The enduring appeal of Johnny Echols and 1960s band Love (2024)

Almost six decades after Love's 1960s heyday, the band's lead guitarist Johnny Echols still marvels at the Los Angeles group's enduring appeal.

Cited as a major influence by countless artists, including Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, REM and Primal Scream, the band's 1967 album Forever Changes is regularly hailed as a masterpiece.

A group of Westminster MPs in 2002 even described it as "the greatest of all-time."

Johnny Echols is currently in the middle of a UK tour that sees the group take to the stage at Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival in the Highlands this weekend.

Billed as Love with Johnny Echols, the band recently sold out London's O2 Shepherds Bush Empire, where they played Forever Changes in full.

Guest strings and horns replicated the original album's orchestration on tracks like You Set the Scene and Alone Again, Or.

Echols said: “People sing along with us and chant things, it’s just touching – sometimes it almost brings me to tears to think we’ve lasted this long."

Aptly, the theme of this year's Belladrum festival is love.

And in a further twist, the band are playing the Grass Roots stage, Love's original name before a rival Grass Roots forced them to change it in 1965.

The 77-year-old is once again looking forward to the Scottish crowds.

He said: "We love Scotland, so this is going to be a blast.

"And we’re playing with our friends (Glasgow’s) The Fast Camels, so that’s just going to be great, we love them, they’re so cool.

"Scottish crowds have always been very respectful and responsive to our music, and we’ve loved playing here."

Echols is the co-founder of Love and the group's only original member.

Formed by Echols and his childhood friend, lead singer and songwriter Arthur Lee in 1965, the band's classic line-up released three albums before imploding after Forever Changes.

Lee led several different line-ups under the Love banner, before reuniting with Echols shortly before his death from leukaemia in 2006.

Robert Plant, who has named Forever Changes as one of his favourite records, was also in the crowd for the band's recent Birmingham show.

Echols said: "We go way back. He did a benefit show with us for Arthur at the Beacon Theatre in New York City when Arthur had leukaemia.

"Way back in the 60s, we met when Led Zeppelin hadn’t quite made it big yet.

"I always knew that Robert was an amazing frontman, he has vocal cords that are just astonishingly good."

The band headed to the UK just before America was rocked by the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and questions over Joe Biden's fitness to run for re-election.

Echols said: “It’s very strange. This has been building up for a long time, it’s not unexpected there would be problems and I think it’s going to get worse before it ever gets better, sadly.

"If we were a few years younger we’d move here."

The political climate of the US in the 1960s hampered the mixed-race band's attempts to play live beyond the east and west coasts.

Echols said: "That was kind of a hindrance because there were places in the US we could not play in the South and much of middle America.

"We were just persona non grata.

"Whereas The Doors, Buffalo Springfield and all those other groups were able to play all venues everywhere."

He said it was disheartening to see openly racist tropes and attitudes aired today, seemingly without consequence.

He said: "I thought these days were long behind us.

"In many interviews I did, I would speak about it as though it was in the past. And it’s like it’s come full circle, with a vengeance.

"Things that people had hidden, now they’re able to say in the open and use the racist tropes."

Echols was good friends with Jim Morrison, and raises an eyebrow at revisionist dramatisations of the Doors frontman and the 1960s Los Angeles scene in general.

He said: “It is difficult sometimes when we see the movie or overdramatizations of things that happened back then.

"You’re not really getting a true picture of the times.

“Jim was an interesting character but he wasn’t quite as notorious as they’re making him out to be.

“He was a regular guy, a very intelligent man. He was a poet, just as Arthur Lee was."

Echols is now into his seventh decade as a professional musician, having started playing with Little Richard aged 13 and backing the likes of Sam Cooke and BB King while still at High School.

He sympathises with young musicians trying to make a start in the business today.

He said: "We were able to have apartments and cars, we were able to survive.

"And I can’t see that the young players now are able to make a living by just playing clubs and the type of places we played.

"I think that’s impossible now, which is sad.

"I am profoundly grateful that we have remained relevant after all these years and there are younger people that take to our music."

Love featuring Johnny Echols play the Grass Roots Stage at Belladrum.