Love - Out Here - Alternate Version (1969)

First off, I want to say that I think "Forever Changes" is one of the greatest albums of all time, but you're missing out if you think that's the only album by that band worth owning. The group put out a lot of great music, both before and after that. For instance, Love's "Four Sail" album from 1969 is a solid album all the way through. But after that album, the quality Love songs got increasingly mixed in with subpar songs, with each album generally being worse than the one before.

This is an attempt to fix that, for at least one album. "Forever Changes" come out in 1967. I don't know why, but Love only put out a single in 1968. That meant that by 1969, which by this point was effectively Arthur Lee and a bunch of supporting musicians, had a backlog of songs to deal with. The group owed one more album to their record company, and that company was allowed to pick an album's worth of songs. That became "Four Sail." There were still so many leftover songs though that Love released the double album "Out Here" just three months later, still in 1969.

In retrospect, releasing a double album instead of a single album was a big mistake, because there was about one album's worth of quality music left. So what I've done here is very simple: I just took the 70 or so minutes of "Out There" and boiled it down to the best music, about 44 minutes' worth. In this case, less is more.

But it gets a bit trickier, because two of the songs were quite good, but also way, waaaay too long. First is "Doggone." This is a 12 minute song. The first three minutes is a typical quality Love song, then the next nine minutes is a boring drum solo. Lee later admitted that it was a mistake to ruin the album flow by having a long drum solo there. In 1982, a weird hodgepodge album of previously released Love material called "Studio - Live" came out. On that album, they edited "Doggone" down to just the first three minutes before the drum solo, so that's the version I've used.

The other song that's way too long is "Love Is More than Words or Better Late than Never." This is an 11 minute long song. The first minute has interesting chords, melody, and lyrics. But suddenly that part of the song stops and the next ten minutes is one long guitar solo, vamping over the same two chords over and over again. I actually like the soloing for a while, but not for ten minutes. And it seemed to me a shame that the rest of the song was limited to just one minute. So what I did was edit the guitar solo down to just the first three minutes. Then I took the first minute of the song and had it repeat at the end, making it a five minute long song. So yeah, I took so major liberties with the editing here, but I think the song works much better this way.

Cutting down those two songs shortened the album by about 15 minutes. I cut out about another ten minutes by removing some other songs that just weren't very good. I think the album works much better this way. Now, in my opinion, it's just as strong as "Four Sail," even though it's the "leftovers," because Lee had a lot more than one albums' worth of good songs in 1969.

Interestingly, the logic of cutting the album down is so obvious that the record company also gave it a try. In 1988, they released the album "Out There" (as opposed to "Out Here"), which was the album cut way down, and then some songs from the next album "False Start" added in as well. But there were some problems with that. For instance, "Love Is More than Words or Better Late than Never" was cut from 11 minutes down to just two minutes, which was too short. And the addition of the "False Start" songs changed it into something else. Trust me, this version is better.

01 I'll Pray for You (Love)
02 Abalony (Love)
03 Signed D.C. (Love)
04 Listen to My Song (Love)
05 Stand Out (Love)
06 Doggone [Edit] (Love)
07 I Still Wonder (Love)
08 Love Is More than Words or Better Late than Never [Edit] (Love)
09 Nice to Be (Love)
10 Run to the Top (Love)
11 Willow Willow (Love)
12 You Are Something (Love)
13 Gather Round (Love)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16695515/LOVEE1969_OutHreAlternte_atse.zip.html

The cover is just the "Out Here" cover with no changes.