The Laura Nyro Experience (Part One)

The beginning of a three-part essay on the lure and wonder of Laura Nyro

Today’s edition of Listening Sessions is the first of three that will be dedicated to a piece of writing into which I have tried to pour every ounce of my ambition and heart. Recently, an article in Rolling Stone asked if anyone remembers Laura Nyro. For me, I can only answer, how could anyone who knows of her and her music ever forget her.

For the past month or so, I have been re-discovering her early albums, hearing what came after 1978’s Nested, pouring over Michele Kort’s biography of her, building a massive playlist on Spotify of her music and everything that circled around her universe, all to ponder why her music moves me so much as well as so many others and to try to write an essay that pulls it all together. It’s the kind of project that seems tailor-made for Substack, breaking all the rules of online writing and letting the muse run wild. It is the most invigorating thing I have done here on Substack.

The below is the first part of what will be a three-party essay on Laura Nyro, and it is the longest piece of writing I have ever done. Part one is about 6,400 words. Because of the length, I’ve only included a few music clips. I hope you enjoy it and I also hope you’ll tell me your thoughts about Laura Nyro too.

Collaboration April: Since I was last in touch, collaborations with two of my favourite MusicStackers have dropped. I took part in Emm as in Music’s Five for Friday sharing my pick for a diabolical earworm. I also took part in Andres’s Vital Records series and filmed myself last fall walking and talking in New York about three albums that radiate my love for NYC. Both pair very nicely with the start of my Laura Nyro essay.

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The Laura Nyro Experience (Part One)
By: Robert C. Gilbert

“I don’t want to sock it to the people. I just want to put my music out there and if they like it they’ll come to me.” - Laura Nyro to producer Bones Howe, June 1968

Once, and only once, did Laura Nyro go along with the emerging formula that was turning her songs into hit records. It was the middle of June in 1968 and the song was one she had written in the aftermath of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

‘Save the Country’ is a call for and a belief in deliverance, of the hope of being baptized in “the glory river” where Dr. Martin Luther King presides, of collectively pledging “to keep the dream of the two young brothers”—Robert F. and President John F. Kennedy—and channeling anger to “take me to the glory goal.”

Its imagery is far beyond the simple platitudes of peace and understanding but it is also free of cynicism. It foreshadows how Nyro would increasingly focus on social and political issues like women’s and animal rights as well as the environment and also how her writing during her first glorious era, a time period stretching from 1966 to 1972, cut as deep into the marrow of life as anyone ever had before or since.

For reasons not entirely clear, Nyro agreed to go to California to record ‘Save the Country’ with producer Bones Howe and the musicians known today as the Wrecking Crew, including bassist Joe Osborn and drummer Hal Blaine.

It was Howe who was at the helm when the 5th Dimension, a male-female harmony group whose music defied easy categorization (was it soul or was it pop or was it even jazz) and who were the first to popularize the songs of Jimmy Webb, a songwriter whose songs also resisted easy labelling, recorded Nyro’s ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ and ‘Sweet Blindness.’ Days before she entered the studio with Howe, the group’s version of ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the first of many times that a Laura Nyro song would ride high on the charts, her songbook becoming a fount of good luck for artists looking for a hit single save for Nyro herself.

The 5th Dimension’s recording of ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ is faithful to the version Nyro recorded for her second album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. It retains the primary motif, although it is played on organ as opposed to piano, as well as her knotty harmonic shifts. The sound is broader with more prominent parts for strings and brass as are the group's harmonies. Even with these differences, the feel of the two recordings is similar. Both are sublime. This general faithfulness to Nyro’s original vision proved to be the exception and indeed, Howe’s reimagining of ‘Sweet Blindness’ takes her ecstatic celebration of being buzzed and twisted it into a fairly conventional pop song with peppy brass and exaggerations of her tempo and meter shifts, ultimately turning her song into a kind of burlesque. It’s a decent recording, to be sure, but one that is a cheap imitation of the rich material Howe was adapting.

‘Save the Country’ was even richer and it is fascinating to hear Nyro sing against Blaine’s cheery drums and bright brass declarations. The beat positively skips, especially on the refrain and Nyro’s vocal echoes that almost innocent cadence.

Amidst the gloss there are some startling qualities: the two measures after the first and second verses where Blaine plays a fill on brushes and the rush of the tempo as she sings, “keep the dream of the two young brothers” with ”dream” sustained for an extra bar or two. Here are two more: the horn lines underline rather than comment on what Nyro is singing and the piano part, played by either her or another musician, is indistinct (it’s barely audible). Howe’s ‘Save the Country’ is then a recording by Laura Nyro that didn’t sound like how a recording by Laura Nyro was expected to sound.

She characterized Howe’s approach as trying to “sock it to the people.” What she wanted to do was something far different: “I just want to put my music out there and if they like it they will come to me.” ‘Save the Country’ was released just over two weeks after it was recorded. It did not chart. Years later, Howe admitted he had approached working with her all wrong: he tried to shape Laura Nyro’s music as opposed to her music shaping how he could realize it on record.

Her sole appearance on network television, an episode of Kraft Music Hall from mid-January 1969, further illustrated this tension between trying to place Nyro within the mold of the female singer and realizing that the mold had nothing to do with Laura Nyro. She sings two songs. The first is ‘He’s a Runner,’ which she sings to the backing track recorded for her remarkably assured debut album, More Than a New Discovery, released on Verve Folkways in early 1967. She is seated at a white grand piano at a ninety-degree angle.

As she offers ‘He’s a Runner,’ she frequently closes her eyes, never looking directly at the camera, fully enveloped in the song. At the end of the bridge, which climaxes on a final, held note, she raises her left hand. As the song ends, the audience applauds and she stands up, bows almost imperceptibly and then moves slowly, lifting her long, flowing dress off the ground, to the middle of the piano bench. Her hands touch the keyboard. She pauses for four seconds. As she tosses her hair away from her eyes, she starts to play a syncopated pattern.

She repeats it and then she sings. “Come on people, come on children…” The start of ‘Save the Country.’ The camera catches her attack of the chords on the piano that conclude the first verse. It moves to tightly focus on her. Again, Nyro never breaks, so to speak, the fourth wall. She occasionally shakes her head in time. As she begins the fourth verse, she sways in time. She gives a furtive smile as she ends and then turns away.

There is a sense of complete interiority here. Nyro is engaging with her music and only her music, and in so doing, poses an urgent question to the viewer: are you in or are you out?

About three weeks after Nyro was on television, she played the first of a series of solo concerts. Just her and a piano. These shows helped build a growing fervor around her. Becoming and then being of fan of Laura Nyro meant something that the word fan only hinted at. That’s why the footage from Kraft Music Hall is so important. It’s the one opportunity to not only hear but to see what it would have been like to have been among the throng at one of her solo shows.

Introducing Nyro to television viewers was Bobby Darin. His brief preamble focused as much on her as a songwriter as on her as a performer. It’s offered with a solemnity that I’d like to think was motivated by a recognition of the privilege the viewing audience was soon to be accorded. If Darin’s words are taken at face value, they represented a 180-degree turn from his first meeting with her in the mid sixties.

Laura Nyro then was still Laura Nigra—she changed her last name, in part, because her given last name could be easily mispronounced as negro. There was no doubt by then that the Bronx-born-and-raised Laura had a gifted way with both words and music whether it was through the poems she wrote for school, the nights she spent harmonizing with a group of young Puerto Rican guys in the 170 St. subway station along the Grand Concourse or during one of the summers she and her family spent in the Catskills when she wrote the music for her team for Song Night, part of Color War to mark the end of the season.

In Michele Kort’s indispensable biography on Nyro, Stoned Soul, her brother Jan Nigro remembered what she composed for the night: “The inspirational songs were so powerful, so exquisite. She had worked these soaring harmonies that left the audience stunned. Her songs had such passion [emphasis Kort’s] extolling the virtues of the green team.”

When she met with Darin, who owned the publishing company Trinity Music, she had graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and had a portfolio of songs she had written. Of them, only ‘He’s a Runner’ and ‘I Never Meant to Hurt You’ would be recorded by her. All Darin would offer on hearing her sing some of her songs was to encourage her to write something like ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?,’ a pop song from the last gasp of tunes that got passed around the stylists of the day and that was more melodramatic then melodic. That Nyro returned to serenade Darin with a song she called ‘What Kind of Fool Are You?’ was a sign that she was an artist not for turning.

Her audition with folk-music impresario Milt Okun in mid-1966 was more auspicious. It was arranged by publisher Artie Mogull—he was the first to sign Bob Dylan—after he hired her father, a jazz trumpeter and highly regarded piano tuner, to tune his piano and listened to Louis Nigro telling him all about his songwriting daughter. The tape of her tryout was recorded and was officially released by Omnivore Recordings in 2021 as Go Find the Moon: The Audition Tape.

The most revealing moment of the tape is when Mogull speaks to Nyro and says, “Laura, I never asked you this, do you do any songs other than those you have written?” She softly answers “no” and after ‘Stardust’ and ‘Moon River’ are offered as suggestions for her to perform, she continues: “yeah, I know some of them. Of course I know there are other songs and I know a few lines from each one, I mean, I know a few, maybe.” Mogull jokes, “there is Irving Berlin,” to which she zings him with “and there’s Bob Dylan” to which he can only say, “yeah, I heard of him.”

For the next minute and a half, a flummoxed Nyro tries to give Mogull and Okun what they seek to hear. She plays and sings the first two lines of ‘When Sunny Gets Blue,’ then tries a starkly reharmonized ‘Kansas City’ and after singing the opening of ‘I Only Want to Be With You,’ Dusty Springfield’s first big hit, she stops and says, almost despairingly, “I can’t do that, I don’t know the other words.”

Reflecting thirty years later, Mogull winced at this whole exchange. “Can you imagine being stupid enough to ask her if she could do Irving Berlin? I was dumbstruck by her talent,” he said. He then added, “but we didn’t get along so well.”

Mogull soon got Nyro signed to Verve Forecast Records and into the studio with producer-arranger Herb Bernstein to record More Than a New Discovery. A big point of contention was the decision to not have Nyro play piano during the album sessions. There was also the decision to market her as a jilted-bride-not-to-be for the single release of ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ which looks comical in hindsight.

Laura Nyro represented something very new in music. She arrived out of nowhere—she didn’t do the obligatory rounds of the New York clubs, for one example—and fully formed. She stood apart from the emerging counterculture but was most definitely part of popular music’s rapid maturation in the mid sixties.

She was all of 17 when she wrote ‘And When I Die’ and only two years older when her first album hit stores. Nyro’s music slipped right past the Beatles and Dylan, honing in on, in part, the girl groups of the early sixties. Norma Tanega, whose Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog was also produced and arranged by Bernstein, and Janis Ian, whose debut was produced by Shadow Morton who had guided the Shangri-Las, another important Nyro harbinger, were two singer-songwriters who were also creating a female-centric, tough kind of music that defied categorization. Neither LP, though, stood out quite like More Than a New Discovery even as it had nowhere the initial success that both Tanega and Ian enjoyed. And even as Bernstein pigeon-holed Nyro into fairly conventional arrangements, there is no denying her songs as well as her herself easily outwitted any attempt at conformity.

It is an addictive album, begging to be played over and over again to experience once again the 12 songs and, more pointedly, to hear Nyro sing them again. And that remained so for each album that followed. The question here then is why.

I think the best answer can be found in two places. The first is offered by producer and arranger Charlie Calello. The second must come from the listener—in this case, I.

Of all the stories of how encountering Laura Nyro could have a transfiguring effect, Calello’s is the most cinematic and, to me, the most heartfelt and resonant.

He first met Laura Nyro in late 1967. By then, David Geffen, still at the William Morris Agency, became her first dedicated champion, managing to get her out of her contract with Okun and Mogull and getting Clive Davis, then just starting his presidency of Columbia Records, to sign her to his label. All it took for Davis—notice the trend emerging here—was to meet her at Columbia’s offices on 52nd Street and to hear her play and sing her songs.

Calello was then a creatively stifled staff producer and arranger at Columbia, and known for making hit records with the Four Seasons, Lou Christie, Shirley Ellis and the Toys that were sonically rich and grounded in a pop sensibility often accented by brass and powered by a rhythm that had and compelled movement.

Davis arranged for Calello to go to Nyro’s small apartment at 888 Eighth Avenue as part of Nyro and Geffen’s search for a producer and arranger for her planned second album. Calello knew of her. If it weren’t for a scheduling conflict, he would have overseen her first album. He was eager to meet her.

Of all the times Calello has recounted his first meeting with Nyro, the one he wrote for Madfish’s box set of almost everything she recorded, Hear My Song: The Collection 1966-1995, is the most evocative.

Calello arrived at 52nd and 8th between seven and eight o’clock in the evening. After Nyro buzzed him in, he entered a room lit by candles and scented by incense. He described Nyro as wearing a short-sleeve blouse with a sunflower pin in the middle of it and a sarong. She asked him to tell her and Geffen, who was there too, about himself. He told them about the records he had made. Nyro interrupted him, “That’s not what I mean. I already know what you’ve done with your music. We want to know who you are. Just tell us about yourself, the stuff we don’t know.”

Calello started by telling her his dad played trumpet. She quickly replied that her dad played trumpet too. It was the beginning of a common ground between the two. They kept talking. They discovered they both loved jazz as well as Motown, and that they both had chosen music as their profession very early on. Geffen then sternly told Nyro to cut the conversation and play the music Calello had come to hear.

She dutifully moved to the upright piano in her apartment, sat down, paused and then began: “Yes I’m ready, so come on Luckie.” From that, the opening of ‘Luckie,’ came 12 more songs, ending with ‘The Confession.’ Calello recalled that as she finished, Nyro looked visibly exhausted.

As she played, Calello was astonished by what he heard. “I felt a powerful flow of emotion coursing through my body,” he wrote. Other times he has told this story, he has mentioned he was moved to tears.

Continuing with his account for Madfish in 2024, after Nyro had finished playing, Calello wrote “I was afraid to move. How to respond after experiencing such a moment? I was paralyzed.” He got up and went over to the piano. Nyro stood up, smiled and took Calello’s hands in hers.

He composed himself and told her, “Laura, you’re brilliant. What you just played is the finest piece of music I have listened to in many, many years. I feel speechless. I just want to thank you for sharing it with me. I promise I will never forget this evening.”

What Calello heard was Eli and the Thirteenth Confession in its entirety and in the order it would be released in March 1968. After getting the job he desperately wanted to oversee the album, he would spend January and February working with Nyro, whom he ensured received a co-producer credit, capturing on record that unforgettable evening in her mid-town apartment.

Even as Nyro would eventually believe that she was rushed during its recording, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession remains her breathtaking breakthrough. Guitarist Hugh McCracken, among the New York musicians Calello enlisted to back Nyro, called it the equal of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Todd Rundgren, part of the Nazz when it came out, once said, “Anyone who was paying attention, and who was around at the time, was just stunned by the depth of this record.”

Trying to find the words to most vividly capture what it is like to hear the album even today, fifty-eight years after its introduction into the world, is necessary, especially here; after all, it is an essay I am writing.

And yet, superlatives, even those that are sincerely offered and richly deserved, can flatten and make commonplace what is tactile and the exception to the norm. I recall here that Calello once said that what Laura Nyro wrote was not songs but experiences. The tagline for one of the ads Columbia put out to promote Eli and the Thirteenth Confession put it this way: “She doesn’t explain anything. She fills you with experience.”

I could choose to go on here about the album and tell of the whirlwind of key changes, harmonic transitions, the climaxes upon climaxes of ‘Eli’s Comin’,’ ‘Timer’ and ‘The Confession,’ the suite-like structures of ‘Once It Was Alright (Farmer Joe)’ and ‘December’s Boudoir,’ the inscrutability of asking “can you surry?” or about “living as long as an elephant,” the glorious shuffle beat that recurs throughout, the dark, joyous romanticism abutting against the realities of loneliness, poverty and sweet cocaine and the exhilaration of one great song after another after another after another after another Ad infinitum.

You got an afternoon to kill? I’ll kill it with you talking your ear off about why everything that has ever been said about Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is absolutely true and more than you can possibly imagine and that it just may be the thing you need to change your life. I will proselytize any day, anytime, anywhere for this music and for Laura Nyro like Leonard Bernstein taking up the cause of Gustav Mahler.

But, what I really want to tell you about this album is that while digging as deep as I could to write the best essay on Laura Nyro I could possibly write, I listened to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession eight times and never once did listening to it feel like a formality or a rote exercise in due diligence. Each time, I was reminded of discovering it and hearing music that was good beyond all comprehension, a glimpse at what I hope the promised land may sound like.

Like almost everyone, I had heard of Laura Nyro before I heard her music. It was her reticence to do any publicity once Eli and the Thirteenth Confession was released, partly the result of her complete lack of interest in the game of being a pop star and partly that the few times she did accede to the game seemed to not go well; in particular, her performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival where the story went that she was out of place (not so—check the full festival bill) and was booed off the stage (the footage tells otherwise), that helped lead to the covers that became commonplace until Nyro’s temporary retreat from recording and performing at the end of 1972. It also, of course, had to do with the quality of the songs.

As it has always been with me when it comes to music, my curiousity naturally led me to want to hear these wonderful songs I knew by others: ‘Wedding Bell Blues,’ ‘And When I Die’ and ‘Stoned Soul Picnic,’ by the woman who wrote and first recorded them. The first Laura Nyro recording I heard was the latter. I liked it but it wasn’t the best introduction given, again, how closely the 5th Dimension’s hit version mirrors Nyro’s recording. The second time came at the best possible time.

It was the morning after I returned home to Toronto in late October 2003 after my second trip to New York. I was there with a friend for a week and a half full of days of walking the city, reading the Village Voice and the New York Times on various park benches, making the occasional visit to Smalls or the Blue Note, feeling the same abandon I had felt six months earlier when I first visited and fell in love with New York’s relentless urban rhythm.

For whatever reason—it may have been that I had seen a Nyro greatest-hits collection as part of a CD listening station at a Barnes & Noble—I decided to seek out ‘Eli’s Comin’’ on my computer the way music lovers typically sought out such things in 2003. After a few minutes, I pressed play and four minutes later, pressed play again and four minutes later, pressed play again and…well, you get the picture.

I knew ‘Eli’s Comin’.’ Three Dog Night recorded it in 1969 and put it into the Billboard Top 10. They turned it into a foot-stompin’ number while maintaining its intriguing rubato opening but removing any nuance, leaving no place for the music to breathe and soar. No worries. Now I would have no need for it. I had finally heard the real thing.

Of all the things that flabbergasted me about Laura Nyro’s recording of ‘Eli’s Comin’,’ two stuck out. The first was its jazz touches, particularly the muted trumpets that punctuated the slow, slinky, sensual ending in which the song’s urgent warning that “Eli’s comin’, better hide your heart girl” is laced with ambiguity.

The second was the 20-second sequence that began at the two-minute, three-second mark: ‘Eli’s Comin’’s second pre-chorus. The music climaxes five times, each one more hair-raising than the last one and save for the final one which crests on a beefy Chuck Rainey bass line, all are fueled by the back-and-forth between Nyro’s lead and the chorus of layered Nyros.

The recording is manically propulsive and yet it is not burdened by its momentum or its largess. When it touches the ground, it is only to use that temporary contact with terra firma to once again head towards the skies.

The next song I heard was ‘Luckie,’ the ecstatic opening of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and my most welcome introduction to the Laura Nyro shuffle. Here again was music that overpowered me, so many things of which to take notice but what totally caught me unprepared was that ‘Luckie’’s gait and the way Nyro sang lyrics like “Luckie’s taking over and his clover shows” and “dig them potatoes if you never dug your girl before” with emphasis on that last word felt like how I felt just a few days earlier walking in the Battery and ending up in Tribeca on the kind of crisp yet sunny autumn New York day where it feels like the movies and you point a camera anywhere and get a great picture and you feel like a million bucks, without a care and open to any and all possibilities that a day in New York can hold.

And then came ‘Lu’ with its street dance and effervescent chorus and then more and more—each recording as interesting and addictive as the last one—until I could fill an 80-minute CD and for the next few weeks, it became my soundtrack going to and coming home from work. I was wholly disarmed, and completely and utterly enchanted.

This is the way Laura Nyro fandom goes. There is, at least it’s what I have found, no such thing as being a casual fan of hers. To answer that question: are you in or are you out?, the answer can only be one of two things: I am in as deep as can be or I am stuck on the outside, peering in, wondering what it is that I am not getting if Laura Nyro ever even crosses one’s mind.

The intensity of attraction that her music can inspire is a constant in the litany of testimonials by those who have become Nyro devotees. Fans would travel to New York in the late sixties and early seventies in search of her. That’s how Nyro’s brother Jan would meet his wife and how percussionist Nydia Mata became a life-long friend and musical colleague of Nyro’s, and then there’s the sketch that superfan Beth O’Brien drew of Nyro that became the cover of 1970’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat.

There were also her peers who were trying to capture her sound: those intoxicating chordal patterns that mashed up gospel, Broadway, jazz, soul and pop, and her adventures playing with song form, whether it was Carole King (‘I Don’t Believe You’) or Lesley Gore (‘Ride a Tall White Horse’) or Peggy Lipton (‘Lady of the Lake’ care of King and Toni Stern).

It’s all part of a parlour game I’ve been playing for years, trying to weave the essence of Laura Nyro within the music that was happening around her, feeling a charge of electricity whenever I have found an album or even a song that has a trace of her fearlessness. It’s been a rewarding and, let’s face it, necessary search—another sign that to fall under Nyro’s sway and remain so is an ongoing devotional—and one that requires digging deep for that is the only way to discover Chi Coltrane, Lily & Maria, Air with the force of nature that was Googie Coppola, the early Melissa Manchester records, Wendy Waldman and Essra Mohawk when she was still known as Sandy Hurvitz.

There’s also Nyro’s place among idiosyncratic male songwriters like Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, Kenny Rankin, Tim Hardin, Jimmy Webb, Harry Nilsson, Michael Brown of the Left Banke, Ron Elliott of the Beau Brummels, Arthur Lee of Love and David Ackles, perhaps him most of all, who shucked whatever may have been expected of them to create their own collages of whatever influences grabbed them.

Think of Laura Nyro and place something like the second Blood, Sweat & Tears album on the turntable and hear it anew not only in light of that brief moment when she flirted with joining the band after Al Kooper left—they rehearsed briefly once at the Cafe Au Go Go on ‘Eli’s Comin’’ (if only a tape had been running)—or that she dated Jim Fielder, the group’s bassist, for about a year but focus instead on hearing a common purpose, adding new colours and expressions to so-called popular music, making the most of the moment when the major labels had moxie and the dough to cough up to match it.

Of course, there’s also their famous cover of ‘And When I Die,’ arranged by Dick Halligan. Its’ ubiquity—beyond the 5th Dimension's chart-topping version of ‘Wedding Bell Blues,’ it’s the most famous of the hit interpretations of the Nyro songbook—obscures how Halligan ingeniously transforms it. Nyro’s recording of it for her debut is an urban hoedown as she sings lyrics which still startle in their profundity, “I swear there ain’t no heaven / but I pray there ain’t no hell / but I’ll never know by living / only my dying will tell,” for one example. Halligan writes a chart that imagines, if in a conventional way, how the song may have sounded had it been part of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, full of twists and turns.

And there’s Elton John’s piano breakdown on ‘Burn Down the Mission’ from Tumbleweed Connection, his most explicit homage to Nyro among the many that were recorded in the late sixties and early seventies. The most moving of them for me is from the Argentinian singer-songwriter Litto Nebbia. ‘José, Laura & Los Chicos’ begins as a piano ballad and then swerves into a two-handed, barrel-house exclamation that ends with a chordal amen. Nebbia repeats the sequence two more times.

When the tempo shifts and that piano begins to rumble away, I hear an impassioned love letter to Laura Nyro, a declaration of the excitement and revelation of the possibilities her music gave to others. To me, it is a hymn of celebration of her New York years and of the five albums that marked them.

It is a run of long players every bit as magical as, say, the Beatles from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road or Stevie Wonder from Where I’m Coming From to Songs in the Key of Life or Miles Davis at various points in the fifties and sixties.

The apex of Nyro’s run is New York Tendaberry which came out in September 1969 and took ten months to record. Davis himself came by the Columbia studios on 52nd Street in July 1969 as Nyro wanted him to play on one of the album’s tracks. He declined, feeling there was nothing he could add to what was already a complete recording.

It is during the New York Tendaberry sessions when Nyro’s uniqueness and eccentricities weren’t tempered. She used analogies, colours especially, to express what sound or feel or mood she was looking for and she would not be rushed to put on tape her song cycle about New York.

Photos taken during the sessions show her as both confident, almost smirking as she poses with her arms resting on top of a mixing console, and deeply serious as she kneels beside a string section, her right arm raised, prodding the musicians to play what was in her head or in the control room with Roy Halee, who co-produced and engineered the album, with her head in her hands as two candles burn between her and Halee.

My favourite of these photos is her in a customary long, black dress, simple at the top but flowing at the bottom like a flower blooming upside down, her feet nowhere to be seen. Her head is titled, her hands held away from her and her eyes are closed. She appears to be both singing and dancing. Maybe she is lost in a favourite by the Shirelles or Martha and the Vandellas or any of the other girl groups that were a bedrock of her sound. It’s the kind of pose not associated with her, especially in 1969, but to me captures the deep yearning and sensuality of New York Tendaberry.

Back when I first heard the songs that make up the album, I imagined being in Halee’s shoes, working with Laura Nyro to create her hymnal to the city. Of all the things I thought I would do if fantasy had been reality, the one thing that would have felt most necessary—beyond question really—was that, before arriving to the studio each day, I would go for a long walk. The route would always begin in Central Park, be meandering and I would exit the Park wherever my wandering led me and then I would hustle to 52nd Street with New York newly in my heart and in my soul.

I was then properly stunned when I learned that Nyro’s ritual during the album sessions was to take a hansom cab through the Park—by then, she had moved from 888 Eighth Avenue to a penthouse apartment at 145 W. 79th Street—to get to the studio. Each night, she would also make sure there was a catered dinner to enjoy.

The idea of ceremony feels right. To make the decision to listen to New York Tendaberry is to set aside the next 45 minutes to enter into Nyro’s vision of New York as a panorama of individual stories against a soundtrack that deepens the quietude of longing. It begins and ends with a chime, making what is in between not so much music and lyrics but instead a liturgy; Nyro does, in the concluding title track, sing of New York that “you look like a city / but feel like a religion / to me.”

Her phrasing of these lines—one of her most beloved couplets—is dynamically riveting. It starts off soft, rises to elongate the word “feel” and pulls back as Nyro climbs up the register and ends on a prolonged “me,” her voice breaking into a cry. At other points on ‘New York Tendaberry,’ she is whispering.

Contrast, more than any other quality, is New York Tendaberry’s signature. Nyro and her piano are the album’s centre. Arranger Jimmie Haskell, he of the evocative string parts for such recordings as Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ and Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Old Friends’ and hired by Nyro after her initial choice of Gil Evans never responded to the letter she sent him—spent a feverish few weeks writing charts that, like Charlie Calello’s for Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, support rather than contort Nyro’s compositions. The big difference here was that Haskell’s were for specific moments rather than throughout the entirety of Nyro’s songs with the exception of Calello’s writing for ‘December’s Boudoir.’

The effect is often volcanic as on the short bursts of brass, organ, bass and drums on ‘Captain for Dark Mornings’ or atmospheric with brief parts for acoustic guitar and woodwinds on the album opener, ‘You Don’t Love Me When I Cry.’ They heighten the emotional intensity of Nyro’s stories of romantic struggle and gallant proclamations of devotion.

As she full-throatily declares “I would lay me down and die” and then softly adds “for my captain, yeah,” it’s virtually impossible to hear her and not feel…seduced. At least that’s how I feel but I suppose it’s how Nyro approaches this line as she does many others on the album as a singer that the label “shrill” became attached to her. It’s utter nonsense of course. Nyro used volume in service of the lyric always. It’s best to just surrender and get taken away in the thrill ride of her performances as she, for example, volleys through the epic put-down of ‘Tom Cat Goodby.’

It starts sweetly and nautically, becomes a romp as she questions her rapscallion of a lover. After the crash of a piano chord and the fleeting use of strings, Nyro sings slowly, “you know you’re never going to make a movie maker, Tom,” repeats it and this time yells out “Tom” and in a second repeat, a waltz begins to materialize punctuated by dissonant strings. She then transitions to an extravagant revenge fantasy where she dreams of “killing her lover man,” moves back to the romp section and ups the intensity and tempo as she catalogues her man’s essential flaws before stopping and asking “can I find him?” and, more pointedly, “can I kill him?” and pauses before an exuberant “my man,” repeating it and ending in a final flourish of chords.

Just as extraordinary is ‘Captain Saint Lucifer’ in which the protagonist leaves home to join her lover. As on ‘Tom Cat Goodbye,’ there are multiple sections, different moods and an acceleration of musical velocity as, here, she announces, “meet me, Captain Saint Lucifer / darling, I’ll be there / don’t you know,” as pure an expression of youthful love as I have ever heard. There’s also the aching move into tempo as she sings of her “sweet lovin’ baby” on the song of the same name or how she packs so much into just the 138 seconds of ‘Mercy on Broadway’ or the jaw-dropping bridge on ‘Gibsom Street.’

Her songs here are so profound and luminous. It’s not a surprise that only the two songs on New York Tendaberry that speak of Nyro’s vision of sisterhood and brotherhood: ‘Time and Love’ and ‘Save the Country’ were covered extensively after the album was released. None of the covers, with the exception of George Duke’s groovy version of the latter, capture much of how Nyro linked the ideals of both with music that matched them. The inescapable urge to turn ‘Time and Love’ into a hokey, Up-With-People, gospel hand-clapper was so pervasive that not even the 5th Dimension avoided it.

The version of ‘Save the Country’ that Nyro recorded for New York Tendaberry was light years removed from the earlier one she cut with Bones Howe. The first section is just her like the performance of it she gave for Kraft Music Hall. It ends with her singing “save the country” and then “NOOOOWWWWW!!!!!”

What follows is an extended coda with a chorus of Nyros repeating “save the country, save the children / come on down to the glory river.” A turnaround bass line adds a soulful amen. A chorus of trumpets begins to play a riff. After a multi-tracked Nyro makes one last proclamation, they take over for a fanfare. True to her meticulousness, it was a taxing one and the players on the session played it over and over to the point where their chops were too busted to play a final, sustained note.

Lew Soloff of Blood, Sweat & Tears happened to be in the studio, trumpet with him and stepped in to nail the final clarion call so that this time, Laura Nyro did ‘Save the Country’ exactly her way.

Part two of The Laura Nyro Experience arrives on May 1.