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!