David LaFlamme, who infused the psychedelic rock of the Sixties with the plaintive sounds of an electrical violin as a founding father of It’s a Gorgeous Month, the airy San Francisco band whose breakout strike, “White Bird,” encapsulated the hippie-era eager for independence, died on Aug. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He used to be 82.
His daughter Kira LaFlamme mentioned the reason for his dying, at a condition help facility, used to be headaches of Parkinson’s condition.
Mr. LaFlamme had appeared an not likely are compatible for the position of flower-power troubadour. He used to be a classically educated violinist who had carried out with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He used to be an Military veteran. “When I was a young man, I carried my M-1 very proudly and was ready to do my duty to defend my country,” he mentioned in a 2007 video interview.
However the occasions have been the days, and in 1967, the age of the Summer of Love, he and his spouse, Linda, a keyboardist, shaped It’s a Gorgeous Month. The band bubbled up from the acid-rock cauldron of the Haight-Ashbury district, which additionally produced the Thankful Lifeless, Jefferson Plane and alternative teams.
The band by no means discovered the industrial good fortune of its hallowed San Francisco contemporaries. Its debut book, known as merely “It’s a Beautiful Day” and exempt in 1969, climbed to No. 47 at the Billboard chart. “White Bird,” sung through Mr. LaFlamme and Pattie Santos, didn’t top to fracture the Sizzling 100 singles chart, in all probability partially as a result of its operating era: greater than six mins, two times the range of maximum AM radio hits.
Even so, the music changed into an FM radio staple, and an artifact of its cultural presen.
The LaFlammes wrote the music in 1967, after they have been dwelling within the store of a Victorian space all the way through a short lived relocation to Seattle. The lyrics took surrounding on a drizzly iciness hour as they peered out a window at leaves blowing in the street underneath.
White chicken
In a blonde cage
On a iciness’s hour
Within the raindrops
“We were like caged birds in that attic,” Mr. LaFlamme recalled. “We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable.”
He next mentioned the music, with its references to clouded skies and arouse, used to be concerning the aim between independence and conformity. In an e mail, Linda LaFlamme mentioned that she regarded as it a music of hope, and that the one arouse they’d felt used to be concerning the Seattle climate.
Nonetheless, the music, with its pleading refrain, “White bird must fly, or she will die,” perceived to echo the mounting disillusionment of 1969, as marmalade skies became typhoon clouds with the realities of drug habit and social turmoil, as epitomized through the bloodshed on the Altamont rock pageant that age.
“It was a very solemn period of music on that first album,” Mr. LaFlamme mentioned in a 2003 interview revealed at the tune web page Exposé.
“If I would have kept going that way,” he added, “I would have ended up like Jim Morrison, getting more and more into that personal torture trip.”
David Gordon LaFlamme used to be born on Might 4, 1941, in Pristine Britain, Conn., the primary of six kids of Adelard and Norma (Winther) LaFlamme. He spent his early years in Los Angeles, the place his father used to be a Hollywood stunt double, sooner than settling in Salt Pond Town, the place his father changed into a copper miner.
David used to be about 5 when he were given his first violin, a hand-me-down from an aunt.
“I began fooling around with it on my own and taught myself to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’” he mentioned in a 1998 interview. Formal coaching adopted.
Then becoming a member of the Military — he used to be stationed at Castle Ord, akin Monterey, Calif. — he suffered listening to injury from the firing of boisterous ordnance. He ended up in an army sanatorium in San Francisco, upcoming put i’m sick roots within the town then his discharge in 1962.
He discovered accommodation in the similar space as his generation spouse, Linda Rudman. “By the second day that I was there, she and I had already written a song together,” he mentioned.
In 1967, Mr. LaFlamme shaped a band known as Electric Chamber Orkustra, often referred to as the Orkustra, with Bobby Beausoleil, a tender musician who performed bouzouki and would next be convicted of homicide as a follower of Charles Manson. A run with Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks adopted sooner than the LaFlammes shaped It’s a Gorgeous Month.
The band were given its crack in October 1968, when the promoter Invoice Graham had it seen for Cream in Oakland. It’s a Gorgeous Month signed with Columbia Data quickly then.
The band’s 2d book, “Marrying Maiden,” rose to No. 28 at the book charts. However through upcoming the LaFlammes had break up and his spouse had left the band. (They divorced in 1969.)
It’s a Gorgeous Month carried on with various lineups and exempt 3 extra albums, together with “At Carnegie Hall” in 1972, sooner than disbanding a age next.
Along with his daughter Kira, from his first marriage, Mr. LaFlamme is survived through his 3rd spouse, Linda (Baker) LaFlamme, whom he married in 1982; his sisters, Gloria LaFlamme, Michelle Haag and Diane Petersen; his brothers, Lon and Dorian; every other daughter, Alisha LaFlamme, from his marriage to Sharon Wilson, which led to dissolution in 1973; and 6 grandchildren.
Mr. LaFlamme exempt a number of albums over time, together with a solo book within the mid-Nineteen Seventies known as “White Bird,” which incorporated a disco-ready version of the latest unmarried. It in truth outperformed the latest, peaking at No. 89 at the Billboard Sizzling 100.
However, he mentioned in 1998, “It was a very difficult period musically, because during that period disco music ruled the earth.”
“It was really the day the music died,” he mentioned.
