Echoes of Laura Nyro

Some thoughts on Nyro's influence during her golden era of the late sixties and early seventies

Welcome music lovers once again!

This time around, I am writing about Laura Nyro once again. Last fall, I wrote an essay on her 1969 album, New York Tendaberry, a masterpiece. For the below essay, I consider some of the artists that were influenced by her—both well known and lesser known—as well as some thoughts on her second album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. I hope you enjoy it and will share your thoughts as well.

With December soon around the corner, I will be dedicating the next three editions of my Substack to the sounds of the season (for those less inclined to seasonal music, not to worry, regular programming here will resume in the New Year). First up will be a slightly revised and expanded version of a piece I wrote in 2021 on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s transformation of portions of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, followed by a kind of meander through the music of the holiday season and then capped off with a consideration of Frank Sinatra’s Christmas music. It should all be a lot of fun to put together.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

---

“No, I don’t have the soul of Joni
And I can not see myself like Miss Laura
But I have found so much to please me
And I guess it’s me, I’m just funny that way.”
- from ‘Funny That Way,’ written by Melissa Manchester

Melissa Manchester’s assertion of independence is included on the first side of her debut album, Home to Myself, released in 1973. It’s an album that flies under the radar—Manchester would break through two years later with ‘Midnight Blue.’ Home to Myself is a recording that should be lauded as an important part of the glorious era of the female singer-songwriter in the seventies. While she was correct to distinguish herself from Joni Mitchell, her desire to carve a similar distinction from Laura Nyro is more quizzical.

It’s hard to listen to her first album and at certain points not sense the ethos of Nyro leading Manchester and the group of musicians accompanying her. The homage is felt in several ways. Primarily it’s through Manchester’s voice and the way it operates on two opposite poles. One is quiet, begging the listener to bend an ear; the other is based on volume, curling up to outrageous crescendos, breaking into a sharp cry that is a little less shrill than how Nyro could sometimes sound. I use that term not in a derogatory way but to illustrate how her voice could open to strike the listener cold, rousing up shivers of pleasure as some deep truth is revealed. Both singers shared a declaratory spirit as well as an assuredness that belied their ages (Manchester was all of 22 at the time of her first LP).

Then there are the purely musical moments. After she professed that she “can not see myself as Miss Laura” on ‘Funny That Way,’ there is a reprise of the album opener, ‘If It Feels Good (Let it Ride),’ powered by a dissonant arrangement for strings by Chris Delrick. They shoot and dart around her, reminiscent of the brief moment in the middle of Nyro’s ‘Tom Cat Goodbye’ from New York Tendaberry.

‘Easy,’ the musical centrepiece of Home to Myself, is full of the hallmarks of Laura Nyro. There is the recurring piano riff played by Manchester, the rise and fall in her voice as she sings a line like “baby, can’t you see / there’s nothing harder than to live without love / that’s why they call me, easy” and the fake ending that leads to a funky interlude that then dissipates back to Manchester at the piano and the soft backing of strings. When Home to Myself was released in April 1973, Nyro was in the middle of a temporary retirement from music.

She was an artist better known in passing than directly. Her songs were well suited to the sound of the 5th Dimension. Their group harmony added punch to songs like ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ and ‘Blowing Away.’ Marilyn McCoo turned the unrequited lament of ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ into an irresistible come hither. True, the group ironed out the idiosyncratic spirit of Nyro’s music to make it more commercial but it was a formula that worked very well and also evidenced the natural affinity between the group and her. Others had hits with her songs too: Blood, Sweat & Tears (‘And When I Die’ - pretty good), Barbra Streisand (‘Stoney End’ - not too bad) and Three Dog Night (‘Eli’s Comin’’ - not so good) being the most notable.

As the 5th Dimension’s cover of ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ was zooming up the charts in mid-1968, Nyro’s second album (her first for Columbia) edged into the bottom rung of Billboard’s Top LPs chart, peaking at #181. Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was the crystallization of the precocious energy of her debut LP, More Than a New Discovery, released on Verve Forecast. Where the latter could be slightly hesitant while sending a clear signal of Nyro’s stylistic breadth, the former was full of her burgeoning genius, unleashed and unshackled.

---

Thank you for reading ‘Listening Sessions.’

The best way to support my work of spreading the joy of listening to music is to take out a paid subscription of $6/month or $50/annually (Canadian funds).

---

The first hint is the brass flourish that launches ‘Luckie,’ the album opener, into high-stepping style. That was care of Charles Calello, a producer and arranger who played a key role in the rise of the Four Seasons among his voluminous contributions and credits. Both he and Nyro produced Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.

In an interview for American Dreamer, an LP box set of Nyro’s first seven studio albums put out by Madfish in 2021 (an expanded CD box set containing the entirety of Nyro’s musical output is coming this December), Calello described visiting Nyro’s apartment on Fifth Avenue between 69th and 70th in New York. With Nyro was David Geffen, her manager. The apartment was small—by Calello’s estimate, about 375 square feet. By candlelight, Nyro began to play the songs that would make up the album.

“She performed [the music] brilliantly. So at the end of ‘The Confession,’ when she finished, I was in tears. I was so emotionally taken by what I had heard and realized I had an opportunity to be involved. I know I could make that record.”

It’s quite frankly easy to imagine being in Calello’s shoes and reacting the same way. Recordings of Nyro in concert from her first era as an artist, a period stretching from 1966 to 1972, reveal the almost religious aura of intimacy that they incubated. With just her singing and playing piano, the only sound from the crowd was either appreciation or shouts of adulation and devotion. Even on the only extant recording of a song from Nyro’s appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival—‘Lonely Women’—where she played with an under rehearsed band and a group of female background singers, the audience is held rapt.

Now imagine Nyro playing the 13 songs that comprised Eli and the Thirteenth Confession in order. The final product, with its often elaborate, deeply visceral productions, remains a profound experience. It’s the kind of album that is impossible to listen to passively. Nyro always wrote songs of consequence, both in terms of their subject matter and how they were realized on record. They pull you in.

Many relished in the joy of living and being in New York; the opening 1-2-3 punch of the aforementioned ‘Luckie’ into ‘Lu’ into ‘Sweet Blindness’ especially so. The rush of the chorus of ‘Lu’ with a chorus of Nyros singing as if twinning the melody line with some unseen choreography is a shorthand for how quickly one can be initiated into Laura Nyro fandom.

The extroversion of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is astonishing. ‘Eli’s Coming’ is a five-alarm emergency, one which the song’s protagonist does not avoid as a chorus of Nyros sings at one point, “she walked, but she never got away.” On the smoky, slow jazz coda, Nyro cries out “ooohhhhh noooooo!!!!!!!!!” ‘Once It Was Alright (Farmer Joe)’ cycles through a series of motifs like Brian Wilson at his ‘Heroes and Villains’ height. ‘The Confession’ pushes even further. The yearning of the opening section, punctuated by searching strings undercut the fervour as she sings, “would you love to love me baby / I would love to love you baby, now.” About halfway, the song moves into double-time—the music now matching the lyrics—and then climaxes as Nyro shouts, “love is surely gospel / love my love thing.” The word love is sung 39 times on ‘The Confession.’ It’s a bold song of seduction and empowerment. It also, as described above, twists and turns throughout its two-minutes-and-50-seconds running time.

Except for ‘Lu’ and ‘Sweet Blindness,’ each song on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession has a fluid form. These unexpected shifts in tempo or time signature or sudden outbursts of sound or a disappearance of decibels became part of what to expect from a Laura Nyro record. They became even more pronounced on New York Tendaberry and Christmas and the Beads of Sweat.

A shuffle beat was another constant. It didn’t imprint itself hard on the ground like Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. It skipped. It suggested possibilities, a joie de vivre. It can be found in the music that Peggy Lipton made with Lou Adler, just as she found stardom as Julie Barnes on The Mod Squad.

The one album she made, titled simply Peggy Lipton, was notable for including two early songs written by Carole King and Toni Stern—three years before Tapestry. One, ‘Lady of the Lake,’ has strong Nyro undertones, including the recurring harpsichord pattern played by Larry Knechtel, the martial beat played by Hal Blaine on the resolution of the verses and during the concluding canon, and the interplay between Lipton and the Blossoms. Of course, Nyro wouldn’t have written such a self-consciously literate song (although it is a good one and the best thing on the album) but still, it has her youthful toughness. Lipton also covered two of Nyro’s songs: ‘Stoney End’ and ‘Lu.’ The former doesn’t make much of an impression but the latter leans into its girl-group quality.

I think there’s a through line in the music of the sixties beginning with perhaps Brenda Lee and then moving to Lesley Gore and then to the Ronettes and then the Shangri-Las and then to singer-songwriters like Norma Tanega, Janie Ian, Bobbie Gentry and yes, Laura Nyro.

Tanega’s lone hit, ‘Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,’ from early 1966 has a New York hipster bent as well as a walking beat that was both aural and visual. Ian’s ‘Society’s Child (I’ve Been Thinking)’ merged social consciousness with a structure that defied standard pop construction (no less than Leonard Bernstein was impressed by it) and Gentry’s songs were redolent of the Bayou country as Nyro’s evoked the glory of living and loving in New York.

One of the most fascinating what-ifs about Nyro’s career came in the spring of 1968. At that time, Blood, Sweat & Tears were looking for a lead singer after Al Kooper left. It is said that Nyro wanted to take his place (and maybe even did for a brief moment) until Geffen convinced her otherwise. David Clayton-Thomas took the mic and propelled the horn-rock outfit to supersonic heights before it all careened back to Earth. The question of what the group would have sounded like, or more pointedly, what Nyro sounded like fronting it, is interesting to ponder.

‘Save the Country’ and ‘Gibsom Street,’ both from New York Tendaberry, provide a hint, but only a small one. Both employ horns only at certain points. ‘Woman’s Blues’ from Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is probably the closest thing we have in Nyro’s discography of her using the conventions of horn rock with its full horn arrangement and a twelve-bar gait.

A recording that Ten Wheel Drive, another horn-rock outfit from the late sixties, provides another potential clue. The group’s lead singer was the fiery Genya Ravan and while most of their music could not be mistaken for Nyro’s sound, there is a brief interlude on the epic ‘How Long Before I’m Gone’ that is super intriguing.

Ravan plays it coy before the band’s horn section, dominated by muted trumpets, plays a cocky line over a shuffle—two signature Nyro touches. A repeat of the sequence has the trumpets remove the mutes before the song returns to the muscular rock that was more typical of Ten Wheel Drive.

But there’s a record that is even more fascinating. It came out in 1970 on Epic and even though it was on a major label, it has retained an invisibility so that to call the album obscure seems almost inadequate. I only discovered it this summer through the Spotify algorithm—even today, technology can still, every once in a while, be your friend.

The album is Wonderful Deeds and Adventures by singer-songwriter Susan Carter (now known as Susan Sisko Carter). By the third track, ‘Temptation ’Bout to Get Me,’ there’s a clear link between Carter’s voice and Nyro’s, mostly in their shared timbre. The following track is called ‘Medley for Billie Holiday’ and begins with Nyro’s ‘Billy Blues’ and concludes with her ‘Lonely Women’—in between there's Holiday’s ‘Lady Sings the Blues.’ By the time ‘I Need a Good Man Bad’ rolls around, Carter’s phrasing mirrors Nyro’s to an eerie extent. Throughout, there are horns—jubilant on the opening cover of Stephen Stills’ ‘Bluebird.’ pensive on ‘Lonely Women,’ forceful on a take of the Beatles’ ‘I’m So Tired’ and chipper on Randy Newman’s ‘Illinois.’

Looking at the album back cover brings the Eureka moment. The arranger on the album was Dick Halligan. In addition to him, the six other musicians specifically thanked are Bobby Colomby, Jim Fielder, Jerry Hyman, Lew Soloff, Chuck Winfield and Fred Lipsius. With Steve Katz and Clayton-Thomas, they were Blood, Sweat & Tears. Among the others thanked are Randy Brecker, who had been in the band during the Al Kooper era.

In other words, here is the album that Nyro may have made had she joined the band assuming, of course, that she wouldn’t have written material specifically for Blood, Sweat & Tears. While the latter may be a stretch, it’s undeniable that Wonderful Deeds and Adventures is historically significant. That it is a good album makes it even better.

Nyro fans, and count me a passionate member of the fan club, will find it a stunning find, another piece in the puzzle of the echoes of Laura Nyro that continue to reverberate.

---