The Fat Angel Sings

Ask most music lovers to name female singer-songwriters of the classic-rock era and the same trilogy of names will come numbingly to the tongue—Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. It’s a familiar enough group to have inspired a best-selling biography covering all three, “Girls Like Us,” by Sheila Weller.

It’s too bad more people don’t know that there should be a fourth “girl” in that club one of equal talent and reach who sprang from the same era: Laura Nyro. That’s especially unjust given the fact that, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Nyro penned many more chart hits than Joni did and at least as many as Carly managed. Admittedly, there’s a significant caveat to Nyro’s success: She could only smuggle her genius into the mainstream via cover versions recorded by more accessible artists. Between 1967 and ’71, songs that Nyro wrote, like “Stoney End”  “Eli’s Coming and “Wedding Bell Blues”, flew high on the charts and became embedded in the public’s consciousness. But they only did so cut by other artists like Barbra Streisand, Blood Sweat and Tears, Three Dog Night, and The 5th Dimension, respectively.

This year, however, Nyro’s achievements deserve a fresh view, will mark 50 years since her debut appeared under the apt title More Than A New Discovery (later re-released as ‘The First Songs’). This fall, the star would have turned 70, while April 8th will mark twenty years since her death, exacerbating the silence surrounding her. Even most of the stars who gave Nyro her hits back in the day have fallen from popular, or critical, favor. The exception? Barbra Streisand, who included a herculean version of “Stoney End” on her most recent tour, this past summer.

That song, and others, demonstrate how Nyro brought together elements, and sensibilities, no other writer thought to connect. Her sift of genres put her beyond easy category. Listening to Nyro’s records today, you find yourself thinking: Just what kind of music did she make? Her unconventional keys and startling tempo changes suggest jazz. Her theatrical melodies speak of Broadway, while the introspection of the songs says “singer-songwriter.” Meanwhile, the soulfulness of Nyro’s tunes played straight to the heart of Motown. Everything from art-song to girl group hits had an influence on her sound.

Nyro’s music also boasted a heightened sense of place. Her records spoke the clamorous language of her birth city, New York, in the mid-20th Century. In her recordings, we hear the grandeur of Grand Concourse, the striving of the Lower East Side, the chic of Riverside Drive and the soul of Harlem. It’s a sound of uptown and down, an ideal blend of the sophisticated and the earthy.

The source of this creative nexus was born Laura Nigro on October 18, 1947 in the Bronx. Her parents boasted Russian Jewish and Italian Catholic roots. Her mother, Gilda, toiled as a bookkeeper while her father, Louis, provided her musical genes. Louis earned his living as a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter. Laura taught herself to play piano as a child, absorbing records played by her parents from the worlds of classical music (Debussy) and jazz (Billie Holiday). A clear prodigy, Laura wrote her first composition at the age of 8. In high school, she came to love the best soul songs of the day, from Martha Reeves to Curtis Mayfield to Nina Simone. Reflecting her ambition, she changed her name to Nyro (NEAR-oh) in high school. Her father’s contacts in the music business brought her to Artie Mogull, who became her first manager in 1966, before she turned 19.

It wasn’t long before the newly dubbed Laura Nyro sold her first song: “And When I Die,” a rousing ode to mortality and rebirth, which Peter Paul and Mary snapped up for five thousand dollars. Three years later, the song became a pop smash for the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears, augmented by an unusual hoe-down arrangement. Nyro made her own professional debut at the hungry i, the famed boho performance space in San Francisco. Shortly after, Mogull got her a recording contract with Verve Folkways Records, home to Richie Havens, Janis Ian and Tim Hardin. In 1967, Verve issued Nyro’s debut, which barely cracked Billboard’s Top 100 Album chart. Its first single, “Wedding Bell Blues,” never inched above No. 103 on the singles list. Yet, two years later, the song went all the way to No. 1 in a version cut by The 5th Dimension. Nyro’s debut contained a Trojan Horse full of eventual hits, including “And When I Die,” which BS&T finessed to No. 2 in ’69, Blowin’ Away, which The 5th Dimension drove to No. 26 the same year and “Stoney End,” which Barbra Streisand rode to No. 6 in 1970, providing her biggest hit since People in 1964.

Still, Nyro wasn’t happy with the album. She had originally conceived of “Wedding Bell Blues” as a three-act suite. But producer Herb Bernstein made her cut a simpler version, undermining her theatrical reach. She experienced more frustration in the live arena. The singer considered her performance at the breakthrough Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 awkward, making her reluctant to play live. At the same time, the show made an impression on an important observer. A young David Geffen saw her and became smitten. He lobbied to become her manager, easing out her earlier handler, Mogull. Nyro became the budding mogul’s first project. Geffen immediately connected her to Clive Davis, then the pasha of Columbia Records. Davis had been to Monterey as well, inspiring him sign another key female star of the ’60s: Janis Joplin.

The fabled story of Nyro’s audition for Davis underscores the intimacy of her style. In Davis’ first memoir he wrote that, when she played for him, she insisted on turning off every light in the room save one—a beam from a television set positioned next to her piano. Bathed in the cathode ray, Nyro performed songs that would end up on her Columbia debut, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, in 1968.

The performance epitomized the star’s keen sense of dynamics. In many songs, Nyro’s voice broke the silence like a spotlight falling on a darkened stage. Slowly, and quietly, piano chords would make their way around the voice, as if waiting for guidance. For minutes, vocal and keyboard would amble on until, fitfully, they erupted with spirit. The singing, then, turned exuberant, the piano playing orgasmic until, together, they formed a melody that couldn’t be more winning or true. The result presented a bold irony: Nyro’s songs were at once embraceable and elusive, easy and hard.

Her songs came to full bloom on ‘Eli,’ which appeared in March of 1968, graced by a unusual bit of packaging. Nyro insisted that the lyric sheet be perfumed. The recording found Nyro fully owning her operatic vocals, while the arrangements (co-created with Charlie Callelo) didn’t skimp on eccentric flourishes. Once again, the album yielded hits for others, including “Eli’s Coming,” a Top Ten smash for Three Dog Night, Sweet Blindness, a No. 13 score for the Fifth Dimension and Stone Soul Picnic, which the same group soared to No. 3. While the essential songs had as much pop appeal as compositions of the era by Jimmy Webb or Holland-Dozier-Holland, in the context of Nyro’s album they dove deeper. They coalesced into a full musical, mapping out Nyro’s greatest loves, hopes and fears.

While the album only inched to No. 181 by Billboard’s album tally, it had a profound influence on other artists. A young Todd Rundgren sought Nyro out, impressing her enough for the star to offer him a position as her band leader. He declined, since he had just signed a contract for his band The Nazz, whose first single Hello It’s Me, bears an obvious resemblance to Nyro’s style. Several years later, Elton John introduced a sound that bore its own debt to Nyro’s. Rickie Lee Jones also took influence from her, evident in her unusual approach to pace and her will to let her songs evolve.

The public began to take more notice of Nyro late in ’69, following the publicity identifying her as the writer of so many songs they loved. In the fall, Nyro’s third album, New York Tendaberry, got to No. 32, the finest showing of her career. A more spare recording, the album contained a song she first released the year before, Save The Country, which showcased her political side. “Save The Country” had been written after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. As usual, the piece got a far wider airing in a version by The 5th Dimension, which became a Top Ten hit in 1970.

Ironically, the only time Nyro finessed a single of her own into the Top 100 was a cover version—of the Goffin-King classic Up On The Roof. It appeared on her 1970 album, Christmas And the Beads of Sweat. The recording proved the power of Nyro as a performer, divorced from her role as a songwriter. That secondary aspect received a full airing on her next album, 1971’s Gonna Take A Miracle, a work comprised entirely of covers. Yet, these sounded like no others. To rarify the sound, Nyro made several key hires. For her producers, she chose the creators of Philly-soul, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. For her backup group, she selected Labelle. The twist? She didn’t use the group members—Patti Labelle, Nona Hendrix and Sarah Dash—as common backup singers.

Throughout the album, Labelle stands on nearly equal footing with Nyro, creating a thrilling sense of tension, while adding great dimensionality to the sound. Together, their voices created some of the erudite vocal harmonies in the history of soul.

For the material, Nyro drew on the Motown, doo-wop and Brill Building hits that first drew her to pop in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Everything from Spanish Harlem to Monkey Time turned up, along with a version of Marvin Gaye’s The Bells that may be Nyro’s most sensual recording. A 2002 re-issue of the album added four live tracks to the ten original studio cuts, including another nod to Nyro’s peer, Carole King, in Natural Woman.

The lyrics to that song perfectly suited Nyro’s image as an urban Madonna, the bohemian Jewish street poet who had become an heir to the classic American songwriters, from George Gershwin to Irving Berlin. The live cuts dispelled the notion of Nyro as an awkward concert performer, an impression held over from her Monterey appearance. In fact, one of her finest recordings was a concert set, Spread Your Wings and Fly, released in 2004 and cut at The Fillmore East 1971, mere weeks before that storied hall closed.

By the end of ’71—at the height of her songwriting career— Nyro announced her retirement from music. She was 24. Nyro had been newly married and wanted to concentrate on her life away from the stage. Happily for fans, her “retirement” ended five years later, when she divorced her husband and released her first album of original material in over half a decade, Smile. For that album she reunited with her arranger on ‘Eli’, Charlie Calello. The album arrived in the wake of the death of her mother, to ovarian cancer the year before, but it had as many encouraging moments as melancholy ones. Over the next two decades, Nyro continued to periodically record and tour, releasing her final work of original material in 1993, Walk The Dog and Speed The Light. It was produced by Gary Katz, known for his work with Steely Dan, a band whose early, R&B-leaning work bore Nyro’s clear influence.

Three years after her final album, the songwriter herself was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, a disease which took her life in April of 1997. Then 49, Nyro was same age her mother had been when she succumbed to the identical illness. In the years since, Nyro’s recordings have become entirely ghettoized to the writerly sidelines. At the same time, her compositions have enjoyed a life of their own. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the repertoires of Leiber-Stoller and Bacharach-David. There’s just one difference in that analogy. Those other catalogues sprang from teams of two. With Nyro, as always, there was only just one.