It's A Beautiful, Beautiful Day

It sure is.

For anyone outside San Francisco, It's A Beautiful Day created their unforgettable impact with the cover of their first album. Unashamedly nostalgic, and not at all psychedelic, it crystalised the feelings and the hopes of the late 'sixties. Music impressario and thieving son-of-a-bitch Matthew Katz came up with the name. He would drag the group (and Moby Grape, and Jefferson Airplane) through the courts for decades, trying to wring every last cent out of claimed rights and preventing re-releases. He died last year, too late. So forget him this way, with It's A Beautiful Day.

George Hunter (The Charlatans founder) designed the cover, and the painting is by Kent Hollister, based on - well, okay, copying - Charles Courtney Curran's Woman On The Top Of A Mountain [left - Ed.]. Looks to me like he painted directly over a print, extending the sky. His slightly coarser brushwork and more saturated palette improves on the chocolate box insipidity of the original. The hand-drawn typography is adapted from period advertising, and the use of the old Columbia logo was a deliberately nostalgic touch. Hunter and Hollister also created the cover for Quicksilver's Happy Trails.

So before we even get to listen to the music, we have all these disparate influences coming together in unlikely synchronicity to produce a work of art that transcends its sources to become genuinely iconic. How could the music live up to that promise?

It does. And at the heart of it is David LaFlamme, who died just weeks before his nemesis Katz, and died as he lived; loved. He formed IABD in the summer of '67 (when else?) with his wife Linda, after an apprenticeship gigging with Garcia, Joplin, and the strange Orkustra [here - Ed.]. After a go-nowhere first single, Love For You, Katz abducted them to Seattle, to "polish their act" at his low rent concert hall. It was midwinter, a universe away from the Summer of Love, and Katz held the band virtual prisoners in a freezing attic. LaFlamme, as ever, accentuated the positive:

"Where the White Bird thing came from - we were like caged birds in that attic. We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable. We were just barely getting by on a very small food allowance provided to us. It was quite an experience, but it was very creative in a way ..."

White bird must fly, she will die ... That yearning for freedom would perhaps never have been expressed so soulfully were it not for Katz's grifting. So we have him to thank, perversely, for their signature song. On their return to San Francisco, the band built a fervent following in live performance, the name becoming a regular feature on the psychedelic posters of the era. Rock violinists were then as now thin on the ground (and the ground is pretty arid these days), but LaFlamme also had the compositional chops to go with the virtuosity. Katz finagled them a Columbia recording contract weighted heavily in his favor, and White Bird made its first appearance on record. LaFlamme wrote, and co-wrote with wife Linda, all the songs on the album, and his classical/zigeuner melodic gift is everywhere.

White Bird was a hit single on the West Coast, and the album did well, keeping Columbia happy. Marrying Maiden did even better, although the atmosphere of the first was lost. The last track is a heartbreaking elegy to a summer already passed into myth:

Do you remember the sun? He remembers you.

You can forget what you came into the room for, but don't forget this. It's a beautiful, beautiful day.

 

 

That's me done for a while. Stay groovy! 

 

 

From Th' Desk O' Farquhar Throckmorton III Dept.

Old School Foam-O-Graph© gives hauntingly lifelike impression of what life's like on th' Isle O' Foam. For full immersive effect adjust occipital lobe.

 

Hi there, music lovers! In the run-up to Yule I have one post in preparation, and after that, zilch. Bupkiss. Time for another extended hiatus. The detailed keyboard attention is once again becoming too much like something approaching office work!

If you have any requests, anything you want dragged out of the crawl space, especially my own curatorial initiatives, leave a note here, and I'll see what I can do. 

Your pal,

Farquhar Throckmorton III 

 

In response to requests, links in comments:

 

John Peel's Perfumed Garden #1 of 5 - link in comments. Cover illustration Martin Sharp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Peel's Perfumed Garden #2 of 5 - link in comments. Cover illustration The Fool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Peel's Perfumed Garden #3 of 5 - link in comments. Cover illustration Michael English.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Peel's Perfumed Garden #4 of 5 - link in comments. Cover illustration John Hurford.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 John Peel's Perfumed Garden #5 of 5 - link in comments. Cover illustration unknown.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Making The Moodies Look Like Motorhead" Dept. - UK Kaleidoscope

The difference between US and UK psychedelic music is nowhere more glaring than a face-off between the two Kaleidoscopes. From English Whimsydelia™ to West Coast wig-outs, these two bands occupied different pots of Acapulco Gold at each end of the lysergic rainbow. The US version has long been resident on th' IoF©, so it's time to dose up from Mr. Dodgson's Patent Drink Me bottle (probably laudanum).

Their first album, Tangerine Dream (whence the Teutonic synth boffins got their name), was a kind of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn lite. So light as to be almost weightless. It gets a lot of love, because it set the Gold Standard for Whimsydelia™. It's very much a period piece, like Nirvana's Simon Simopath of the same year, without the charm. Or the hits. Still, it shifted enough copies to garner them a second album from Fontana.

 

 

Faintly Blowing  [above - Ed.] is worth it for the epic title track, which floats like dandelion seeds on a hot summer day. It shimmers and buzzes with an air of faerie magic, and nothing else on the album comes close to its sleepy pastoral beauty. This really does out-pastoral the Floyd at their pastoraliest. The Three O'Clock must have been influenced by it when they recorded the lovely As Real As Real. It sold less than the first - '69 was a strange year, and Faintly Blowing was left blowing faintly in the wind.

When these guys are good, they're very good indeed, and it was just tough breaks that prevented the Fairfield Parlour album from being a breakthrough hit in 1970.  They'd renamed themselves, anxious to burn the kaftans, but threw away what slender following they'd built without winning a new one. Fairfield Parlour was perhaps too close to Fairport Convention, and too far from memorable. And a little old lady (LOL) cover is never going to fly off the rock/pop shelves. Damn shame, as it's their strongest release, full of great tunes, emotive singing, and superb production. Touches of psychedelia remain, but this a dawn of the 'seventies album through and through, and it should have fed off the huge Moody Blues audience.

White Faced Lady was shelved for decades due to label incompetence. It's a double concept album, with the visually impaired Peter Daltrey apparently embracing a woman's corpse on the cover, and I've yet to get into it because it's a double concept album, with Peter Daltrey apparently embracing a woman's corpse on the cover. Let me know how you get on.

 

 

At no extra cost to you, Mr. and Mrs. Musiclover of Yourtown USA,  we offer this swell long-playing bonus LP record of radio sessions Absolutely Free!

This post autoclaved by Andy's Autoclave, Perineum, CO.

Perfect Tens Dept. - Blue

Joni, anticipatin' another nite of romantic knob stuff wit' yrs. truly!

 

You will argue, in that unpleasant adenoidal whine you have, that this is an altogether too, too populist choice, and Ms. Mitchell recorded other Perfect Tens only truly appreciated by the cognoscenti [Italian: gear sniffers - Ed.] such as like yer swell self. You may have a point, but go make it somewhere else [like the comments, f'rinstance - Ed.].

The magic that Mitchell worked with Blue was to make guys think she was singing to them, about them (th' saps!) and chicks think she was confiding in them, gal to gal. Listening to Blue is a startlingly intimate experience - there's no distance between her and you. It's not just her spare, and brilliant, production, it's the quality of her singing. Her previous album, Ladies Of The Canyon, was beautiful in the sense of hippie beautiful, her voice still girlish, skipping into cute falsetto. The cover [not at left - Ed,] was a clue - an unfinished page from a coloring book. Incomplete, half way there.

Needing a break from messed-up relationships, she vacationed on a Greek island, fucked a redneck on the beach, and came home a deeper person. I can't bring myself to say became a woman, because I don't have a Stetson and a back porch handy. The timbre [Fr. wood - Ed.] of her voice changed, her internal vision was clearer, and her lyrics hid nothing at all. Again, the cover is a clue; Joni sexing up the mic in super-saturated blue, singing eyes closed, just for you. There's no room for a Big Yellow Taxi in the confessional.

She inhabits her songs rather than performs them. Raw like silk, wild like honey - melody lines wind into unexpected shapes that would defeat less gifted singers, and she's always bang in the middle of the note. There's a chamber music restraint to the arrangements - this is basically a live album, and Joni's front and center. Blue created a naked intimacy that she never recaptured. But she never tried. She's an artist, she don't look back.

 

This post funded in part by your pals at th' pool hall. who will be contacting you about your contribution.

Burt Reynolds' Guide To Neo-Psychedelia Dept. - Levitation Room

 

Hauntingly lifelike Foam-O-Graph© invites YOU to share an exotic beverage with Burt in our tasteful Tiki Bar!

You'll know brawny Burt from his iconic roles in The Pudding Boys II, and Heidi's Hawaiian Holiday, but did you know he's an expert on neo-psych albums?! Burt waxed loquacious anent his musical passion as we relaxed poolside, whilst Kreemé served her signature Whelkfoot n' Livebait Smoothies!

FT3 Bertie-baybeeee!!! High five, my man! Thanx for dropping by th' Isle O' Foam©!

BR Always an honor and a privilege to kick back with my favorite humor-based music blog writer!

FT3 I like to think of myself more as a content creator, actually.

BR Well, fuck you in your pretentious pink ass, Farq!

FT3 (laughs) Ha ha! Tell me, you still smacking Loni Anderson [left - Ed.] around?

BR She still alive?

FT3 (laughs) Ha ha! Unlike you, pally!

BR (laughs) Ha ha! Fuck you, Farq!

(Monkee-style romp as we tussle goodnaturedly around the pool, unaware of any homoerotic subtext)

FT3 (breathlessly) So, which albums you brung for th' Four Or Five Guys© today, Bertram?

BR Well, it's these guys Levitation Room. They got, like ... uh ... I think I have to help Kreemé with the, the, whatever she does back there ...

 

You know those whiz lines left by the Tasmanian Devil? That's what we're looking at right now.