Love - Da Capo - Alternate Version (1966)

Love is justly celebrated for its 1967 album "Forever Changes." That album is on all the lists of the top 100 albums of all time. Their 1966 album "Da Capo" is similarly excellent... except for one problem. This is an effort to fix it.

The problem is actually two fold. The first is that the album is only 35 minutes long. (Forever Changes was 42 minutes long, and other albums of the time were up to 50 minutes long.) That, by itself, wouldn't be so bad, except that more than half of the album ended up being on song, the 19-minute long "Revelation."

That also wouldn't have been a problem had "Revelation" been a great song, perhaps like "A Quick One While He's Away" by the Who that same year, which was a suite with many diverse parts. But unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Most listeners were bored by "Revelation," and thus generally only listened to the other side of the album, which is only 17 minutes worth of music.  

Here are some quotes from the Wikipedia entry on the album: "The album's critical reputation has suffered as a result of the inclusion of 'Revelation.'"

Also, the entry quotes Richie Unterberger writing for AllMusic: "It's only half a great album, though; the seventh and final track, 'Revelation,' is a tedious 19-minute jam that keeps Da Capo from attaining truly classic status."

Thus, my fix to the album was to get rid of "Revelation" and replace it with some other songs. But actually, it's not a bad song, in my opinion, it just goes on waaaaaay too long. So I edited it down to a "mere" nine minutes (instead of 19) and kept it on the album. Then, luckily, there were two good Love songs from the era to add, one of them a B-side and the other an outtake.

That still would have left it a very short album though, but also luckily, there are some demos from band member Bryan MacLean that are quite good. The band was dominated by Arthur Lee, who wrote and sang most of the songs, but MacLean was occasionally allowed a song or two, such as "Orange Skies" on this album (though it's sung by Lee) and "Alone Again Or" on "Forever Changes," possibly the band's best known song. Clearly, MacLean was a talented songwriter and should have been allowed more songs on each album. His frustration with this caused him to leave the band in 1968.

I picked out what I consider to be the four best MacLean demos from the 1966 and 1967 era and added them to the second half of the album. Unfortunately they're all acoustic guitar demos only, so they sound somewhat different from the rest of the album, but I think they're good songs that match the quality of the rest of the album.
 
Had Lee been more inclusive and included more of MacLean's work instead of using half of the album for a single song, we might be talking about two Love albums being all time classics instead of just one.

01 Stephanie Knows Who (Love)
02 Orange Skies (Love)
03 Que Vida (Love)
04 Seven and Seven Is (Love)
05 The Castle (Love)
06 She Comes in Colors (Love)
07 Blues Singer (Bryan MacLean)
08 Revelation [Edit] (Love)
09 Tired of Sitting (Bryan MacLean)
10 No. Fourteen (Love)
11 Barber John (Bryan MacLean)
12 Love Will Be Here (Bryan MacLean)
13 Wonder People [I Do Wonder] (Love)

https://www.imagenetz.de/iAsnt

The cover is the exact same cover of the "Da Capo" album.