Midweek Music Break: Laura Nyro

Laura Nyro (pronounced Nero): it’s a name I haven’t heard anybody mention in probably forty years. But there was a time when she was it, as a performer but mostly as a songwriter. She looked like a spooky-contemplative Joan Baez — Joan Baez by way of Leonard Cohen — but whether you ever laid eyes on an album cover or not, you knew Laura Nyro.

If you’re of a certain age, the list of big hits she churned out in just a few years, especially for others, seems almost too much to believe: “And When I Die” (Peter, Paul, & Mary, and later Blood, Sweat, & Tears as well); “Blowin’ Away,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Sweet Blindness,” and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (the Fifth Dimension);  “Stoney End,” (Barbra Streisand); and “Eli’s Comin'” (Three Dog Night)…

Other songwriters who have asserted her influence over them: Ricky Lee Jones, Todd Rundgren, Melissa Manchester, Joni Mitchell, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, and Stephen Sondheim, who said of “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “In economy, lyricism, and melody, it is a masterpiece.” …If you’re interested, go to Google Books and pair her last name in a search with that of just about anyone else writing pop music in the late 1960s-early ’70s. Heck, just put “Nyro” alongside the word “songwriters.” It’s amazing.

One interesting factoid I didn’t know when setting out to create this post: Nyro biographer Michele Kort reports that when Blood, Sweat, & Tears’ lead vocalist Al Kooper left the band, Nyro — encouraged by the band themselves — toyed with the idea of replacing him. That would have been a heck of a potent combination.

Most interestingly, as reported in a 1970 LIFE Magazine story, Nyro could not actually write music. She relied on others to transcribe her tunes to notation:

Musicians, they want to know about the bar, and all of that… and I don’t know any of that. I have my own language. I think of music in terms of colors, and shapes, and textures, and sensory things, and abstractions. But once I have the instruments to work with, I can do a lot of things. You can take a string, and strings can be brazen, or they can be sweet, that can be pale. I would work on textures like that.

As for performing publicly, especially for large audiences, Nyro generally declined opportunities to do so. Reportedly, both The Tonight Show and David Letterman tried (unsuccessfully) to get her to appear on their stages. At the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, she seems to have imagined hearing, among the crowd noise, a chorus of boos — and left in tears. Whether she actually heard them or not — conflicting reports, ambiguous recordings of her performance, all the rest — it marked her for good. (She didn’t appear in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Monterey Pop, but you can see a portion of her set thanks to the Criterion Collection and YouTube. I’ve embedded that clip at the foot of this post.)

She first showed up in a 1968 album of her own, and quit music just four or five years later. For good, she said, and at first she pretty much stuck to her word. She came back a few times in the 1970s and ’80s (including some live albums), but never again hit anything like that early plateau. She died in 1997, not quite 50 years old, of ovarian cancer.

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Nyro’s voice, like her songwriting and her “vibe,” was sui generis. If you think of that list of hit songs — and the performers who made them hits — you may get a sense of the voice she apparently had in her head when she composed them, which was her own voice. It could soar, pierce through cinderblock dorm walls (as I know from first-hand experience), and her tempos could suddenly zig-zag slower or faster, not always but often catching you by surprise.

I’ve got a selection of four of her songs here today: one a little more offbeat, and three of them probably familiar. The offbeat one has one of my favorite song titles ever, I think (especially for ambiguity): “When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag.”

Of the others, my favorite — the one I can most easily call to mind in her voice, rather than someone else’s — is “Sweet Blindness.” In a song about drinking, you just don’t expect to find complex, subtle words and music:

Oh, sweet blindness
A little magic, a little kindness
Oh, sweet blindness
All over me

Please don’t tell my mother
I’m a saloon and a moonshine lover
Come on baby, do a slow float
You’re a good looking riverboat
And ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me?

Is that great or what?

(You can find lyrics to “When I Was Freeport…” here; for the others, lots of places around the Web will be happy to serve them up for you.)

[Below, click Play button to begin ‘When I Was a Freeport (etc.)’. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This playlist is just about exactly 13 minutes long.

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About the Monterey Pop appearance: You can judge for yourself. The gods know I’m no authority on the interpretation of recorded sound, but I don’t pick up any booing here: