A lot of folks (esp. music journalist) continue to ask us how we came to play in Love. I come across Love fans everywhere and, being in a vintage guitar shop, as soon as anyone from the UK comes in on their holiday they immediately ask Rusty and I if we are in Baby Lemonade. Actually, we’ve had people from Italy, Australia…heck, even South America! Now, to put that in perspective, when Chapple and I were booking the Temple Bar gig, the booker had never heard of Arthur Lee, Baby Lemonade or Love! I LIVE DOWN THE ROAD FROM THE TEMPLE BAR! If you live in LA and are 40 years old or less, you probably either had cool parents or cool older siblings or just hung out with friends with good taste IF YOU KNOW ARTHUR and LOVE’s music. I still meet people in their 50’s and 60’s who actually saw Love back on the Sunset Strip. It must be terrible for them to have watched their city’s creative spirit and clubs vanish into thin air over the past decades.

Well, I’ve titles this “The Real Story” but I actually won’t really ‘get to’ the story i want to tell in this diary, as the time has flown past me and I have to take my son to summer camp in venice, put some diesel in my ’79 Mercedes and then go to the guitar shop. But I do have an interesting story and Glenn and i have been talking about teaming up and getting a cool book together. The basic premise is how Baby Lemonade got the Love gig to begin with and how we thought it was gonna be just a handful of gigs and then he’d move on. That handful turned into hundreds and hundreds of gigs! The first 100 shows were documented (from my hand written diaries) as “Countdowns” on Freedom Man’s site. Our book will be more in that vein but will document EVERY LIVE PERFORMANCE and our idea is to have a few comments (even a short story or two?) from band members, ensemble members and fans who witnessed a particular show and thus, showing the different perspectives.

I got this idea after receiving an email from a Love fan who expressed how much he enjoyed a gig we did. i remember the gig WELL and thought it was one of our worst. I think Johnny and the Baby Lemonades would agree with me. Arthur liked the show, probably. We didn’t know it at the time but he was in pain and heavily medicated. He did the best he could. When i think back on it, emotionally, it was a very powerful show. it kind of reminded me of a Brian Jonestown Massacre Show. We’ve done a few shows with the BJM and Anton and Arthur were not that far apart as intense performers. I know a lot of LA people don’t like them (for various reasons) but i always defend them, musically. They really do have the spirit of what’s missing these days and that’s one of the things Baby Lemonade (with and without Love) always try to bring to the stage; excitement, intensity, emotion.

So, this fan’s take on the gig was so different from my experience I had to dig further and we had a good email exchange for a while and it really changed my perspective on shows. What you experience and what I experience are sometimes quite different although we are LOOKING AT and HEARING the exact same thing.

Peace and Love, ya’ll…

Mike Randle