Laura Nyro

1947-1997

by Brett Milano

It's a shame that the first obituaries I read for Laura Nyro hauled out the kind of cliché'd accolades usually reserved for '60s artists: "spoke for a generation," "opened the doors for women in rock." In truth, Nyro -- who died last week of ovarian cancer at the age of 49 -- did neither of those things, but that doesn't diminish her importance. Although she wrote her share of hits, mostly for other artists in the late '60s, her best work was too idiosyncratic to be influential on a grand scale. What lingers most about it is her beautiful eccentricity.

What was notable about Nyro wasn't just that she introduced a feminist element to late-'60s songwriting, but that she did it within the confines of AM-radio pop. She was the missing link between Phil Spector and Ani DiFranco. For a time it seemed that all the quirkiest songs in the Top 10 were hers: "Eli's Coming," "And When I Die," and "Stoned Soul Picnic" (respectively recorded by Three Dog Night, Blood Sweat & Tears, and the Fifth Dimension circa 1968-'70) were classic hit singles well suited to the commercially minded acts that recorded them. But they also stretched the boundaries of what AM-radio lyrics could deal with. The first song turns the small-town heartbreaker into a mythical beast of sorts; the second was one of the first hit singles to ponder the afterlife. And the third remains one of the most poetic odes to drunken abandon that the Top 40 has produced.

Unlike Carole King, whose solo career was launched around the same time, Nyro was a better singer than those who made her songs hits. And her solo material -- the best of which is collected on the recent two-CD set Stoned Soul Picnic (Columbia) -- was the stuff cult heroes are made of. Her arrangements borrowed heavily from jazz (one story goes that Miles Davis declined to play on one of her albums, saying, "You've already done it all"), but the pop tunesmith's touch was always there. And like Prince a decade later, she regularly blurred the line between carnal and spiritual matters. There was a powerful sexiness about much of her work that infused even "Save the Country," ostensibly a traditional gospel song.

That's one reason Nyro's cult was so adoring. When she played at Berklee toward the end of the '80s, she was surrounded backstage by crushes of both genders. ("What can I say -- they can't get enough of me," she joked when I asked her about that a few years later.) But it didn't start that way. The most famous performance she ever gave was a legendary flop at 1967's Monterey Pop Festival, where she attempted a Brill Building, soul-revue format and was booed off the stage by a crowd waiting for the Who and Hendrix and Janis Joplin. No doubt the 19-year-old Nyro didn't have her act together yet, but you also have to assume she ran afoul of what was considered hip at the time.

On her infrequent recent albums (just two in the '80s and one in the '90s), she'd return to AM radio for inspiration. The new-age turn of her later work was a letdown, but even when she was writing odes to trees and animal rights, the pop touch and the New York street sense were still there. (How many songs that throw Frida Kahlo's name around begin with the dedication "This one's for the kick-ass woman artists"?) And it's appropriate that the last song on her last studio album (Walk the Dog & Light the Light, Columbia, 1993) is a gorgeous cover of the Shirelles' "Dedicated to the One I Love."

For that reason, the forthcoming tribute album Time & Love (Astor Place) is more than a disappointment; it's a bore. The likes of Phoebe Snow, Holly Cole, Jane Siberry, and Suzanne Vega reduce her work to a matter of aching, languid sensitivity. (Surely they could have found some fans outside the adult-contemporary circuit. My guess is that Kristin Hersh, Mary Lou Lord, and Indigo Girls would fit right in.) Patty Larkin does connect with the gritty urban tone of "Poverty Train," but the only tracks that really work are the two relatively daring ones. Lisa Germano's "Eli's Coming" up-ends the bluster of the better-known Three Dog Night version -- the singer here is a victim rather than a team of rampagers. And the Roches do a suitably bawdy take on "Wedding Bell Blues," honoring the song's teenage passions just as Nyro did with her '60s covers.

The Monterey fiasco is recounted in Fred Goodman's recent music-industry study, The Mansion on the Hill, which also documents Nyro's initial meetings with her first two managers, Artie Mogull and David Geffen. After her father had arranged for her to see Mogull, Nyro headed straight for his piano and played the opening of "Stoney End" (later a hit for Barbra Streisand) -- the lines in the first verse ("I was raised on the good book, Jesus, till I read between the lines") were reportedly enough to catch his ears. Meeting the then-upstart Geffen for the first time, she showed up at his office wearing purple lipstick, black nail polish, and Christmas-tree earrings -- in short, looking like a proto-goth figure. Geffen was charmed and proceeded to master his hustling techniques, with Nyro as his first client. Even millionaires on the make need their muses.