The opening track of Forever Changes is such a remarkable thing, the more I think about it. It's so delicately arranged, with that wonderful Mariachi-styled trumpet solo - you'd almost miss the sadness that permeats the song.
The thing that defines it is schizophreny. The title already suggests a lingering, an uncertainty, and the lyrics bring it home. A line as wonderfully optimistic as I think that people are the greatest fun is followed up, oddly enough, by and I will be alone again tonight my dear. The conjuction there suggests there is an obvious causal relation, but I don't quite see it.
Interestingly enough, the double feeling of this, their most famous, song, is symbolic for the band. One of only two songs on Forever Changes written by Bryan MacLean, yet sung by Arthur Lee. MacLean was the outgoing one of the band, and was deeply immersed in the West Coast hippie scene with The Doors and The Beach Boys. Arthur Lee, on the other hand, spent the summer of love as a recluse in his mansion on the hill: sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die. Because of both his distance and proximity to the scene, he foresaw more than anyone how the counterculture movement would implode. It is almost as if MacLean gave Lee part of the lyrics, and the latter appended his own grim observations to it. It's both the beauty, hope and optimism of the idealogy of the times, and the paranoia and disillusion that would follow, all wrapped up in one wonderful three-minute song.
