Carl’s Rock Songbook #91: Love, “Alone Again Or”

Here’s a song that knows what it is to feel loneliness midst the Summer of Love:

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.

With “Alone Again Or”, the rock
band named Love explored a basic problem with what their fellow hippies were
saying about Love.  It was fine to seek
to love everyone, say, to get a charge from the reciprocal vibe of brotherly
love at the Happening, but this would never quite feel like falling in love,
and having that love returned. That love,
eros, spoke to a more primary
need.  And without the need tended to,
the practice of brotherly love could still leave one feeling alone.  Yet again.

In a number of recent Songbook posts, I’ve explained how the
hippie tendency was to combine and conflate three different sorts of love:  1) a brotherly love for all mankind, 2) eros, the sort of love that makes you
fall for a particular man or woman, and 3) free-love.

It’s fairly obvious how, midst this conflation, some might
think that 1) was more easily realized if one engaged in 3). Next time, when I consider the film Taking Woodstock, I’ll say more about
that aspect of the conflation. And of
course, everyone knows that the line separating 2) from the broader “lust” that
fuels 3) is anything but a neat one—arguably, the hippies attempted nothing
terribly new by trying to more thoroughly blend those.

But these combinations are less interesting than that of 1)
and 2), the one explored by “Alone
Again Or.”  The narrator is initially open to the idea touted in a song like Jefferson
Airplane’s “Let’s Get Together” of trying to love everyone, but finds that it
fails in practice.  He says, “No, that’s
not doing it for me. And no, that’s not
really what I mean by love. What I want is you. Your
love and your presence.”

The first stanza sets up the divide between the song’s lover
and his beloved:

Yeah, said
it’s alright:

I won’t forget,

all the
times I’ve waited patiently for you,

as you do,
just what, you choose to do…

and I will
be alone, again tonight, my dear.

This beloved apparently expects her lover to accept her free-choosing
not-tied-down ways, to say about them yeah,
…it’s alright. Now these could be
any sort of selfish ways that leave the narrator waiting for her and spending a
number of nights alone, but here’s a further interpretation: just as he initially seems to affirm the
touted hippie embrace of fraternal love with the second stanza’s yeah, he initially seems to affirm the expected hippie acceptance of open-relationships with the
first stanza’s yeah. The repeated pattern asks us to connect the
two apparent affirmations.  Such connection makes more sense if what the first stanza suggests is not simply that his beloved expects him to accept her freedom on her own terms, but that she further does so in the name of the new free-love. Isn’t her lover hip?

Whatever he might say,
the narrator is unhappy about her treatment of him. It’s actually not alright.  Songbook readers might recall certain lines
from that other song on Jefferson Airplane’s first LP, “And I Like It,” where
the singer says, This is my life, I’m
satisfied. So watch it babe, don’t try
to keep me tied.  In the first stanza
of “Alone Again Or,” if my interpretation is correct, we’re given what the
other side of that feels like, particularly if the other side is really in love.

So, while there’s only two brief stanzas (the
second repeats), they pose the real and perhaps impossible-to-satisfy longing
of erotic love, against at least one, and perhaps two, of the cheery new love-substitutes/supplements
recommended by the new hippie creed.

Now a bit about the band for those who haven’t heard of
them. Nearly every connoisseur of 60s
rock loves Love. While they did not seek
or win much popularity beyond their LA base, they produced one fine folk-rock/gargage
LP, Love, and two LPs that easily
stand among very best of the era, Da Capo
and Forever Changes. The latter
is particularly praised, both for one of the best uses of orchestral strings in
rock and its lyrical sophistication. That praise is deserved, but for me it’s Da Capo that is the real knock-out, as a briefly described in
Songbook # 44.

Their name always had an ironic aspect to it. Yes, “love” was the watchword of the
folk-rock songs, and sure, Love were right there with what was hip and au courant, penning their share of love-celebrating
songs, and saying, in the pantheistic blather of the times, that they wanted their
music to “engulf the listener as love engulfs the world.” But Love evinced a tough side also, recording a number of remarkably angry songs:  the garage-punk classic “My Flash on You,” one
the fastest versions of “Hey Joe,” a
cover of “My Little Red Book” that ditches the lost-love vibe of the
original, and finally “7 and 7 Is,” a breath-taking hardcore punk prototype
from early ’67, complete with a nuclear explosion finale and lyrics about
throwing one’s Bible in the fireplace.

By late 1967’s Forever
Changes, this more aggressive musical side had melted away, and the gently
sad Spanish-y drama of “Alone Again Or” shows just how potent their artistry was
in its more pensive mode. Still, a certain
tension between their cynical side and their wistful one remained, sometimes embodied in the
different lyrical approaches of leader Arthur Lee, and of Bryan Maclean, the writer of this song.  Both contributed to the general feeling of The Search that pervades Forever Changes, culminating in one of the most honestly philosophical of rock songs, “You Set the Scene.”  The original
line-up was fired by Lee 1968, and despite all his musical genius, he was not
able to assemble another group worthy of the name.

Now if I could just understand why Maclean put the word “Or”
in the title of this song. Any ideas?