Tequila is Missing

I don't remember what the contest in 7th grade English was about, but I won it and for my outstandingness, I got first dibs at a pile of Promotional Albums.  The pickings were slim: Bread, Neil Diamond, Anne Murray, Three Dog Night, The Carpenters... and then there was this:

Obverse

Hello!  I'd never heard of a Tony Williams Lifetime or of the expression Bum's Rush, but the epic story told in the immediate style and colors of the jacket, and in cryptic liner notes that managed to paint a vivid picture in my mind of the dark incident that inspired the album, sang to me.  And thus it came to pass that Tony Williams Lifetime's The Old Bum's Rush was among the first things in this world that I came into on my own.

Reverse: The Bum's Rush comes because You Make It Easy to explain What It's Not About. (Being Thrown out more than Once - the animal Rush)- Yeah.
Having been, and will be, I am writing "Bunky Loves Luckie" on the wall of the Lodge Hall and telling the story of old folks, the Rush of the Sea.
Side 2
The Rush Changes.
"Get Down From There"
A frightening rush, being in that room  with all those people doing the bang, etc. - and being asked to leave ... Mmm?
I LOVE IT -
T.W. 

Arriving home that day with my prize, I had no expectations, only interrogations when I placed the record on the turntable, cranked it up and heard the first crackle of the needle dropping on the vinyl, so I could not foresee that the album would open up for me a world of adulthood and transcendence. From the first taps of Tony William's drumsticks on his snare introducing the mellow, yearning groove of the first song, I was transfixed.  More complex and inventive than pure pop, too funky and vernacular to be just avant garde, the album's 7 tracks delivered on the promise of the cover to be a different kind of experience.  Tony Williams' compositions gave him room to flex his incomparable technique and showcase the tightness of the band, but never at the expense of maximum listener involvement. Its accessible innovations aside, being ensconced for much of my life to that point in the homogenous, rural and wintry world of the deep American Northeast, I'd never heard anything like it. But the revelation was the vocalist, Tequila, with a voice of soulful sexiness that enveloped me in a hot bath of strong new emotions and compelled me into the world of her lyrics:

Easy, you make it easy 

Easy, you make it easy 

Easy

Had my share of lovers and I've seen things that you never have seen before 

though it makes you different 

and I'd be insatiable for asking more

I've traveled many circles and I've met the king and queen of Pompadour

and though it makes you different 

And I'd be insensitive for asking more.

Even though I've heard some words spoken

sailed on wings of butterflies

there's one thing that I'm certain

you make it easy

I've had my share of lovers, yes sir

and I've seen things you've never seen before

though it makes you different

And I'd be insatiable

Easy, make it easy

Sometimes when a doubt crosses my mind

And seems to become more alive

Something you do makes me want to come alive

You make it easy, it's so easy.  

The power of her voice and the fearlessness with which she invented ways to wring expression from it was almost frightening to me at first, but it soon came to excite me as much as Tony William's songwriting and playing.  If there was an undreamed of way to stretch a syllable, she would go there. From every corner of her voice dripped Soul, stripped bare.  She played the spectrum between hot and cool like a Stradivarius.  In the magic of her voice, I became a man that day.  (I like to think.  It's actually taken me much longer.)

From many years of perspective, I can now appreciate that this rare album (that I won) is one of the most overlooked masterpieces of all time, and Tequila is one of the great missing persons. Loving her voice as I do, it's hard to imagine how she could have apparently disappeared with very little in the way of a trace.  But from the apex of her work with Tony Williams, and on the landmark song, Turn Off the Light, that she co-wrote and performed as Laura "Tequila" Logan with former Lifetime keyboardist Larry Young on the album Fuel (the infectious bass-line of which is sampled on Salt-n-Pepa's 1997 track Say Ooh), she appears to have receded back into the void of non-fame that I myself occupy.  Like me, she doesn't even have a Wikipedia page (although her work is mentioned in the contexts of Tony Williams' and Larry Young's projects).  Even going as far as co-writing and recording Tony Williams' unreleased 1975 Wildlife tracks (with Jack Bruce on bass), she remains a fixture of the "Promotional Copy - Not for Sale" sphere of the recording industry.  She is in the shadows of the mis-google "Linda Tequila Logan".  But is she really the same Laura Tequila Logan who proclaims herself to be "happily self-employed" on her Facebook profile, or the one credited with harp on the entry for the 1994 recording Pomp & Pipes: Powerful Music for Organ & Winds on allmusic.com?

Have you seen this person? Laura "Tequila" Logan, bottom left, on the back cover of Larry Young's 1975 LP, Fuel. Sadly, we can no longer ask Larry Young or Tony Williams.

How is she not known?  Where did she go?  What songs have I not heard and what songs did she not get to sing?

Pending the answers to these questions, let this stand as an ode to the tantalizing promise that lies in obscurity: