Linda LaFlamme, a songwriter and keyboardist who helped found the San Francisco folk-rock band It’s a Beautiful Day in 1967 and co-wrote the band’s soaring “White Bird,” an enduring anthem of the psychedelic era, died on Oct. 23 in Harrisonburg, Va. She was 85.
She died in a nursing home of vascular dementia, her daughter, Kira LaFlamme Newman, said, adding that Ms. LaFlamme had a stroke in April.
Linda Sue Rudman was born on April 13, 1939, in St. Louis, the middle of three children of Edward Leonid Rudman and Annette (Miller) Rudman. She was classically trained on piano and harpsichord, but her tastes veered toward jazz and rock ’n’ roll. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1961, she moved to San Francisco.
Two years later, she met David LaFlamme, an Army veteran who had played violin with the Utah Symphony. Musically and romantically, “we just clicked,” she said in a 2020 interview with the music website Please Kill Me.
They married the following year and went on to form the six-piece unit It’s a Beautiful Day, with the help of Matthew Katz, who managed Jefferson Airplane. Mr. Katz sent his new act to Seattle, where he had a rock venue, for seasoning. The LaFlammes were living in a cold, drafty house there in early 1968 when they wrote “White Bird.”
“There was no food, there was no money, nothing,” Ms. LaFlamme told Please Kill Me. “I was seven months pregnant.”
One day, she was noodling around on an electric piano with a chord sequence that caught Mr. LaFlamme’s attention. “Do that again,” he said. Two hours later, they had written their magnum opus, which became the opening track of their debut album, released on Columbia Records the next year.
The album, which also contained two other songs the LaFlammes wrote together — “Hot Summer Day” and “Girl With No Eyes” — climbed only to No. 47 on the Billboard chart. “White Bird,” sung by Mr. LaFlamme and the band’s Pattie Santos, failed to crack the Billboard Hot 100, in part because it lasted an unwieldy six minutes — too long for Top 40 radio.
But with its imagery of a “white bird in a golden cage” who “must fly, or she will die,” the song encapsulated a longing by the flower-power generation to escape a conformist life and soar toward a loftier plane of existence. The song lived on, but the romance between the LaFlammes did not.
They divorced in 1969, and Ms. LaFlamme, who later went by her Hebrew name, Neska, formed two other bands: Titus’ Mother, based in St. Louis, and A Thought in Passing, based in Oakland, Calif. In the late 1970s, she turned her attention to composing music for various Bay Area theatrical companies.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a sister, Barbara Liberman, and two granddaughters.
“What we didn’t realize,” Ms. LaFlamme once said of the dissolution of her marriage, “is that we were connected so musically that we were not connected in the sense that you would say, married people had this love. I mean, I loved David. But our connection was so through the music.”
The post Linda LaFlamme Dies at 85; Her ‘White Bird’ Reflected a Hippie Fantasy appeared first on New York Times.
