Laura Nyro
"Who the hell is Laura Nyro?" you ask with an elevating tonal inflection. 50% of the reason she and David Geffen became millionaires in the first place, i answer deadpan. Besides selling a song to Peter, Paul, and Mary for $5,000 out of nowhere, then being talked out of auditioning for lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears (the position our old friend David Clayton Thomas ended up getting, remember) to form and later sell her 50/50 publishing company with said Geffen for $4+ million, her songs became staples of tons of bands (just go back through the liner notes of albums we already listened to, and realize that's a mere sample), and she's in both the songwriter and rock and roll halls of fame (though i suspect she had a few choice new york words for anyone who suggested she should be a celebrity). Jackson Browne was her boyfriend (not the other way around) for a while, but that's not really relevant. This isn't a like it or hate it kind of review, but there won't be any doubt exactly how i feel by the time you get to the end. She is a musical fact and we're going to give her the consideration she deserves as such.
I have both her acclaimed albums from 1968/69, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry, so go already!
The only songwriter i can honestly compare her to is Harry Nilsson. That's not because they are similar at all, but professionally speaking they willingly made other people famous (and a whole lot of money in the process). I of course could be wrong, but they both seem genuinely most proud of creating their songs in the first place, and the fact that other people were able to leverage that foundation is icing on the cake. When you "go back to the source" you inevitably say "holy crap, yeah, i get it now." Whether you like her songs or not, you can't deny she's every bit as good a piano based singer/songwriter as fellow New Yorker Billy Joel; obviously not pop, but every bit the equal craftswoman.
These two albums are very, very different. Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is borderline Motown (and i wouldn't be surprised if the Supremes made an appearance in our future). New York Tendaberry, however, sounds like she locked herself in her apartment like the
Collyer brothers.
I said in reference to Joni Mitchell that it's impossible to pretend that she didn't know what she was doing, but Laura Nyro takes that sentiment to a-whole-nother level. I said Julie Driscoll didn't have a timid setting, but Laura Nyro could probably hold her own in whatever dark alley she felt like visiting (even her whispery moments are razor sharp). If Patti Smith weren't busking in Paris at the time, you might think she learned that special brand of unhinged from Nyro.
All that said, i don't think these albums have the same punch in reverse order. They are, for better or worse, completely chrono-locked; you can't go backward from Tendaberry to Eli, it just doesn't make any sense. That difference is as much a product of the changing political/social climate as it is her obvious success, and personal drive.
To put things in perspective, i listened to New York Tendaberry two and a half weeks ago (when her name kept cropping up in the songwriter parentheses), but had no idea what i was actually hearing. Now in this coincidental two-albums-back-to-back format:
Holy crap. Yeah, i get it now.
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