Race is just one factor that set them apart: Before Jimi's Experience and Sly's Family Stone, Love was an integrated rock band, its sound the result of some odd musical cross-pollination. Though Lee grew up emulating crossover artists like Nat King Cole, he was struck by the chiming sound of the Byrds and the foppish pose of such Brit bands as the Kinks and the Stones. "Lee wanted to bring in very traditional folk elements, very light almost 'white' tones,' " producer Harvey Kubernick told the L.A. New Times in a recent piece on Love. "He wasn't making dance music for your feet or body, he was making dance music for the mind."

Dance music for the mind. That's probably as good a description of psychedelic music as you'll find. That Love and the minds behind it shattered like a bottle only heightens the group's claim to the title of greatest California psychedelic band, for psychedelia ain't supposed to last. But there is sadness lurking behind much of Love's sound -- sadness, confusion and sometimes anger.

"Their name should be Hate rather than Love," Peter Albin of Big Brother and the Holding Company groused at the time, and it's obvious that Love's edgy attitude didn't play in San Francisco's would-be utopia. But how authentic was that city's peace-and-love vibe? The Dead hung out with Hell's Angels and the Airplane were spoiled rich kids. Love was like a ticking time bomb; in any case, today Lee is doing a minimum of eight years in a state penitentiary and two of the band's original members are dead. The explosion at the end of "Seven & Seven Is," two minutes and 15 seconds of punk apocalypse, may be the punctuation they were looking for.

"I started playing guitar when I was about 17," Lee told the New Times, "but I started playing on washtubs at the age of 3 or 4." After fronting for a few garage bands, Lee saw the Byrds perform and that was all she wrote. Hooking up with former Byrds roadie Bryan MacLean, Lee founded Love and married Roger McGuinn's circular guitar style to his own pained lyrics. It was like shadows on a sunny day ("Can you find your way/Or do you want my vision?/It's dark there they say/But that's just superstition"), and some say the tension in Love's songs came from the chemistry Lee forged with MacLean. A handsome blond rich kid from Beverly Hills, a kid who dated Liza Minneli in high school, MacLean was Love's unsung hero. To his utter frustration, the group only recorded four of his songs (including the hypnotic "Alone Again Or") but his playing and singing are everywhere.

The impact Love had on Elektra music founder Jac Holzman was immediate. Though Elektra was a folk label (Judy Collins and Tom Paxton two of its big names), they were on the prowl for something electric when Holzman heard Love's cover of "Little Red Book." The song, taken from the film "What's New, Pussycat?," was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and was only hip in a square way (who the hell had a little red book?); it was Love's pulsating beat -- the descending bass line, the tambourine -- and Lee's strangled vocal that brought the song to life. "Five guys of all colors: black, white and psychedelic," Holzman recalled in his autobiography. "My heart skipped a beat."

Love's first album, "Love," had the Byrds stamped all over it: chiming guitars, plangent vocals, choir-boy harmonies, most in service to radio-friendly ditties (a huge hit locally, "Little Red Book" only went to No. 52 nationwide). But there was something unique here too: a sense of childlike loss and yearning in the heartfelt "A Message to Pretty" ("I go slip-slip/You go slip-slip/Away"), a realistic depiction of junkie life in "Signed D.C." (named after a former band mate) and bad vibes abundant. Lee sang of "little children dying in an age of hate" on "Mushroom Clouds" and brought down lots of listeners. The songs were rife with drug references, and not the nice kind. "Don't force your smuggled drugs my way," he sang on "My Flash on You," "Cause I cleansed my soul and that's how it's going to stay."

So much for good intentions. By the time the band was gearing up for its second album, everyone was pretty wasted. Heroin was a factor, with at least one member becoming strung out, but Lee was, according to many, on acid 24/7. The band now lived together in a Gothic mansion once owned by Bela Lugosi; its destroyed fireplace and spiral staircase appear in most of the Love photo shoots. The songs on "Da Capo" (1966) reflected the songwriter's state of mind. The whimsical "Que Vida!" almost seems like a parody of a hippie song, punctuated with what sounds like a pop gun. It is on the album's fourth track, "Seven & Seven Is," that Love reached ground zero. Launched by an insistent, rolling-thunder drumbeat (courtesy of new drummer Michael Stuart) and propelled by slashing guitars, the song is like a rocket lifting Lee's bizarre missive into the stratosphere:

When I was a boy I thought about the times I'd be a man
I'd sit inside a bottle and pretend I was in a can
In my lonely room I'd sit my mind in an ice cream cone
You can throw me if you wanna 'cause I'm a bone and I go
Oop-ip-ip, oop-ip-ip, yeah!

Profound nonsense, a miracle of self-abnegation; if Iggy wanted to be your dog, Arthur was a bone, a barking moron in the basement who might save the world -- or kill your family. The song crescendos with a sound like crashing surf above Lee's hushed panting and then a countdown to apocalypse. "Seven & Seven Is" went to No. 33 nationally -- the band's biggest hit -- and still smolders like a volcano today. "I was born in 'Da Capo'," Lee later told Lenny Kaye, and Love seemed primed for the big time. But 1967 saw the release of their masterpiece and the end of their chances for commercial success simultaneously. Elektra put its money on the Doors while Love seemed content ruling Sunset Boulevard -- "Between Clark and Hilldale," as one song title had it. "I don't think they were willing to travel and go through all the games and numbers you have to," Jim Morrison said -- numbers that included playing at Monterey Pop, the record companies' premier showcase for new talent in 1967.

By all accounts, the recording of "Forever Changes" was a fiasco. Band members were often so out of it they couldn't perform and studio stalwarts the Wrecking Crew actually laid down many of the tracks. The ultimate effect was dreamlike, alternately soft and focused. "This is rather like a soundtrack from an LSD movie," Dave Marsh wisecracked, and there is a dated, trippy-hippie feel to a lot of the music. If this is a concept album, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what the concept is: Aimless rebellion, self-conscious poetry, oblique jokes and flashes of madness swirl about, often in the same line. On the flamenco-influenced opener, "Alone Again Or," Lee shares vocals with MacLean, as strings and mariachi horns carry them aloft.

Yeah, I heard a funny thing
Somebody said to me
That I could be in love with almost everyone
I think that people are the greatest fun
And I will be alone again tonight my dear

In a single self-contradictory lyric Love refuted the very, well, love that was flooding the airwaves. The other side of the transcendental experience was isolation -- an isolation that felt all the more acute in the Summer of Love. Small wonder the band broke up immediately afterward -- several members were in need of recovery and MacLean had a religious conversion when he tasted a drink turning to sand in his mouth. Jesus quenched his thirst after that -- he died of a heart attack in December 1998 (original bass player Ken Forssi died of brain cancer the same year).

And Lee, well, suffice it to say that the true stories are almost as bad as the apocryphal ones. Though he did not blow his brains out on stage or kill a roadie, he could be found panhandling on Sunset in the '80s, oblivious to former colleagues. After "Forever Changes," Lee recorded two albums with new Loves and two solo LPs (a collaborative effort with Jimi Hendrix was never released). In 1992, Lee released a new record in France as Arthur Lee and Love; touring with several indie bands here and abroad he drove fans over the wall with the old songs. "He looked very healthy, was in fine voice and was bounding all over the stage," one U.K. fan wrote online of a '96 show.

Unfortunately, Lee's wayward ways caught up with him in September of 1996 when a judge sentenced him to eight to 12 years for pointing a pistol at a neighbor. All a misunderstanding, Lee insists from his new home at Pleasant Valley state prison in Coalinga. But it was one that followed several other misunderstandings involving weapons and spousal abuse, and in three-strikes California the judge saw no reason to be lenient, upbraiding Lee for (among other things) driving without car insurance since 1963.

Personally, I think it's amazing Lee even had a license all those years. If half the stories that remain are true, it's a miracle that the hammer didn't come down sooner (he did two years on an arson charge in the '80s -- another misunderstanding). To cast him as the innocent, the butterfly broken upon the wheel, ignores Lee's role in all of this. "Arthur's a master con man," producer Botnick has said and there is something of the hustler to his legacy. The scene Love was on the margins of was the same one that produced the Manson family, and echoes of the band's hedonism can be heard in the transcendent despair of L.A. groups as diverse as Jane's Addiction and X. Was Love important? Do they deserve to have a burger named after them at the Hard Rock Cafe? For that you'd have to ask Arthur Lee who might simply sing the final lines of "Seven & Seven Is":

Through a crack of light I was able to find my way
Trapped inside a night but I'm a day and I go
Oop-ip-ip, oop-ip-ip, yeah!