AS THE volatile frontman and enigmatic main songwriter with the band Love, Arthur Lee will be best remembered for the psychedelic classic Forever Changes, which is regularly voted by critics as being among the top ten albums of all time. Released at the height of 1967’s “summer of love”, Forever Changes came to represent a unique moment in popular culture and is still finding new adherents almost 40 years on.

Love split up soon after releasing Forever Changes and Lee’s subsequent solo career was erratic, and marred by drug addiction and a lengthy spell in prison. But on his release in 2001, he began touring again with a new Love line-up, performing Forever Changes at a series of triumphant concerts before audiences made up almost equally of ageing hippies and fans not born when the record was released.

Arthur Lee Porter was born in 1945 in Memphis, Tennessee, and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was young. His first band, the LAG’s, was an instrumental outfit playing R&B and surf tunes and also included the future Love member Johnny Echols. Lee played organ and wrote surfing songs such as White Caps and Ski Surfin’ Sanctuary. He also had some success as a songwriter for other artists, writing My Diary, a minor R&B hit for Rosa Lee Brooks. The guitarist on the session was an unknown Jimi Hendrix, and he remained a close friend until his death in 1970.

When the LAG’s broke up after one 1964 single called The Ninth Wave, Lee formed The American Four, recording the single Luci Baines, and sang lead vocals on an album by Ronnie And The Pamona Casuals. These early recordings were mundane pop fare by a musician still trying to find his own voice and style. By early 1965 he was on the way to doing so with the Grass Roots, a folk-rock band whose combination of jangling guitars with a backbeat Lee claimed predated the similar sound patented by the Byrds. When it transpired that there was already a group with the name the Grass Roots, Lee renamed his band Love, possibly in honour of Bobby Beausoleil, briefly a guitarist with the group whose nickname was Cupid and who later joined Charles Manson’s “family”.

Like the Byrds, Love built a following during the summer of 1965 playing clubs on LA’s Sunset Strip, including Bido Lito’s, where it had a residency. But the Byrds were first to be signed to a record deal and had an instant number one with their version of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man. Lee felt an intense rivalry but the Byrds’ success led directly to Love becoming the first rock group to sign to the folk label Elektra in early 1966.

By then Lee had recruited Echols and Bryan MacLean on guitars, Ken Forssi on bass and Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer on drums and it was this line-up that recorded the band’s 1966 self-titled debut album. Although the influence of the Beatles and the Byrds was clear, the album was hard to categorise for it also included elements of R&B, proto-punk, the emerging sounds of psychedelia and garage rock. Most of the songs were Lee originals, although the album included an extraordinary version of Bacharach and David’s My Little Red Book.

Lee was one of the very few black musicians at the time playing rock’n’roll for an essentially white college audience. Hendrix and Sly Stone would soon follow, but Lee was arguably the archetype of the psychedelic black musician.

The second Love album, Da Capo, in early 1967, was more fully developed, and contained six exquisite Lee compositions, including 7 and 7 Is, their only top 40 single.

In June that year, Love began recording Forever Changes with its organic, free-flowing quality that still sounds as fresh today as it did then. However, the album charted at only 154 in America. Although it made number 24 in Britain, its status is almost entirely posthumous, but it was highly influential on other bands at the time, including Pink Floyd.

Amost immediately following its release, the band split up. Several of its members had developed chronic heroin habits and Lee was bitterly disappointed by the critical failure of his magnum opus. Seeing the success of heavy rock groups, he sacked the band, turned up the volume and began recording in a more bludgeoning style with session men. The result was 1969’s Four Sail but it was a pale shadow of Forever Changes. Following a move from Elektra to Blue Thumb, the double set Out Here followed later the same year and False Start appeared in 1970. The latter bore the strong influence of Hendrix who featured on one track, but again came nowhere near recapturing the glory of 1967. At the end of 1970, Lee disbanded Love and disappeared for the next two years.

He re-emerged with the weak solo set, Vindicator, in 1972 and, in the light of its commercial failure, the follow-up Black Beauty was not released. In 1974 he formed a new version of Love in which he was the only original member and the resulting album Reel To Real again disappointed.

In the late 1970s and 1980s there were several attempts to revive the band for touring purposes with founder member Bryan MacLean, but there were no new recordings until the appearance of Arthur Lee and Love on a French label in 1992. With interest in the band at a new height after The Damned had charted with a cover of Alone Again Or, he began touring more rigorously, backed by the band Baby Lemonade.

In 1995, however, he was arrested twice, first for allegedly burning down an ex-girlfriend’s apartment and then for firing a handgun outside his home after a neighbour had asked him to turn down his music system. In 1996 he was given an eight to 12-year jail sentence, partly because of an earlier drugs offence. He served five years and was released in December 2001.

While he was in jail, Elektra had released a two-disc anthology and an expanded edition of Forever Changes and Lee found himself fêted by a new generation of bands and music fans, particularly in Europe where Love had always enjoyed a larger following than in America. He recommenced touring and in 2003 triumphantly staged Forever Changes in its entirety, complete with a string orchestra and horns. The show was released on CD and DVD.

He had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia diagnosed in April this year. In June, a number of famous musicians, led by the former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant, played a benefit concert in New York to raise funds to help to pay his medical bills.

He is survived by his wife, Diane, who was at his bedside when he died.

Arthur Lee, musician, was born on March 7, 1945. He died on August 3, 2006, aged 61.