I can’t play the guitar like him at all.”

That might have been true, but then Lee could sure write great songs, some of which he gifted to other LA acts. They included Everybody Jerk and Slow Jerk, recorded in 1964 by Ronnie & The Pomona Casuals on the back of the Jerk dance craze, and I Been Trying, cut by Little Ray the following year.

Other songs he kept for himself. Most notable was Luci Baines, a Latino-influenced garage rock call-out-the-dance stomp modelled on the Isley Brothers’ Twist And Shout and named after the daughter of then-US Vice President, Lyndon B Johnson. The track was recorded by Arthur’s latest band, the American Four – Lee plus his childhood friend from Memphis, guitarist Johnny Echols, and John Fleckenstein and John Jacobson, a pair of schoolfriends they met in Hollywood. Luci Baines was the first time anyone had captured Lee’s maniacal vocal and adrenalised, proto-punky thrash. He had finally found his own voice.

The American Four rehearsed in Arthur’s mum’s garage, before launching themselves on the burgeoning LA club circuit in late 1964, playing anything from chintzy nightclubs to seedy backrooms. Lee’s volatile temperament and take-no-shit approach was evident early on. During a break between sets at one show, a fist-fight broke out between Lee and Fleckenstein in the parking lot. “Fleck was a football star at Hollywood High School,” John Jacobson recalled, “but Arthur put him down in two punches.”

In April 1965, the American Four took up residency at Brave New World, a gay bar on Melrose Avenue. Gradually, the existing clientele drifted away, replaced by a straight crowd. At the same time, the American Four changed their name to the Grass Roots, inspired partly by Message To The Grass Roots, an album by black American activist Malcolm X, as well as being a nod to their drug of choice.

Over the next few months, musicians drifted in and out of the Grass Roots. One was guitarist Bobby Beausoleil – ‘Bummer Bob’ to his bandmates – who joined when Lee decided he wanted to focus on singing and banging a tambourine. When Lee was unable to pay his wages, Beausoleil was fired. He subsequently fell in with Charles Manson’s ‘Family’, and was sentenced to a life sentence for stabbing a schoolteacher to death in 1969.

Beausoleil’s replacement would prove to be much more significant to the band. Bryan MacLean was a hip LA musician and scenester. Born to wealthy Hollywood stock, he’d befriended Jack Nicholson, dated Liza Minnelli and wangled a job as David Crosby’s gofer on a recent Byrds tour, before unsuccessfully auditioning for a role in The Monkees. MacLean’s red-blond hair and Wasp-y good looks were matched by his musical talents. Cannily, one of the reasons Arthur hired him was because of his connections to the Byrds’ crowd – including their groupies – who he could draw to his band’s shows.

There was just one obstacle. Another, more successful LA band were using the Grass Roots moniker, forcing a seething Lee to change the name of his own band. In Bryan MacLean and Johnny Echols’s version, they passed a billboard advertising Luv Brasseries on Melrose Avenue. When Johnny informed Bryan that Arthur used to work there, they decided to present the name to the singer, albeit in a more traditional spelling. And so, in August 1965, the Grass Roots became Love.

For all his talent, Lee – and Love – could easily have been overlooked had Jac Holzman, president of New York’s Elektra Records, not decided to take a trip to the West Coast in late 1965. Having missed out on the Lovin’ Spoonful, and tiring of the Big Apple’s tourist-trap folk scene, Holzman flew to LA in search of something new. Browsing local listings for ideas, he was drawn to a show by Love at Bido Lito’s Club, a claustrophobic brick enclave in a cul-de-sac known as Cosmo Alley. Holzman was instantly sold.

“I saw Arthur on stage,” Holzman says, “and I knew this was ‘my band’ and that I was going to do whatever it took to sign Love. If the hairs on the back of my neck go up, I pay close attention. Bido Lito’s was a scene from Dante’s Inferno: bodies crushing into each other; silken-clad girls with ironed blonde hair. Love were cranking out [covers of] Hey Joe and My Little Red Book, a song by Bacharach & David in the Woody Allen movie What’s New Pussycat? – hip but straight. And here was Arthur Lee going at it with manic intensity.”

Love didn’t have management or a booking agent, which allowed Holzman to deal directly with Lee. When he offered the band a deal with his label, there was little reluctance from Lee. Within a few weeks, Elektra had rushed them into Sunset Sound Studio to record their debut album, with Holzman producing his first rock record alongside trusted accomplice Mark Abramson and 21-year-old engineer Bruce Botnick. The latter was amazed that the band completed the task. “Arthur was stoned twenty-four hours a day,” he later recalled.

Most of the songs that made up the album were already in Love’s live set, including the MacLean-written Softly To Me. “We were just getting the hang of it when we made the album,” MacLean said.

As well as Lee, Echols and MacLean, playing on the Love album were ex-Surfaris bassist Ken Forssi and Swiss-born drummer Alban ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer. The latter replaced Don Conka, who had been sacked after spiralling into heroin addiction. Conka was the subject of Signed DC, a detailed account of a user every bit as harrowing as The Velvet Underground’s Heroin, which it preceded by six months. The Velvets themselves were early Love fans – their guitarist Sterling Morrison remembered his band’s attempts to cover Love’s raucous version of My Little Red Book, trying to unravel the rhythm and failing miserably. The rest of the Love album bridged the worlds of Californian folk rock, proto-garage rock and the first glimmerings of psychedelia, even if it didn’t quite scale the same heights as The Byrds.

Featuring a distinctive logo designed by Elektra’s Bill Harvey, the cover of Love showed the band in the grounds of The Castle, the red-brick mansion in LA’s Beachwood Canyon once owned by horror star Bela Lugosi. Love had taken up unofficial residence in The Castle, squatting there in early 1966. They would be visited by friends and fellow musicians including Jim Morrison, Nico, John Phillips of the Mamas And The Papas and the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones.

“Enter The Castle at your own risk,” Lee recalled. “The doors were always open. There was no violence in The Castle though, no guns. The bands never fought each other. Oh, but one day I was leaning off my balcony and Bryan MacLean wandered up to Jim Morrison by the pool and Jim slapped him round the face. Funniest thing I ever seen.”

Holed up in their own Xanadu, Lee and Love would ingest copious LSD and then hit town to bask in starlight. Their reputation was spreading, their profile growing as they were moving up the LA food chain. “It was crazy because we’d been living in a cheap motel room, but now we had cars and were dating Playboy bunnies,” says Johnny Echols. “Anything you imagine happening at the Playboy Mansion happened at The Castle. The Castle was a Love Inn where local musicians would socialise and party.”

Despite the wanton air of hedonism in which he was immersed, Lee handled Love’s finances. “I wasn’t materialistic,” he told me, “I just didn’t trust the others with the money.” Not that he himself was hugely reliable.

“He wanted a five-thousand-dollar advance for the record,” says Herb Cohen, who managed the band briefly. “So Love arranged to meet Holzman at the bank. Jac cashed the cheque and counted out the five-thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills, after which Arthur tells the other guys ‘Wait at the hotel. I have to get something.’ Arthur returns a few hours later and shows them a two-door Gullwing Mercedes, telling them that this was for the band and their equipment. No one says a word. Then he hands each guy a hundred dollars – all that’s left of the advance.”

“Arthur had a curious sense of cubic capacity,” says Holzman. “That car was just big enough for him, his girlfriend and his brand new harmonica.”

Lee got a dose of reality when Love came out in March 1966, and it only made No.57 on the Billboard chart. My Little Red Book, released as their first single, didn’t do much better.

It was on stage where Love truly ruled. Michael Stuart, drummer with local LA outfit the Sons Of Adam and a future member of Love, saw plenty of shows where Lee lorded it over his group.

“Arthur was decked out in his multicoloured sunglasses, combat boot – one only – and scowl, banging the hell out of his tambourine,” he recalls. “John Echols had a lead-guitar style like no other: loud and frantic, soft and melodic. Jazz, rock, classical and flamenco… he could do it all. Played a double-necked Mosrite twelve-string and six-string – equally accomplished on either neck. Bryan MacLean, eyes closed, head tilted to his chest, appeared to be asleep while he played.”

Despite the apparent air of bliss, there were strains between Lee and MacLean. Jealous of the attention his bandmate was getting from the girls, Lee would openly criticise his playing. MacLean’s mother, Elizabeth McKee, witnessed this friction at one gig in mid-1966. “I had never seen Love live, and I went to the Whisky,” she remembered. “I got right under Bryan’s nose, and Arthur was saying to him: ‘Don’t play, you’re out of tune!’ Bryan kept his eyes straight ahead, kept playing and ignored him.”

That summer, Love left LA to show the San Francisco hippies how it was done. They played three shows at the Avalon Ballroom’s Hupmobile-8 in May, with Captain Beefheart and Janis Joplin watching from the wings. In July they headlined the Independence Ball over the Grateful Dead at the Calliope Warehouse in San Francisco, and topped the bill over Big Brother And The Holding Company at the Avalon Ballroom again. In August they astounded the Fillmore auditorium, before returning to LA for a series of Whisky A Go Go shows – including matinees – with The Doors as special guests.

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.”

Love’s breakthrough finally came with the single 7 & 7 Is, which reached No.33 in the US in July 1966, giving both Love and their label, Elektra, their first hit. Sonically, it was breakneck punk 10 years before punk, but the inspiration was purely lysergic. Drummer ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer described the single as “acid-flash imagery – me and Arthur took a lot of LSD together in that period”. They would need 40 takes to get it right, something that caused tension. “Arthur told me exactly how he wanted to play it,” said Snoopy. “Because of that he thinks he played it! The only take you hear is mine.”

By the time Love entered RCA Studio B in September 1966 to record their second album, Da Capo, Pfisterer had been moved from drums to organ and harpsichord – an indication of Lee’s ever-increasing ambition. Aware of Jim Morrison’s ambition “to be as big as Love”, Lee pulled out all the stops.

Da Capo was a tripped-out masterpiece. Or at least side one was. Gloriously psychedelic and melodically ornate, with Latin American overtones demo’d on his black Gibson acoustic, Lee exchanged the occasional morass of the debut for six pristine, classic pop songs: Stephanie Knows Who (about a girl caught in a love triangle between Lee and MacLean); MacLean’s Orange Skies, ¡Que Vida!, 7 & 7 Is, The Castle (a wanderlust musing on returning to mother, or going to Mexico) and the gorgeous She Comes In Colors. Integrating session man Tjay Cantrelli’s flute and Snoopy’s harpsichord, Lee wrote the latter about his acid fuck buddy Annette Ferrell. It was later ‘borrowed’ by the Stones on She’s A Rainbow.

Side two was taken up entirely by the 19-minute wig-out Revelation (aka John Lee Hooker). Do Love fans ever play this? Not so often. “Oh, that long song,” Bryan mused. “It was a shame. We should have had more songs. But we didn’t.” Echols, who steered Revelation, disagreed. “An underrated song. The live version is really cool, one of the first true fusion jams which allowed the musicians to stretch out, and take solos. It was meant to be live in the studio, with the audience from Bido Lito’s dancing as we played.” Pfisterer’s replacement on drums, Michael Stuart, remembered the stop-start nature of recording the track. “We took regular breaks to smoke Arthur’s blond Afghan,” he said. Lee’s own interest in Revelation was minimal.

Halfway through a four-album deal, the sales figures were depressing: Da Capo made No.80. Chances were blown. After appearing on teen TV shows Hullabaloo and American Bandstand in spring ’66, lip-synching to My Little Red Book and the bittersweet A Message To Pretty, Love were ostracised because they had blanked presenter Dick Clark (“Hey, I hear you guys live in a castle?” Silence. “We must visit – for a second”).

They bamboozled the press with a couldn’t-give-a-shit stance, including the influential KRLA Beat, whose reporter they insulted when she visited The Castle and heard Bryan having sex in another room. He claimed he was too ill to be interviewed. “The new album will be prettier sounding… easier to listen to,” Lee told her. Unaware her subjects were tripping, the writer concluded: “Only when a group really reaches the top can their careers withstand what they may suffer from being continually rude and uncaring to fans and reporters alike. In my opinion, Love will soon be on many blacklists in the music industry, rather than ‘In My Little Red Book’, where they want so badly to belong.”

Love’s biggest problem, however, was Lee’s refusal to tour outside California. Holzman implored him to bring Love to New York, but Lee wouldn’t budge. “He was jealous of The Doors’ success”, says Holzman. “But he wouldn’t travel far from his perch in LA.” Ever enigmatic, Lee had his reasons. On ¡Que Vida! (meaning ‘a wonderful life’) he sang: ‘With nickels and dimes, you soon will have a dollar/Am I in your time, I see no need to swallow/Or catch a plane to travel, my mind’s not made of gravel.’

Photographer Guy Webster took the back cover image for Da Capo. “I took individual group member shots against a white background, with Arthur Lee in prime position,” he recalls. “I doubt if they were in my studio for an hour. Arthur shook my hand and said: ‘Do what you want with the cover, I really don’t care.’ He was nonchalant, to say the least.” So much so that the front cover of Da Capo is a virtual re-enactment of its predecessor.

Love ended 1966 with three nights at the Fillmore, headlining over Moby Grape, showcasing all of Da Capo. But things were shifting. Buffalo Springfield had landed, and Jim Morrison had given Lee a tape of The Doors’ forthcoming debut album. Radio was playing the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. But Lee foresaw only bad things. Ken Forssi and Johnny Echols were heading towards heroin addiction. Lee left The Castle and moved to Mulholland Drive, where Forssi would shoot up. “Then we’d look down over the city, Arthur staring and wondering about the ambulances and the sirens,” recalled Forssi.

Lee’s mind was already elsewhere. As Da Capo ebbed away, he began constructing his masterpiece, Forever Changes, which would emerge more than a year later – a lifetime in the late 60s. That album would fare even worse than Love and Da Capo, but it would be garlanded belatedly as one of the great albums of the era.

Love split in the early 70s, after a final album, False Start, most notable for featuring Lee’s old buddy Jimi Hendrix playing guitar on one track. Lee embarked on an erratic solo career that wasn’t helped by his struggles with drugs; he was jailed for 12 years in 1996 under California’s ‘three strikes’ law for negligent discharge of a firearm (he served five years). When he was diagnosed with the 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. His flame might have burned bright for a brief length of time, but it left an indelible mark on everything that followed.

“We opened the gate for The Doors, Buffalo Springfield and all the groups that followed,” Lee once said. “We were the beginning, the ones who spread the scene to San Francisco. We were only a small spark on the Sunset Strip at first, but we became a wildfire.”

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 221, March 2016

Max Bell worked for the NME during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for The Times and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the Standard and mags like The Face and GQ kept him honest. Later, Record Collector and Classic Rock called.

In a scene that will doubtless strike a chord with women the world over, on the morning following their first night together, after receiving his unsolicited opinion that she “tries too hard” with her songwriting, and that her songs “are like an oil painting at the dentist’s office”, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) tells Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), “You’re kind of an asshole Bob.” Though no other character in James Mangold’s eagerly-anticipated biopic of one of music’s most enigmatic legends voices the same line, you can take it as read that, at some point in their dealings with the Minnesota-born musician, they’ve definitely had the same thought.

Adapted from American music journalist and folk/blues guitarist Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split The Sixties, a forensic look at Dylan’s legendary and controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, A Complete Unknown opens with a wide-eyed, baby-faced Dylan tumbling out of a hitched ride onto New York’s streets in January 1961 on a mission to locate Woody Guthrie, whose songs he says “struck me down to the ground”. Directed to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, Dylan finds folk hero Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) at the stricken Guthrie’s bedside, and is asked to play something for the two men on the acoustic guitar he’s carrying. The confident young musician proceeds to play Song To Woody (“Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song ’bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along“), gaining instant approval from the folk scene elders: Seeger then invites Dylan to stay his home, and subsequently introduces him to, and champions him among, the Greenwich Village cognoscenti, who are similarly charmed and awed by his obvious talents.

In reality, none of this happened. And if this is the sort of ‘heightened reality’ storytelling that would irk you as a dedicated and learned student of Dylan’s life and art, then perhaps A Complete Unknown may not be for you. But given that Dylan’s long-time manager Jeff Rosen optioned Elijah Wald’s book for film rights, and worked closely with screenwriter Jay Cocks on the adaptation, and that Dylan himself made notes on the script and insisted on the inclusion of a totally inaccurate scene, one can assume that the man himself is okay with a little myth-making. After all, he wasn’t above mischievously tweaking an autobiographical fact or three in his early years, and wasn’t overly concerned whether others believed him or not. At one point in the film, Dylan informs Baez that he learned guitar from a cowboy called Wigglefoot while working at a carnival, earning the response “You’re so completely full of shit” from his already increasingly weary and wary new love.

It’s to Timothée Chalamet’s immense credit that he can make his character self-centred, capricious, stubborn, precious and downright rude on occasion, and still have you rooting for him. In this regard, he’s helped no end by superb supporting performances from Barbaro, Norton, and Elle Fanning, who plays Sylvie Russo, a version of Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Russo might not be aware that Dylan and Diaz have slept together in her bed while she’s out of the country, but in a pivotal scene, watching her fast-rising lover sing The Times They Are A-Changing at 1964’s Newport Folk Festival while Baez looks on adoringly from side stage, her eyes slowly fill with tears. It’s a subtly heartbreaking moment.

The restless Dylan too, of course, is changing, as is the world at large. This results in tension, friction, frustration and generational clashes, with the gentle, generous Seeger not exempt from Dylan’s anger, despite his kindness to the younger man. This all builds to a peak, as promised, at Newport 1965, and arguably the most famous four-song set in rock ‘n’ roll history. Often cast as a progressive vs luddite stand-off, the story is given greater nuance here, even as the facts of the day are massaged once more. At a point, Norton’s Seeger pleads with his friend to take stock of the fact that his performance on the day could be a make or break moment for the community which has nurtured him, but gets short thrift from Chalamet’s Dylan. It’s a sweet irony then that A Complete Unknown is already causing a new generation of music fans to discover the work of Dylan, Baez, Seeger and Guthrie for themselves. The times, once more, are a-changing.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

John Carpenter secured immortality via a string of cult movies including Halloween, Dark Star, Escape From New York and The Thing. At the beginning of his career he wrote his soundtracks out of necessity. Then he created the Lost Themes album series, which saw him creating music for fun with his son and godson. In 2016 Carpenter told Prog about Lost Themes II and how he’d managed to build a second career in his 60s.

---

John Carpenter’s reputation was sealed with the series of films he made in the 70s and early 80s. Filmed on a budget of $300,000, 1978’s Halloween became one of the biggest indie hits in history, grossing $70m worldwide and more or less inventing the slasher genre. The Fog, The Thing and Christine may have been less successful at the box office, but they remain cult classics.

Carpenter’s other great area of excellence is sci-fi, his visions of a bleak, dystopian future tempered by a sly wit in movies like Dark Star (1974), Escape From New York (1981), Ghosts Of Mars (2001) and 1988’s satirical swipe at the mass media, They Live.

Yet he’s far more than just a writer-director. His self-composed soundtracks have always been a key component of his work. Inspired by his violinist father, a music teacher at Western Kentucky University who was also an in-demand session player, Carpenter began scoring his own shorts while studying cinema at the University Of Southern California in the late 60s. Hallucinatory western The Resurrection Of Broncho Billy – on which he was writer, editor and composer – won an Oscar in 1970 for Best Short Subject. A year later, he began work on Dark Star with classmate Dan O’Bannon (who would go on to write the screenplay for Alien). When it came to making the film, Carpenter shaped an electronic score on a VCS3 synthesiser.

The music for 1976 thriller Assault On Precinct 13 was suitably menacing and lean, then Carpenter achieved maximum effect from the most minimal of tools on his follow-up, Halloween. Its title theme is one of the most memorable motifs in modern cinema, created using just three notes. The inspiration, says Carpenter, was a 5/4 bongo rhythm his father had taught him as a 13-year-old. The rest of the soundtrack was suffused with a similar sense of impending dread.

The experience taught Carpenter a valuable lesson. “I screened the final cut, minus sound effects and music, for a young executive from 20th Century Fox,” he recalled. “She wasn’t scared at all. I became determined to save it with the music.” Having added the score, he ran into her again six months later: “Now she too loved the movie and all I’d done was add music.”

As fellow filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has observed: “Carpenter’s scores fluctuate with his films. Listen to them – they embody the spirit of each film perfectly. They are his final auteur voice.”

It should come as no great surprise, then, to discover that Carpenter has been making non-soundtrack albums of late. Now aged 68, this year saw the release of Lost Themes II, the sequel to 2015’s Lost Themes, both of which are instrumental collaborations with his son Cody and his godson Daniel Davies.

Every person has a movie running in their head and this is the soundtrack for it

Lost Themes II is expansive and organic, driven by Carpenter’s eerie synth riffs and embellished with acoustic and electric guitars. Foreboding techno, dark blues and avant-garde ruminations are rolled out onto a prog landscape shaded by Tangerine Dream, Cluster and Carpenter’s own back catalogue.

The acclaim has been such that Carpenter and a five-piece band, including Cody and Davies, recently made their live debut in Europe, before heading off to America to tour. Reviews have bordered on the ecstatic, with Carpenter and co playing selections from his most iconic films, with accompanying clips on a backdrop, alongside choice selections from both Lost Themes albums.

He’s also just reissued the themes from Halloween, Escape From New York, Assault On Precinct 13 and The Fog on spanking new vinyl.

How did Lost Themes II develop?

We decided to do another record, and this time around, Cody and Daniel and I were all in the same town at the same time. The first Lost Themes album was done over a period of years. We would record some stuff, then Cody went off to Japan to teach English. So when we got the record deal, Daniel helped me finish it up, while Cody would send sketches over from the Far East via computer.

When it came to this one though, all three of us being in the same town together meant it was a much more immediate experience. That said, the idea is basically the same – every person has a movie running in their head and this is the soundtrack for it. We all brought sketches of ideas and our own stuff into it, so it was a real collaborative effort.

Lost Themes II sounds heavier and more organic than its predecessor…

Look, we’re naturally rocky people! It just sort of worked out that way.

Some of the titles alone are intriguing: Persia Rising, Angel’s Asylum, White Pulse – and not forgetting Windy Death…

[Laughing] That’s Cody’s. I decided on the names of these songs, incidentally, much to his chagrin. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the titles on Lost Themes were all one word. The titles on Lost Themes II are all two words. We’ll have to see if there’s a Lost Themes III and how they’ll work out.

To have a second career, at my time of life, is like, “Are you kidding me? Wow!”

Tell me about Bela Lugosi, another great piece…

That’s essentially Daniel’s inspiration. Daniel provided the impetus for the song Night, from the first album, which is very similar. He has a very unique approach and I just love to come along and play with him.

Dark Blues is a standout from Lost Themes II. How did that come together?

That was all based on hearing this arpeggiator on the synth [an arpeggiator creates a pattern from ‘listening’ to notes being played]. I thought, “Wow! Listen to that!” We started working with it, but the problem was that the arpeggiator was playing in triplets, so we all got screwed up. But we finally made it sound good.

I love the blues; I love that kind of feel. Daniel brought his incredible skills as a lead guitarist there. He knew exactly what to do. Then there’s a song like Distant Dream. I always wanted to do something that kicks ass and it’s partly a homage to Tangerine Dream. If you listen closely you can hear a little of Sorcerer [1977] creeping in there.

Were you ever tempted, at any point during the album sessions, to add a vocal?

No. This is all music for soundtracks, the brain’s soundtrack. The idea is to turn the lights off in your place of residence, sit down, put the music on, close your eyes and start to have a waking dream. And let the music be the soundtrack. It might even inspire people to create movies that could be scored with this music.

We had such a blast making this album. It was all about enjoying ourselves and having fun. And I don’t have to go through the bullshit of making movies. There were no pressures, no actors or crew asking what they’re supposed to do. And no cutting room to deal with.

The idea was to make my music fuller, because we had unlimited tracks to play around with. We just wanted to make it sound moody. And to have a second career, at my time of life, is like, “Are you kidding me? Wow!”

I listened to Procol Harum big time. And The Beatles of course… music was my first immediate love

That raises the question: why didn’t you do this earlier?

I never thought about it. And no one ever asked me, that’s the big thing. But I got a new music attorney and she asked me if I had anything new. I said, “Here, listen to this,” and played her the stuff I’d been doing with Cody. And all of a sudden I had a record deal. It just came out of nowhere.

Given that Lost Themes was one of the biggest sellers in Sacred Bones Records’ history, was it a no-brainer that there would be a follow-up?

No, not at all. I had to ask them: “Do you guys want another one?” The people at the label are so supportive of the kind of stuff we’re doing. We discuss many things and, of course, they have input into what gets released.

Going back to your formative years, your dad was a classical violinist, music teacher and session musician. So was music a huge part of your childhood?

Oh yeah. And I used to go with him to these sessions. You have no idea what it was like to be sitting there and seeing Roy Orbison. It was unbelievable. He would wear sunglasses all the time and had a guy who’d sing harmony with him, who also wore sunglasses. My dad played on one of Orbison’s biggest hits, In Dreams. I never met Patsy Cline, but I did meet Brenda Lee. My dad played with her on I’m Sorry. He also recorded with [pianist] Floyd Cramer and a whole lot of other people.

You grew up listening to classical music, but also to The Doors, the Stones and Procol Harum…

I listened to Procol Harum big time. And The Beatles of course. I loved music – it was my first immediate love. But my true calling was cinema. I fell in love with movies.

You were in a rock’n’roll band in high school, called Kaleidoscope. Did you want to be a musician?

Sure. I grew up in a little town in Kentucky [Bowling Green] during the 50s and put together a little band with friends. We’d play at fraternity parties and I’d be on electric bass or guitar. We’d be doing our set, watching these fraternity members get completely drunk and trying to grope their girlfriends. It was fun; we made some money. But I came to a crossroads in my life where I thought, “What the hell am I going to do? I can’t just keep on doing this.” That’s when I went off to California to learn how to make movies.

When did you first come across the music of one of your big influences, Bernard Herrmann?

The Day The Earth Stood Still [1951] was the big one for me. The music was scary, as a kid. I wish the movie had been a little scarier, but Herrmann’s music was like, “Wow!” And then Vertigo, North By Northwest and, of course, Psycho. I grew up watching all those great Hitchcock movies he made soundtracks for.

Dave Davies’ music was haunting and dark and heroic. I loved it

Herrmann created emotionally charged scores that were also very minimal…

That was the main reason why I was so drawn to Bernard Herrmann. It gave me hope as a composer. My lot was all-functional. When you’re a student filmmaker, or a low-budget filmmaker, you have no money to hire a composer or an orchestra, so I had to do it myself. I was cheap and I was fast, so that’s why I did it.

Bernard Herrmann was inspirational because he got maximum effects from real simple means and simple chord progressions. He had this ability to create a powerful score using only limited orchestra means, using basic sounds like high strings or low bass. Psycho, which was a big inspiration for Halloween, mostly just used string instruments for its soundtrack. So I thought to myself, “Hell, I’m no goo,d really – I can’t play very well, but maybe I can make my way through this with a synthesiser.” That’s how it all started.

So you started composing music for film through necessity?

Exactly. There was no other choice.

How much of an influence on you was Dimitri Tiomkin as a composer?

He was huge for me – a giant. He was so much more accomplished, musically, than I am, so I could never really get to where he was. But he was just such an amazing composer.

There are modern-day composers I admire too. I’m very big on Hans Zimmer, for instance. He has to be my favourite. Like some of the great masters, his stuff is really memorable and transformative. And I also like some of the stuff that Trent Reznor has done.

You’ve been associated with rock musicians too. You’re good friends with Dave Davies, with whom you worked on your 1995 remake of Village Of The Damned…

I was always a big Kinks fan and it was really fun to get together for that movie. Dave sent me a cassette of a musical idea that guided the direction for the soundtrack of Village Of The Damned. Dave’s music was haunting and dark and heroic. I loved it. We worked with the Robb Brothers at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles and ended up with a score that combined live instruments with synthesisers. When our compositions came out of the speakers, they’d been transformed into one of the most romantic scores I’ve ever done.

The music from Forbidden Planet takes me back to an innocent time when I believed there was an invisible monster stalking me

I love working with other musicians. Musicians have a whole different vibe to movie people, it’s just a whole different ball game. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, but they’re snobs in a different way. Let’s just put it like that.

What was the first synthesiser score that grabbed you?

There was only one, and that was Forbidden Planet [1956]. I was eight years old when I first saw that movie and the soundtrack was different to everything else I’d ever heard. I knew it was created on a synthesiser – though I didn’t know what that meant exactly – and that it was electronic music.

The Barrons [Bebe and Louis], the husband and wife team who composed it, did it with relays and all sorts of methods that seem crude by today’s standards. But man, the impact of that was just unbelievable. I still appreciate that music now – it gives me chills whenever I hear it. And it takes me back to an innocent time when I believed there was an invisible monster stalking me.

Your synthesiser scores of the 70s – Dark Star, Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween – were strikingly different to most other film soundtracks of the time, which were often orchestral or rooted in jazz and funk. Yours seemed futuristic by comparison.

Yeah, that’s true. I remember we had two weeks to do the scoring sessions for Halloween, because that’s all the budget would allow. There was some other great stuff around in the 70s too though, like Tangerine Dream. Sorcerer is a very underrated movie, with an incredible score. It still sounds like nothing else I’ve heard. And some of Dario Argento’s early Italian movies introduced me to the work of Goblin, whose music was just incredible on Suspiria [1977]. Have you ever heard that soundtrack? It’s unbelievable. So there was other unusual stuff being done in various places.

When it came to doing soundtracks, sometimes I’d have a basic theme or a sketch, something I’d put together and started working on at home, but mostly it was all improvisation.

I told Ennio to come up with something very simple… something that even I could play

Talking of Goblin and Tangerine Dream, were you ever a fan of progressive music?

I’m still not quite sure exactly what it is, but my son Cody is a huge fan of progressive music. He loves it. And, of course, he is Ludrium, which is a progressive rock act.

Did the Suspiria soundtrack feed into Halloween?

Of course. But there was also Ennio Morricone’s work on those Italian films. He was an experimental composer and some of the sounds that he created were groundbreaking. His music was so memorable and so attached to the images on screen. And so moving, especially when you consider the score for Once Upon A Time In The West [1968]. You can’t get better than that. It’s triumphant.

You finally got the chance to work with Morricone on 1982’s The Thing. Bearing in mind he doesn’t speak any English, how did you manage to communicate?

Not very well! Not speaking the same language meant that we had to use interpreters. He was a very kind and compassionate man. A wonderful man. The main collaboration we did was working on the main title for The Thing. I just told him to come up with something very simple, because he was composing general pieces that were very involved. But I wanted something basic, something that even I could play. So that’s what he did. In fact, we’ve been playing that at the live shows.

Was there much trepidation about making your live debut as a performing musician earlier this year?

Of course. I was scared to death! But it’s been a blast so far. I get up there, this old man walking out on stage. I have a rock’n’roll band, because a lot of my scores are rock’n’roll-based. And of course I have Cody and Daniel with me. But we play a lot of themes from my movies and also a lot of songs from the two albums, Lost Themes I and II. There’s visuals too, so it’s an entertaining evening for all, hopefully.

Do you plan to keep on making music and playing more live dates now?

This whole thing came about after Cody and Daniel convinced me to do it. They said to me, “Well, how great would it be to tour with us?” I said, “You know what? You’re right.” So the honest answer is: I don’t know. We’ll just have to see how it goes and take it from there. People haven’t booed me yet when I’ve stepped out onto the stage, which is always a good sign.

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes. Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.