Map to the treasure
Extensive eight-album box set charts the mysteries of the influential singer-songwriter.
Laura Nyro ★★★★★ American Dreamer MADFISH/SNAPPER MUSIC. LP
ON MR BLUE (Song Of Communications), the opening track of her 1978 album Nested, Laura Nyro reports a phone conversation with a lover. “He said, ‘Sweetheart, look, you know what happens when we get together/I mean I’ve heard of liberation, but sweetheart – you’re in outer space.’” Too free, too untethered, too much – it was the kind of accusation that followed Nyro for most of her life. “If anybody could be miscast, it’s me,” she said in a 1970 interview with Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson. “That’s been my problem, because if you put my music in the wrong place, it becomes a freak.”
Finding the right place for her music – and for Nyro herself – has never been a simple matter. A press advert for her 1966 debut single, Wedding Bell Blues, showed the Bronx-born 19-year-old in grudging bridalwear, glowering over a bouquet. At 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, she wore black to regale the West Coast flower children with the astringent Poverty Train, its occult undertow – “I just saw the devil and he’s smiling at me” – way ahead of the counterculture’s sympathy for such things. (Film footage later suggested cries of “Boo!” were actually “Beautiful!”)
While tracks from her debut, 1967’s More Than A New Discovery, were grist to the mainstream hit machine – Barbra Streisand called her 1971 album Stoney End after one of its three Nyro covers; Frank Sinatra, in hip satin jacket, sang Sweet Blindness with The 5th Dimension on TV – attaching the writer to her songs made them a harder sell. As a result, it’s tempting to write about Nyro as if you’re providing character references for her, pushing for that big-time showbusiness job she never quite landed. Bob Dylan loved her chords. Stephen Sondheim was a fan. “Laura Nyro, you can lump me in with,” Joni Mitchell told MOJO in 2003. Since her death from ovarian cancer in 1997, aged 49, there have been regular flashes of Nyro worship – not least her 2012 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by a teary Bette Midler. Nyro remains cultish compared with Mitchell, or Carole King (who influenced her profoundly and who she influenced right back), but for an artist often described as “unsung”, she frequently comes through surprisingly loud.
American Dreamer collects her first seven albums – including the remarkable run of Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, 1969’s New York Tendaberry, and 1970’s Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat – with an additional disc of demos, live tracks and single versions. In the process, it underlines why Nyro was never really destined for the same blue-chip recognition as Mitchell or King. It wasn’t her voice: as Charlie Calello, co-producer of Eli And The Thirteenth
Confession and 1976’s Smile, comments, “when you take into consideration some of the people who were her contemporaries, like Dylan, come on.”
Instead, that “freakishness” that Nyro detected – the slight but vital different between hothouse exotic and potential triffid – is what becomes clear. Even when Nyro is working most tightly along soulful Brill Building pop lines on More Than A New Discovery, there’s an instability to her songs, a sense that the churchy longing of He’s A Runner or I Never Meant To Hurt You’s radical empathy could spill over, burst banks. By the time of New York Tendaberry, it’s a flood. It applies to the era’s cosmic joy, too: both Nyro’s Stoned Soul Picnic and Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning are soaked in colourwheeling sensory bliss, yet Nyro, making up her own words (“can you surry?”), seems to have taken all the supporting walls out of her song, risking collapse.
When she tries for another ’60s staple, the protest song, it’s equally unstable. Save The Country, from New York Tendaberry (another madeup word), was inspired by the assassinations of John F and Robert Kennedy, a gospel call for cleansing. Yet it changes pace wildly, less a song for marching than a rapturous hurtle towards salvation. Often, it feels as if Nyro is being chased by something. The devil, or Lucifer, appears repeatedly; Eli’s Coming, popularised by Three Dog Night, might be about a faithless man, but there’s an almost supernatural threat in the repeated name, the warning piano. On her fourth album’s Beads Of Sweat, this thumb-pricking quality is heightened again: “Something’s coming I know/To devastate my soul.” With Blackpatch (“Lipstick on her reefer/Waiting for a match”) and Been On A Train’s drug-related death, Sinatra and Streisand are long gone, but Lou Reed might have understood.
After her fourth album, however, that intensity partially lifts. Produced by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Gonna Take A Miracle is a collaboration with her friends Labelle, a fabulous tribute to her pop roots. It includes a brilliantly raw cover of The Shirelles’ I Met Him On A Sunday; a carnal You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me (matched by the demo of her own Emmie) and a version of The Charts’ Désiree that predicts the erotic charge of Amy Winehouse’s Valerie. For once, it feels as if she’s rooted somewhere.
From here, however, her career was formed of retreats and returns. She married and divorced before 1975’s Smile, a record that begins with one spoken word – “strange” – before launching into a mellow cover of The Moments’ Sexy Mama. There’s a new smoothness, a recognition this is now a world with Carly Simon in it, yet you could hardly call Money or I Am The Blues subdued.
Nested, meanwhile, released two months before her son’s birth in 1978, comes with softer, moon-and-New-York-City piano, yet Child In A Universe and American Dreamer hit upon war and peace, fight and flight, Nyro’s voice still pushing through the mellow haze.
It is a lot, this eight-album demand to live and listen at her pitch. Yet as Nyro, mocked for her liberation in Mr Blue, retorts, “I’ve been studying the radar in the sky/I can almost run, fly/ Listen like the animals do… yes, I’m ready for you.” The mainstream might not have been ready for her, but American
Dreamer emphasises once more exactly where her place should be: out in the world, front and centre, not a freak but a true star.
“That ‘freakishness’ that Nyro detected – the difference between hothouse exotic and potential triffid – becomes clear.”