Love Jumped Through My Window

When a rare record unexpectedly brightens a grim couple of days

I spent much of this past weekend feeling completely exhausted, thanks to another week of absolutely brutal heat and humidity, the immediate fallout of Saturday night’s horror show — including but not limited to the deluge of misinformation, prognostications, conspiracy theories and bad-faith hot takes, as well as the several Trump flag-flying trucks being driven aggressively through my and my girlfriend’s rural neighborhoods by various bros who were clearly itching to throw down in the name of their bloodied king-daddy — and the sadly overwhelming sense that this country is getting meaner and shittier by the minute.

And then, once again, Arthur Lee came to the rescue.

The late, great Love leader has been on my mind a lot lately, both because

Tony Fletcher

and I just recorded a new episode of our CROSSED CHANNELS podcast about him and his band (which will be up tomorrow for all of our paid subscribers to enjoy in its entirety) and because I’m fittin’ to see some of his old bandmates performing as Love Revisited in Edinburgh and Glasgow in a little over a week.

But I really wasn’t expecting Arthur to show up at my pad on Sunday afternoon, in the form of a rare single that I’d been in search of for years.

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It was my pal Chris who unwittingly gave him entry. An acquaintance of Chris’s had given him several boxes of old singles to look at, on the chance that he might want to buy some of them — and knowing what a fiend I am for vinyl of the seven-inch variety, Chris kindly brought them over to my place so that I could go through them, as well. This alone was welcome medicine for me, as I find few things as relaxing and centering as digging through a bin or box of dusty 45s.

The first few boxes we looked at were largely filled with common sides from the original rock n’ roll era — Elvis, Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker, etc. — and early-sixties folkie stuff like “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” by The Highwaymen. But around box number three, I started pulling weird early-seventies US releases from semi-obscure UK prog bands (Caravan! Patto! Fresh Meat!) and several rock bands that I’d never even heard of before (Wool and Pepper Tree among them, neither of which were very good). And then, to my complete astonishment, I churned up a promo copy of “Everybody’s Gotta Live”/“Love Jumped Through My Window,” the first of two singles from Arthur Lee’s ill-fated 1972 album Vindicator.

There’s so much about this single that brings me joy. For one thing, it contains two of my favorite Vindicator tracks; the A-side is a pleasingly pragmatic mantra that sounds like a Laurel Canyon cousin of John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!”, and the flip is a bluesy hard rocker with a wonderfully vibrant vocal performance. For another, the label is stamped with that classic A&M Records logo, which of course immediately makes me think of Herb Alpert.

I don’t know much about Arthur’s brief stint on Herb’s label, and have no idea if their paths ever even crossed during the course of it; indeed, it was more likely Herb’s partner Jerry Moss who signed the once and future Love leader to a one-album solo deal. But there are moments in Love’s catalog (specifically “Alone Again Or” and “Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale” from Forever Changes) that sure make it seem like Arthur was a big Tijuana Brass fan, so it’s easy to imagine him and Herb hanging out and shooting the shit about their favorite Burt Bacharach records. (Then again, it’s also easy to imagine Arthur saying something deeply offensive to Herb and blowing the whole deal right there.) In any case, by the time of Vindicator, the horns, strings and baroque arrangements that had characterized much of Love’s early catalog were a thing of the distant past, now replaced by swaggering, bare-knuckled guitar rock.

I hadn’t heard a single note of Vindicator — nor had I even heard of it — when I stumbled across a used promo copy of the LP in a bin at the Westsider Rare & Used Books store on Broadway between 80th and 81st in Manhattan during the fall of 1989. They wanted $18 for it, which was a trifle high for my record budget at the time, but I also knew I’d probably never see the album in the wild again. (I still haven’t.)

I have to admit that Vindicator freaked me out a little bit once I got it home and played it. As much as I loved the hard-rocking music, Arthur’s vocals and lyrics definitely gave the impression of someone in a fair degree of psychic pain — or, at the very least, dealing with some drug-induced fragmentation of the ego — and the album’s artwork only furthered that impression. The album’s cover shows him both as a clean-cut, broom-pushing janitor and a berobed and bewigged rock star awkwardly carrying a Dan Armstrong lucite guitar; and the gatefold illustrations are laid out like an incoherent scrapbook. There’s Arthur happily kicking it with Jimi Hendrix; there’s Arthur moodily kicking it with his homing pigeons; there’s Arthur looking goofy and overweight in an unflattering shirt; there’s toddler Arthur with his mom, giving the camera the same piercing, eyebrow-raising “Say what?” look I would see cross his face from time to time in the 1990s.

I sure loved the album, though; and that promo copy is one of the few that I really regret selling off when I hit some dire financial straits around 2007. So the discovery of this Arthur Lee single on Sunday not only brought a couple of Vindicator’s songs back to my turntable after too long an absence, but it also momentarily transported me back to a period in my life where the future still felt more exciting than terrifying, where amazing vinyl treasures could still be unearthed across the street from Zabar’s, and where my knowledge and understanding of Love and Arthur Lee was still expanding in all directions. Those were sweet times, and it did me a world of good to be able to relive them again.

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