Laura Nyro - An Enigma Wrapped in Songs

Laura Nyro is a textbook example of an underrated, unlucky artist who only received her due recognition after death. Even today, however, her fame remains far below the influence she managed to exert on later generations of songwriters. Her refined works represented some of the most intense pages of American singer-songwriter music: a collage of poetry and musical innovation, expressed through her piano and her blues-soprano voice, capable of conveying a soul, jazz, gospel and folk feeling. A formula born from the fusion of the various influences that marked the New York music scene in the mid-1960s: the music of the Brill Building and the confessional songbook of Carole King, the gospel of the Harlem churches and the jazz of the Greenwich Village clubs, Black blues and the wild poetry of the Beats and of Dylan, the music of Motown and the doo-wop vocal groups performing on street corners. But her musical and poetic universe also embodied the dream of a great generation, the "freak" generation, of sexual liberation and rejection of bourgeois convention. Laura Nyro, however, never had a hit single or a gold record, even though her songs - from "And When I Die" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" to "Wedding Bell Blues" - made the fortunes of other colleagues, including Three Dog Night, Peter Paul & Mary, BS & T, Barbra Streisand, Julie Driscoll & Brian Auger with the Trinity, and the Fifth Dimension. Among the reasons were a reticence and a fierce independence that hardly suited the logic of stardom. Never one for the spotlight, Nyro always stayed on the sidelines: very few interviews, many disputes with arrangers, record executives, managers and producers, whose interference she abhorred. Her proverbial insecurity is summed up perfectly in one episode: the alleged fiasco at the Monterey Festival in 1967, when Nyro was supposedly booed off the stage by a drunken crowd unable to follow her winding lyricism. But it seems things didn't actually happen that way. Excerpts from that famous concert, filmed by movie producer D. A. Pennebaker, actually show a magnetic performance by Nyro, who every so often shoots fleeting, grim glances at the mediocre band backing her. And at the end, with a half-smile masking her disappointment, the crowd applauds warmly, and one man even shouts "Beautiful!" Not a single boo. "She imagined it all," Pennebaker later said.

In the Heart of the Big Apple

Laura Nyro (real surname: Nigro) was born on October 18, 1947 in New York, into an Italian-Jewish family. Her father Louis was a jazz trumpeter, her mother Gilda a bookkeeper for the American Psychoanalytic Association. Laura grew up in the Bronx, in a small house across from the High School.

At eight years old she had already written her first song, pounding away at the family Steinway.

After attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, she began performing in local clubs, showing off a repertoire that mixed different influences, from Bob Dylan to John Coltrane. At 12, she practically slept with a keyboard. At 14, as a camp group leader, she turned little war songs into five-part harmonies. At 16, she sang jazz tunes in subway stations and shut herself in her room listening to Mary Wells and the Ronettes. And at seventeen, she sold her first song, "And When I Die," for a $5,000 advance, to Peter, Paul and Mary. It's also one of her most moving songs, eerily prophetic of her tragic fate: “And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone/ There’ll be one child born and a world to carry on/ I’m not scared of dyin’ and I don’t really care/ If it’s peace you find in dyin’, well, then let the time be near/ If it’s peace you find in dying, when dyin’ time is here/ Just bundle up my coffin, cause it’s cold way down there”.

In 1966, at just 17, she made her debut with the album More Than a New Discovery, which - in its compositional and pianistic approach, lyrics and deeply personal vocal style - profoundly shook up the American scene. The commercial outcome was disappointing, but the record soon became a rich source for other artists, who covered its songs: the Fifth Dimension had massive hits with "Wedding Bell Blues" and "Blowin' Away," Barbra Streisand brought "Stoney End" to success, and Blood, Sweat & Tears broke through with "And When I Die".

A voice spanning three octaves of emotion and an intimate style, Nyro transformed her inner stirrings into music that was hard to pigeonhole, so many were the elements fusing together at once: effervescent and confessional; catchy and experimental; jazzy and bluesy, with a touch of soul and doo-wop. "She didn't want to change a single note or a single word in her songs," her father, Louis Nigro, told Deborah Sontag of the 'New York Times' in 1997. "Very early on, an arranger told her that what she wrote was sometimes musically impossible, and she started crying".

In 1968, David Geffen, then an ambitious talent scout, saw her on the tape of that supposedly disastrous Monterey performance and signed her to his label. As the story goes, at her first major audition, in a room at a Beverly Hills hotel, in front of Clive Davis, then president of Columbia Records, Nyro was so intimidated that she asked for the lights to be turned off and sang lit only by the glow of a muted television.

She landed a $4 million contract, which allowed her to make Eli And The Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry, destined to remain her masterpieces.

Self-analysis in music

With the thirteen tracks of the double album Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, Laura Nyro set a new benchmark for women in the Sixties: that of the complete singer-songwriter, who writes, sings and "lives" her own songs in the first person. The record, a concept album about a girl's evolution from adolescence to adulthood, is a bold amalgam of jazz, soul, folk and rock, a sequence of aching ballads tinged with melancholy. Her refined melodies echo the finest work of Burt Bacharach, Hal David, George & Ira Gershwin. The arrangements, always imaginative and elegant, are elevated by her clear, gospel-inflected voice and by the lyrical intensity of the words. Her troubled self-analyses tell of love, of inscrutable romantic illusions, of lonely women and sensual desires. They capture both pain and the joy of living, hope and alienation, neurosis and utopia. In particular, "Eli's Coming" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" showcase virtuosic piano writing, while folk influences blend with soul/blues on "More Than A New Discovery", "Luckie", "The Confession" and "Poverty Train", an acoustic guitar piece that anticipates by many years the "atmospheric" intuitions of Jane Siberry. This time, although it doesn't achieve major commercial success, the record puts the Bronx pianist firmly on critics' radar. And, as usual, it yields plenty of hits for other artists: "Sweet Blindness" and "Stoned Soul Picnic" would be covered by the 5th Dimension, "Eli's Comin'" by Three Dog Night.

New York Tendaberry (1969) continues in this vein, sharpening the focus on sound, which now becomes less jazzy and more dramatic. "Time and Love" and "Save the Country" are the most impassioned songs; "Gibsom Street" captures the full conflict between attraction to sin and guilt. But "Tom Cat Goodbye" also hits the mark, a "nocturnal" piano ballad torn apart by silences and sudden vocal outbursts, as do the austere meditations of "Captain Saint Lucifer" and "You Don't Love Me When I Cry". Pianistic and hallucinatory, the record offers a deconstruction of song form in which one senses the influence of jazz and of Miles Davis, whom Nyro had come to know at concerts organized by Bill Graham at the Fillmore West, alongside Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Steve Miller. New York Tendaberry is the musical transcription of a psychoanalytic session: it creates and sustains an atmosphere that is almost sinister in its intensity. And it's almost as if producer Roy Halee managed, between the notes, to capture "the sound of silence". The lyrics range from personal reflections to social themes, such as poverty and alienation in a megalopolis like New York, even brushing against moments of genuine spirituality, far removed from the shallow Eastern-tinged mysticism in vogue at the end of the Sixties.

Meanwhile, though, Laura Nyro was growing increasingly impatient with the record industry machine: within a few years, her relationship with Geffen fell apart, and when he founded Asylum Records, she chose to stay with Columbia. Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat (1970) continues her exploration of soul music, with contributions from the likes of Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins and Eddie Hinton. On one track, "Beads Of Sweat", Duane Allman even appears on guitar.
A minor misstep, redeemed however by the following Gonna Take a Miracle, recorded with Labelle and with the production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. Her first non-"original" record, it gathers spectacular tributes to Motown ("Jimmy Mack," "Nowhere to Run"), to doo-wop ("The Bells", "Spanish Harlem"), and to the "girl group" era ("I Met Him On A Sunday"), confirming her as a performer of boundless talent.

Retirement and comeback

At 24, in the grip of a deep personal and artistic crisis, Laura Nyro announced her retirement, repelled by the cold economics of a music business she could never come to terms with ("Money, money, money / I feel like a pawn", she would later write in a song). She married a carpenter, David Bianchini, with whom she had a son, and moved from her Manhattan penthouse to a cottage in a Massachusetts fishing town. Her marriage, however, would be short-lived, ending in divorce in 1975. It was not the only tragedy of an eventful decade for the Bronx pianist: her mother, Gilda Nigro, in a grim foreshadowing, died of ovarian cancer at 49.

In 1976, she returned to the studio with Smile (1976), an ultimately transitional record that alternates original songs with covers. The live album Season Of Lights (1977) followed, then the more mature Nested (1978), highlighted by "American Dreamer" and "My Innocence". Confused and unhappy, Laura Nyro took another long break, during which she embraced the lesbian and feminist world. A decisive encounter came in 1977 with painter Maria Desiderio, with whom she would live for 17 years on a bucolic property in Danbury, Connecticut, where, amid streams and duck ponds, she also raised her son, Gil Bianchini. "The business side of music was an environment in which she never felt comfortable," Ms. Desiderio, originally from Brooklyn, would recall. "She saw in it a sea of false friendships, false emotions. But she lived the business of life very intensely. She was certainly no hermit."

When Laura Nyro returned in 1984 with Mother's Spiritual, her music had become more mature and introspective. The memory of her mother, as the title suggests, is the dominant theme of a record that nonetheless fails to convey the emotional charge of her earlier work. Another five years would pass before Live at the Bottom Line, recorded at the legendary New York club. It was followed, in 1993, by Walk the Dog and Light the Light, her first collection of new material in nearly a decade, produced by Gary Katz (who had previously worked with Steely Dan). Her songs tackle the most varied subjects — from animals to motherhood to the rights of Native Americans — but they no longer carry the dramatic fervor and magic of her earlier work. In 1994, already struck by illness, she returned to the stage in Japan; she then retreated to Power Station Studios in New York with luminaries such as the Brecker Brothers, Jeff Pevar, Bernard Purdie, Will Lee and John Tropea.

An artist's testament

"Ever since I was very young," Laura Nyro recalled in her last interview, given in 1995 to the American magazine 'Musician', "I always wanted to go out into the streets or to my college girlfriends' parties, because there were so many lovely groups that represented the joy of my youth. But looking back on those years, I realize I also had a very spiritual feeling that tied me to that kind of music. I was never interested in the conventional boundaries of a composer. Besides, everything I've written has always reflected my feminine nature and the life around me. What I focus on is art itself, married to poetry and music. I'm that kind of artist, and I can do and say anything: that, to me, is what being an artist means."

In one of her last public outings, Nyro went to the Beacon Theater to see one of her idols, Chaka Khan. Not long after, she asked her family to plant a Japanese maple outside her bedroom window, one that would keep growing as she faded away.

Laura Nyro died of ovarian cancer, just like her mother, on April 8, 1997. Shortly afterward, the anthology The Best of Laura Nyro: Stoned Soul Picnic was released, with tracks chosen by Nyro herself. Four years later came the collection of unreleased material and rarities Angel in the Dark, whose title captures the enigmatic, tragic fate of the New York singer-songwriter. A tribute concert was also organized in her memory, featuring Patti LaBelle, one of the musicians closest to Nyro, Phoebe Snow, Sandra Bernhard and Cyndi Lauper, during which an amateur video, "Of Nyro On Nyro", filmed during her final year, was screened. And one of her most direct "descendants", Suzanne Vega, wrote a touching tribute to her memory.

"She should have received, at the very least, as many gold records as Neil Sedaka," Louis Nigro lamented in the aforementioned 'New York Times' interview. "But Laura was always very sensitive. She didn't like collaborating. Let alone compromise. She was an artist, and she didn't enjoy — in fact she hated — the show-biz side of things." Today, Laura Nyro rightfully belongs to the category of "cult" artists. A very active cult, it would seem, given that her very first biography — "Soul Picnic" (St. Martin's Press, $25.95) by Michele Kort — sold out the very morning it arrived in London. Thanks to her pioneering role as a songwriter ahead of her time, her melodic sensibility, her imaginative arrangements and the themes she explored, the shy pianist from the Bronx cast an extraordinary influence over the generations that followed. From Joni Mitchell to Suzanne Vega, from Rickie Lee Jones to Fiona Apple, nearly every female singer-songwriter who came after her owes her a debt, consciously or not.

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