It’s a Beautiful Day: Marrying Maiden (1970)
It’s a Beautiful Day was a Bay Area psychedelic band that gave us White Bird, which is on their self-entitled 1969 debut. Marrying Maiden is their second album, in which the band witnessed only a minor lineup change: Linda LaFlamme (who apparently broke up with David LaFlamme around this time) left, replaced by a new keyboardist, Fred Webb.
In my opinion, I don’t feel this album is nearly as good as their first. The compositions just aren’t as strong, for the most part, but it’s still not a bad album. Despite that, it’s ironic that this should be It’s a Beautiful Day’s best selling album, despite no song being a regular on FM radio. The music seems to be softer, overall. The album opens up with “Don & Dewey”, an instrumental violin jam in honor of the R&B duo by the same name (it so happens that Don “Sugarcane” Harris of that duo also played violin with Little Richard, and Frank Zappa on the albums Burnt Weeny Sandwich, and Weasels Ripped My Flesh).
“The Dolphins” proves that Marrying Maiden just isn’t quite up to their debut, as the song just sounds cheesy to my ears. Luckily “Essence of Now” is much better, harkening back to the better moments of their debut. Jerry Garcia makes a guest appearance on this album with “It Comes Right Down to You” and “Rodeo”, unsurprisingly, these two songs have a rather country-ish feel, not unlike what the Dead was doing around the same time with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.
“Let a Woman Flow” is a pretty atmospheric piece, but the lyrics leave much to be desired (ie. “I let a woman flow/to her own natural rhythm”, huh? What the hell were they thinking to write lyrics like that?). “Good Lovin'” happens to be another favorite of mine on this album, one of the more rocking pieces. There’s the atmospheric “Galileo” which features mainly spoken dialog, then it ends with “Do You Remember the Sun”, nice ballad, great vocals.
What I also really dig is the back cover which features the band in a house that looks like it was inhabited by hippies (looks a little like a place I used to live 20 miles outside of Eugene, Oregon, when I was a small kid in the late 1970s).
As many may or may not know, It’s a Beautiful Day fell in to the greedy and unethical hands of Matthew Katz (you can find out more about his greedy and unethical practices, and how he screwed with the musicians from the Bay Area psychedelic scene at: Matthew Katz is a Jerk.com). That means, look for the original version of this album on Columbia Records, because if you get the reissue on San Francisco Sound (Katz’s label), the band will not receive any royalties for sales of the album. Regardless, Marrying Maiden is a good album, but start with their self-entitled debut, of course.
– David LaFlamme: vocals, violin
– Fred Webb: organ, piano
– Val Fuentes: drums
– Mitchell Holman: bass
– Hal Wagenet: guitar
– Pattie Santos: vocals, percussion