You may not care for Laura Nyro's music. You may find it too "Broadway" for your taste, or you may find that her shrieking falsetto is too much. Her self-coined words may make you wonder just what she's singing about. And then there are those unwieldy album titles. But to speak for myself, in the past year, no other artist's recordings have moved me more than Laura Nyro's.
She performs with a wild abandon that's frankly scary. Maybe it will make your blood run cold. As for me, it gets me right here [points to left side of chest].
You can find the facts on her elsewhere -- teenage prodigy from the Bronx who came up in the mid-1960s, and who, before she was old enough to vote, wrote top-10 hits for the Fifth Dimension, Three Dog Night, Blood Sweat & Tears and Barbra Freaking Streisand. But although she could write hit records, much of her music pulls away from all that, toward strange, dark, asymmetrical suites.
Where's the chorus? On her magnum opus, "New York Tendaberry," released in 1969, when she was 22 years of age, many of the tunes are "through-composed," one theme into another, with no repeats, rather than using verse-chorus-verse song forms. She gets deep at the piano, and her silences are pitch-dark. Her sense of time is drifting, and the more it drifts, the more dead-sure she sounds. She draws on rhythm and blues, doo-wop, early soul music, church music and Tin Pan Alley. Shocking bits of orchestration burst in suddenly and then vanish, never to return. The chorus is there. Thing is, she does it only once.
She is stubborn, uncompromising. And when she lets loose with that untrained voice, your stereo speakers go into panic mode, having never processed anything like this before.
And yet, and yet, she wrote pop tunes that were smashing victories. "Wedding Bell Blues," which she recorded at age 19, is so satisfying that to match it you have to reach for Brian Wilson on a good day. The bridge on "Stone Soul Picnic" is so astonishing that it must have sent fear through the corridors of the Brill Building.
Her work is uneven, often self-absorbed, as though she is working out a personal mythology known only to herself. By all accounts she was difficult to deal with, and she had a knack for sabotaging her own career. But when she soars, she reaches heights of freedom that pop-crafters and punk-rockers alike can only dream about.
Some people have written that she wasn't much of a live performer. The legend is that her set at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 was a bust. But a recent CD, "Spread Your Wings and Fly," has her on solo piano at the Fillmore East in 1971, and it's just hypnotizing.
Here are some emailed comments from Bob Brainen, a disc jockey at WFMU in Jersey City: "I did see Laura at The Turning Point, very small intimate club, and I was about 10 feet away. Just her voice and keyboard, it was wonderful...
"I think the live aspect is largely based on misinformation about her Monterey Pop performance. She was ahead of her time and channeled Nina Simone's penchant for taking styles and songs from wherever she wanted to, long before it became a standard practice."
You can find a video clip of Laura Nyro on solo piano on a "Kraft Music Hall" TV special in 1968. She's singing "Save the Country," and she is out for blood. That last high note, which breaks up in mid-flight, is a doozy.
From there, you can find the facts for yourself -- her album of rhythm-and-blues covers, how she retired and un-retired from music several times. In a late video clip from 1994, the camera shakes and the audio is poor, but her power comes through.
Laura Nyro died of ovarian cancer in April 1997, at age 49. She has been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, and she probably won't get in. That doesn't matter; any Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that excludes Iggy and the Stooges is a joke anyway.
If you have never surrendered yourself to the sound of Laura Nyro cutting loose, give it a try. Maybe you'll resist it, but maybe you'll feel a bracing chill that I can't compare to anything else in music.