Nov. 13, 1976: David LaFlamme

 

Lenny Silver lands a big fish for Amherst Records.

Nov. 13, 1976

LaFlamme Rises from Ashes,

Still Seeking a Beautiful Day 

“I HAVE JUST ONE REQUEST,” David LaFlamme says as we arrive at a suburban restaurant for lunch. “After I tell you the whole story, do me a favor. Don’t write in the paper that I’m a bitter person.”

          LaFlamme, followers of the late ‘60s San Francisco rock scene may recall, was the singer and violinist who led one of the Bay Area’s germinal rock bands, It’s a Beautiful Day.

          He wrote the group’s best-known song, the soaring “White Bird.”

          But while the group’s records have become collectors’ items (used copies of their first album command a price of $12.95 and up), LaFlamme has had to endure an incredible stream of hard luck which has stripped him of virtually everything but his pride.

          Not only did he lose his band, he also lost a lawsuit over the naming of the band.

* * *

TO SATISFY judgments, back taxes and loans, he estimates he’ll have to earn half a million dollars just to break even.

          Nor is it over. In town to check the test pressings of his first new recording in five years, LaFlamme is obliged to seek an additional advance from Amherst Records president Leonard Silver.

          The original advance of $60,000 is gone, thanks to the producer of the album, who spent it.

          “That’s the kind of intelligence I’ve been dealing with since Day One,” he observes. “What keeps me going? I’m ornery. When you say no, that’s when I say yes.”

          The chance to record the new album, which includes new versions of “White Bird” and another It’s a Beautiful Day favorite, “Hot Summer Day,” came after a particularly low point in his post-lawsuit struggles.

          Taking affront at a club owner’s refusal to give his band the door receipts rather than a flat $75, LaFlamme went to another club.

          There he arranged to play for the money at the door, agreed to hire a second band for $75 and took in a grand total of $44.

          “In the Bay Area, it was real bad,” he says. “Everybody felt the shadow fell over me. I was like a leper. They wouldn’t come near me.”

          Judging from the album, the reasons for his rejection couldn’t have been artistic.

          The David LaFlamme Band is an artfully updated version of It’s a Beautiful Day, complete with a woman vocalist (Dominique Dellacroce), Buffalonian Jim Ralston on guitar and sparks flying from classically-trained LaFlamme’s violin.

* * *

“YOU GO BACK to the studio after a couple years,” he remarks, “and it really is different. The standards are different. What I used to demand of It’s a Beautiful Day is much less than what we did now.

          “They did a great job for us at the Record Plant in Sausalito. I have a terrific range if I can get it loose and the place I was the most relaxed singing was in their Jacuzzi bath. They were ready to mike it up for me.”

          Without hearing it, the San Francisco grapevine already has turned thumbs down on his record, he says. Rolling Stone writer Ben Fong-Torres, rejecting his request for an interview, told LaFlamme he’d heard “it wasn’t that good.”

          “San Francisco’s always been a hard-nosed, very conservative town,” he says, “and it’s ruled by the throat by Bill Graham. He managed me for 2½ years.”

          LaFlamme’s originally from Salt Lake City, son of a French-Canadian actor who turned his back on Hollywood and films after he served in World War II.

          LaFlamme, an actor and movie enthusiast himself, would love to share the screen with Jack Nicholson. In fact, when he talks, his forceful whine sounds very much like Nicholson’s.

          He moved to San Francisco in 1963, organized a band and was in the center of the psychedelic outburst of 1966-67, which is when his financial problems began.

          “There was a wedge driven between the two camps out there,” he says, “the money-mad, power-hungry people and the spiritualists.

          “I was one of the people who went with the money-mad camp and that’s the trouble I’m in today.”

          Disaster struck after It’s a Beautiful Day’s fourth album on Columbia Records. A former manager took them to court, claiming they’d stolen their name from him.

          “He comes around 6¾ years after it happened, just under the statute of limitations,” LaFlamme relates. “His argument was it’s all in a name. My point was it’s all what you make it.

          “I played the first record for the judge and he says: ‘I don’t like it.’ It was his last case before he retired. He said, ‘Listen, I don’t care if there’s another rock and roll star.’ Those were his words.”

          The judge not only imposed a $250,000 settlement on LaFlamme, he also banned use of the group’s name – thereby stopping sales of their albums and squelching a songbook about to be released.

* * *

“THERE WAS NO book and no check,” LaFlamme says. “The band broke up. Friends started coming down on me for money. I’d tell all of them: ‘You are cashing in now on my life.’

          “Even my wife cashed in. She took the house, the kids, the money. I can remember her driving down the driveway in my Mercedes with her boyfriend.

          “Being an actor, the more bizarre a situation gets, the more I get into it. It’s a better part.”

           Now, after two years at the bottom, LaFlamme feels his new album is a sign that better days are coming.

          He still has a strong following in the Pacific Northwest, he says, and a Seattle record dealer promised him he could sell 250,000 copies of any album with “White Bird” on it.

          “I don’t care if the record comes out in a brown paper bag,” LaFlamme says. “Let’s just get it out.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: After years of legal problems and artistic breakdowns, singer-violinist David LaFlamme makes a comeback. Buffalonian Jim Ralston is on guitar. Dominique Dellacroce is vocalist.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: David LaFlamme indeed was an integral part of the San Francisco music scene, distinctive for his virtuosity on the violin and for playing an electrified instrument before they became common. Prior to starting It’s a Beautiful Day, he was co-founder of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. He and his first wife Linda, a powerhouse keyboardist and singer he married in San Francisco in 1964, wrote “White Bird” together just after they moved into a freezing band house in Seattle, where their manager had sent them to get some seasoning in the clubs.

“There was no food, there was no money, nothing,” Linda said in an interview that appears on pleasekillme.com. “I was seven months pregnant. The first week we were up there, I had the electric piano out. I was sitting on the bed, and just started playing some chords. And David turned around and said, ‘Do that again.’ ‘White Bird’ was developed through us just working together for about two hours.”

After the first album was released on Columbia, Linda left the band in rather dramatic fashion during the last song on a gig at the University of the Pacific. In her interview she reveals something that David did not talk about. He had fallen in love with another woman. She’d had enough.

The manager, an attorney named Matthew Katz who also messed up the career of the band Moby Grape, did indeed think up the name It’s a Beautiful Day. David finally got the name back in the 1990s when Katz failed to renew the trademark.

The marriage of David LaFlamme and Lenny Silver didn’t work out so well, either. David’s music had gone in an R&B direction in the 1970s, but what Lenny wanted was another “White Bird.” After David recorded the album, Lenny sent him back to the studio to do something more like that first It’s a Beautiful Day LP.

Despite the friction, the new version of “White Bird” peaked at 89 on the Billboard Hot 100 and David got to make a second album for Amherst, “Inside Out,” released in 1978. Best of all, David was able to repair his tattered finances.

          “I managed to extort, and I use the word extort, money out of that label to the point where I managed to pay off all my creditors and debts, back child support payments, I could go on and get myself all square again at least,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “I was still flat broke, but I was square.”

          His troubles weren’t over, though. In an interview in 2003, he recounted how Lenny Silver pulled the plug on the tour support for the second album in 1978 when he was out on the road opening for Billy Joel. David recalled that his manager phoned him up and broke the bad news:

          “I said, ‘What am I going to do?’ He said, ‘Pay the band off and send them home.’ So Linda and I paid the guys off and sent them home. That was the end of the Amherst deal.’”

          Incidentally, Linda was Dominique Dellacroce (also Dellacroix). She's also David’s second wife, Linda Baker LaFlamme. They met when they were singing together in 1973 in a Bay Area band called Love Gun. There is considerable confusion about her and Linda #1 in histories of It's a Beautiful Day.

The David LaFlamme Band toured a lot in the 1980s, then after a hiatus, returned to the stage as It’s a Beautiful Day after he got the name back. He released a few small label albums in the early 2000s and he and Linda continued to perform, primarily in the Bay Area, through the 2010s.

As for Jim Ralston, previously seen in this column back in 1971 with the group Flash, at this point he had been writing songs and recording with bandmate Phil Dillon on a revival of Flash, but it never got beyond the in-studio stage.

Beginning in 1980, Jim embarked on 20 years as guitar player for Tina Turner, leading the band on her tours. Since 2002, he has worked with country singer Vonda Shepard and has found renown as a luthier, restoring vintage guitars. Based these days in Henderson, Nev., outside Las Vegas, he was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2002.