In Bloom Again

“Nice stripes!”

The shout from the packed audience at Spaceland seemed to silence the room for an instant. On the club’s small stage, Arthur Lee, who had just removed his jacket to reveal a shirt patterned with thin horizontal stripes, looked quizzically into the crowd as if trying to interpret the comment.

Was it a joking allusion to Lee’s recent five-year stay in state prison on a firearms charge? And would it unnerve the notoriously volatile singer, sending the latest comeback by the onetime king of L.A. rock skidding into the rubble of his career just minutes after it had begun?

“Nice stripes?” Lee repeated. “That’s easy for you to say!”

Lee smiled, the audience laughed, and the band kicked into another one of the songs that have kept his cult legend alive through thick and thin for 35 years. The comeback was back on. In his first performance in six years, just a few months after checking out of Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, the 57-year-old Lee was back where he started--enchanting the youth of Los Angeles with music that was raw and elegant, richly imaginative and utterly original.

This might not be the unlikeliest resurrection in pop history, but it will do for this year anyway. Lee (who plays tonight at the Knitting Factory) hadn’t simply faded away after his 1960s heyday--he’d become an all-purpose archetype of the classic rock casualty, a convenient subject for any rumor that would stick. He’d become a homeless panhandler, went one story. Or he’d shot himself in the head on stage. Or was strung out on heroin.

“Aw, man, that kind of stuff is crazy,” Lee says a couple of weeks after the Spaceland date. “I read that stuff while I was away.... They said I blew my brains out at the end of ‘7 and 7 Is.’ I couldn’t very well have done that and be sitting here talking to you. It’s all this ridiculous stuff. We hung our road manager. All kind of crazy things.”

Given all the mystery and the history, you’re prepared for lunch with a basket case as a meeting with Lee at a Studio City deli approaches, but during a 45-minute interview he’s clear and lucid enough, if somehow slightly distant. He’s never been crazy about interviews.

“I don’t want to do this stuff,” he says. “I saw a Jimi Hendrix documentary--who cares what he says? I don’t care what he says or bought in 1960, whatever it was. Or what a basketball player has to say at halftime. Make the shot, man. Give the guy the guitar, man. One-two-three, hit it, man, let’s do the song. I’d rather play the music and let it speak for me.”

He shakes his head, which is wrapped in an American flag bandanna and crowned by a black derby with a leopard-print band. His western shirt is an eye-catching blend of beige and vivid brick red, decorated with embroidered flowers. Others might tone things down at his age and under his circumstances, but Lee has always been one of a kind.

A teenage free spirit, Lee finished up at Dorsey High School and hit Hollywood in the mid-’60s, a hippie prototype whose musical tastes ranged from jazz to classical, blues to Beatles. He and his band, soon to settle on the name Love, quickly became the toast of the exploding L.A. music scene.

“Arthur Lee and Love, they were in charge,” recalls Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist of the Doors, who succeeded Love as the biggest band in town. “We would see them play the Whisky A Go-Go and think that one day we wanted to be like Love.

“They had those terrific songs. Arthur himself was enigmatic. He wasn’t particularly outgoing with the audience, but he was very intense and sort of possessed by darker forces.”

When Elektra Records released Love’s self-titled debut album in 1966, such songs as “My Little Red Book” (a Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition) and the searing single “7 and 7 Is” became part of the city’s aural fabric.

The second album, “Da Capo,” which is being reissued on May 13, marked the first time a single track (“Revelation”) filled an entire side of an LP. Lee’s talented partner in Love, the late singer-guitarist Bryan McLean, contributed the key tracks “Alone Again Or” and “Old Man” to 1967’s “Forever Changes,” an ambitious set of orchestrated pop that’s come to be regarded as one of rock’s overlooked classics.

Lee is still revered in music circles. The Scottish group Belle & Sebastian sometimes plays “Alone Again Or,” and Lenny Kravitz revives “My Flash on You” from the first album. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant cited Lee and Love in his acceptance speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. At Spaceland, the songs sounded like music that’s being created today all over the indie-rock map, especially in their mix of yearning idealism and dark undercurrents.

“Well, that’s pretty much the way life is, isn’t it?” Lee says. “I tried to write it as I saw it and felt it. Eerie and happy and all those things. I wanted something that would pass the test of time, and I think I might have done it. I don’t know.”

Although Love ruled L.A., Lee’s indifference to touring and other promotional obligations kept the band from reaching a national audience, and as drug problems undermined the band, he moved on to other lineups and lesser works. “False Start” in 1970 included a collaboration with his old friend Hendrix, and he released a solo album, “Vindicator,” in 1972, but he became increasingly elusive and was largely written off by a music business that he’d come to distrust.

“Arthur’s an eccentric,” says drummer Bruce Gary, who played with Lee in some Love lineups from the ‘70s and ‘80s and remains a friend of the singer. “He’s an artist, and he lives for his music. I can compare him to other people I was close to, like Harry Nilsson for instance. They went through strange periods in their lives. But when it came to playing he always gave 100%.”

In the ‘80s, Lee left the music world further behind as he cared for his stepfather, who was suffering from cancer. (He also racked up a felony conviction for malicious setting of a fire, which would later come back to haunt him.)

Lee emerged in the ‘90s, hiring the Los Angeles pop band Baby Lemonade to back him in 1993 and hooking up with a new manager, all of whom were surprised when Lee told them he had to go to court.

There he was convicted in 1996 for negligent discharge of a firearm and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Under provisions of the three-strikes law, his sentence topped out at 12 years and four months.

Last October an appeals court ruled that he was entitled to a new trial because of prosecution misconduct. Instead of risking another trial, Lee, who has always maintained his innocence, pleaded no contest in March and was sentenced to time served. He hopes to have his record reduced to a misdemeanor later this year.

Prison isn’t his favorite topic.

“It’s something that I’m gonna have to answer for a while in interviews, but let sleeping dogs lie. I don’t have any grudges or anything.... In this world bad things happen, and that happened to me. I had to discipline myself to have a whole lot of patience and faith in God, and my attorney of course.”

So now it’s comeback time. Of course the story will be better if it goes on for a while. Lee is looking forward to recording his new material, but for the old fans there will be shows packed with the classic songs, and plans to add some strings and horns to the band to celebrate the 35th anniversary of “Forever Changes.” If Brian Wilson can be guided into the headliner’s seat at the Hollywood Bowl with “Pet Sounds,” anything is possible.

His friends think it will work.

“He’s a different person,” says Baby Lemonade guitarist Mike Randle. “Arthur is at peace with himself. Arthur realizes what’s important. Arthur’s interested in playing music and writing music, making records and playing shows.... Playing this music is euphoric, and then you see how dedicated Arthur is in delivering the music. He doesn’t mess around, even in rehearsal.”

At the deli, Lee’s cell phone rings. He speaks briefly and hangs up.

“I’m trying to get a new place,” he explains. “They ran a check on me and they had the wrong Social Security number, of all things.” He laughs. “I’m glad it was just that.”

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Love with Arthur Lee plays tonight at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 8 p.m. $20. (323) 463-0204.