LEE FREEMAN 8th November 1949 – 14th February 2010


Guitarist/singer/songwriter/founding member of The Strawberry Alarm Clock, LEE FREEMAN, sadly passed away on 14th February 2010. Those who knew him best couldn’t help but smile ruefully at the Valentine’s Day connection. MIKE FORNATALE turns back the clock


“How fitting,” says George Bunnell, The Strawberry Alarm Clock’s bassist/songwriter and other founding member. “He was all about love.” In a band with so many members, the obsessive fan’s game of “who did what?”


might leave you thinking that Freeman was a minor player. In reality, he seems to have been a (or indeed “the”) driving force. “Lee was the band’s free spirit,” says Bunnell. “You need one of those for


success. They create an intangible tangible.” As one of the band’s chief songwriters throughout their career, his salt-and-


vinegar singing filled the same role in The Strawberry Alarm Clock’s otherwise smooth multilayered harmonies that Russ Giguere filled in The Association, or Dennis Wilson in The Beach Boys. That’s Lee on lead vocal in ‘Pretty Song From Psych-Out’, ‘They Saw The Fat One Coming’, and most endearingly, ‘Lose To Live’. He was with the band for its entire run, four albums worth, and after they broke


up, Freeman went to work for former SAC guitarist Ed King’s band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, as a tour attendant – occasionally joining them onstage to play harmonica on songs like ‘They Call Me The Breeze’. He was lucky enough to have missed the plane that crashed, killing several musicians and crew members in ’78, and stayed on the road, serving in the same capacity for Donna Summer for several years. In 1982 The Strawberry Alarm Clock reunited, shifting personnel several times,


WELCOME BACK MR BOND


BRIAN GREENE talks to soul music’s most endearing street troubadour LOU BOND about the reissue of his 1974 masterwork. “Better late then never”…


Lou Bond’s initial discovery of music occurred in the kind of institution so many troubled souls have always turned to for solace – it happened in a house of worship. Orphaned at a young age and raised in Memphis’s foster care system in the ’50s and early ’60s, Bond first experienced the soul-cleansing value of songs while attending Sunday services as a child. “The music bug hit me when I heard people


singing in church,” Bond says today. “One of the guitar players in the church I went to taught me how to tune a guitar. And folks were telling me they liked how I sang when they heard me sing. So it really all started from there.” Bond won a singing contest in elementary


school and continued to work on his guitar- playing chops throughout his childhood and adolescent years, eventually going on to join and promptly leave the US Navy over issues of conduct, before finding his timid feet in the music industry as a staff writer for Chess Records – during which time he wrote a tune recorded by The Mighty Clouds Of Joy. It is however, for his self-titled album from ’74


that Lou Bond will ultimately be remembered. An album that upon release came and went without any critical or commercial notice, leaving Bond to face the challenges of hard living: homelessness and substance abuse problems, after being diagnosed with a mental disorder. He eventually got some help via government assistance and has been holding things together since the late ’80s but now that Light In The Attic is rereleasing this lost classic, it seems Lou may soon be


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ready to take his act to the stage again. “I was in limbo musically all those years, until


a friend told me back in November that I was all over the Internet. Better late than never, I say. I like how Light In The Attic is doing things – they’re nice people, and you don’t always find nice people in the music business. I kind of feel the music coming back on now. I’ve been rehearsing, and I think I might be ready to go out and play again.” The first striking thing about Lou Bond is its


cover image – a stark photo that shows Bond standing out on an inner-city street on what looks to be a sizzling summer day, his eyes covered by a Sly Stone-esque floppy hat, his nylon-string acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder: a heavy-hearted, cosmic musician literally taking it to the streets. But it’s the material, six tracks – three originals and three covers – that combine Lou’s workingman’s soul with stinging political and social commentary. ‘To The Establishment’ is a lengthy epic and centrepiece of the album that, like everything good about Bill Withers, Curtis Mayfield, and Gil Scott-Heron, rolls into one package, yearning and world-weary soulfulness. The Light In The Attic reissue even includes one bonus track: a jaw-dropping live take, on which Bond makes a medley out of combining parts of Al Green’s ‘I’m Still In Love With You’ with the traditional ‘Motherless Child’. Lou Bond is available now on Light In The Attic Records. Visit www.lightintheattic.net for more information


but always including at least four of the original members, including Lee Freeman. They were at New York’s CAVESTOMP! extravaganza in 2007, with the entire original line-up save Ed King. Freeman wafted gingerly into the sound check, seeming quite frail and weak, due to his debilitating illness, but very genuinely happy to be there and I personally remember vividly that as soon as the music started, he was a man on fire. Nothing tentative, nothing held back. Even more so during the show later that night. Following a lengthy illness, Lee Freeman died peacefully at home in the early


morning hours of Valentine’s Day, 14th February 2010, but will be remembered as George put so appropriately as an “intangible tangible”, and one of the nicest guys it’s ever been my pleasure to meet.


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