{"id":10097,"date":"2026-04-09T11:21:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T11:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/laura-nyro-remembered-musical-force-nature-100568\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T11:21:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T11:21:32","slug":"laura-nyro-remembered-musical-force-nature-100568","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/laura-nyro-remembered-musical-force-nature-100568\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Nyro remembered: \u201cA musical force of nature\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There is an abiding image of Laura Nyro<\/strong> as the black sheep at the crowning of the counterculture. On June 17, 1967, the 19-year-old played Monterey. According to cousin and confidant Alan Merrill, the moment producer Lou Adler called and asked Nyro to play, \u201cHer lips went blue from the shock.\u201d Once she recovered, she started sketching costumes. Her outfit was a black dress that hung off one shoulder, forming a batwing beneath the other arm. A decade later, Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks would take this look mainstream. In \u201967, Nyro came off as an earnest East Coaster in a field of flower children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Originally published in Uncut Take 240 [May 2017], Uncut tracks down Laura Nyro\u2019s closest collaborators to uncover the true story of a revolutionary singer-songwriter and her own thwarted career. \u201cShe was too soulful for radio,\u201d laments Todd Rundgren. \u201cOther artists had success with the material by essentially turning down the soul\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is an abiding image of Laura Nyro<\/strong> as the black sheep at the crowning of the counterculture. On June 17, 1967, the 19-year-old played Monterey. According to cousin and confidant Alan Merrill, the moment producer Lou Adler called and asked Nyro to play, \u201cHer lips went blue from the shock.\u201d Once she recovered, she started sketching costumes. Her outfit was a black dress that hung off one shoulder, forming a batwing beneath the other arm. A decade later, Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks would take this look mainstream. In \u201967, Nyro came off as an earnest East Coaster in a field of flower children.<\/p>\n

Onstage at Monterey, Nyro would have preferred to perform at the piano, but there was little precedent for a young female artist playing her own songs, and the house band struggled with her complex charts. Certain she had heard the crowd booing, Nyro demanded that DA Pennebaker omit her performance from his documentary. When he reviewed the footage in 1997, he discovered these were cries of \u201cbeautiful!\u201d and invited her to see for herself, but Nyro died from ovarian cancer before she could resolve her fear. The film shows the Russian Jewish\/Italian Catholic girl from the Bronx to be the greatest white female soul singer until Amy Winehouse emerged four decades later. \u201cWedding Bell Blues\u201d sparkles with festive harmonies, while on \u201cPoverty Train\u201d, Nyro searches the sky as she details a bad trip. She\u2019s vulnerable and dramatic, and appears daunted by her own power.<\/p>\n

Contrast this tentative performance with a solo appearance at LA\u2019s Troubadour in 1969. In attendance was Jackson Browne<\/strong>, songwriter, admirer and aspiring artist. (Joni Mitchell was also allegedly there, taking notes. \u201cShe was the only female singer-songwriter at the time that I knew,\u201d she would tell PBS.)<\/p>\n

\u201cShe had brought in a grand piano,\u201d Browne recalls. \u201cHer fans were so crazy about her that, in between each song, she\u2019d walk out to the edge of the stage and pace the front to rolling applause. Then she\u2019d compose herself, and go into another song. I\u2019d never seen anything like it. She wore a red velvet dress \u2013 she was not like the freaks, the hippies she was playing to. Her audience was just wilding for her. But she was a diva; she took this in her stride.\u201d Browne laughs. \u201cThere was no false modesty in Laura! Never any, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re too kind\u2019, she just expected it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the moment that I met her, she had a presumption of her own power,\u201d says friend Ellen Sander<\/strong>, who met Nyro in the office of her first manager, Artie Mogull. \u201cShe sensed that what she was doing was important and should be popular.\u201d Alan Merrill<\/strong>, who played on Nyro\u2019s teenage demos, says her confidence was inbuilt. \u201cNobody could touch her in terms of musical strength, at least as a writer,\u201d he says. \u201cShe was inimitable and she knew it. She was a musical force of nature, more than a talent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contrary to the image of Nyro as a fragile failure, 50 years since the release of her debut, More Than A New Discovery, it\u2019s apparent that Nyro was a confident, gentle visionary who thrived when she got to create her own terms. <\/p>\n

She upset the archetypes for female musicians, fashioning new aesthetic moulds and poetic expressiveness, and made a case for authorship as autonomy. She inspired Joni Mitchell<\/strong> to take up piano, and Carole King<\/strong>\u2019s push to be taken seriously as an artist.<\/p>\n

With her natural producer\u2019s touch, Nyro co-pioneered the LP\u2019s transition from pop vending machine to studio-crafted statement, and found on the streets of New York analogues for the cyclical violence of war, poverty, and injustice plaguing the US at the end of the \u201960s: \u201cThe Bronx Bront\u00eb\u201d, as one writer described her.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was inexorably the way she was,\u201d says Browne. \u201cA person who could focus her feeling, and summoned the song in a way that was real every time. That was a great example of how to conduct yourself as a performer. Someone who\u2019s gonna get up there to represent their work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born Laura Nigro in the Bronx, she took her education from her mother, Gilda\u2019s, blues albums and her father Louis\u2019 jazz LPs. Later, she and Ellen Sander would see Miles Davis live in San Francisco. \u201cAt one intense part of the concert, she let out this big moan,\u201d says Sander. \u201cShe turned to me and said, \u2018He is working with the physical aspect of the trumpet itself! He is making the trumpet do things it never thought it could do, you could see it in his body!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Nyro had been writing since her early teens. Age 15, she persuaded Alan Merrill to help her record a three-song demo in a tiny studio \u2013 he recalls a hard task-master. Nyro was also singing with doo-wop groups in Bronx subway stations, though Merrill claims this was a fabrication by second manager David Geffen, \u201cso she wasn\u2019t perceived as a wealthy songwriter. She didn\u2019t like the rough kids and would have been too shy to approach them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The family name was pronounced \u201cnigh-gro\u201d, to avoid accidental injury. But age 18, with her eye on success, Laura changed her name to Nyro (\u201cnear-oh\u201d). Her timing was neat. Artie Mogull hired her father, Louis, to tune his piano. On the job, he raved about his daughter until Mogull relented and invited her for a session. She played him \u201cStoney End\u201d, \u201cAnd When I Die\u201d and \u201cWedding Bell Blues\u201d, and he signed her on the spot for management, recording and publishing. She scored a deal with Verve Folkways, who paired her with producer Herb Bernstein for her debut. The pair clashed: Nyro had little control over the sessions, and felt that her work was being over-polished.<\/p>\n

Released in January 1967, More Than A New Discovery was jauntier than Nyro\u2019s naturally dark inclinations. It\u2019s not just Bernstein \u2013 she could write froth, even though, as she later told The New York Times, she \u201calways knew that \u2018Moon\/June\u2019 was not what love was about.\u201d The album didn\u2019t chart. <\/p>\n

Coupled with the Monterey fiasco, Nyro felt misunderstood and desperate to escape. Then 24 and at the start of his career, David Geffen<\/strong> hadn\u2019t seen her live, but was \u201cmesmerised\u201d by More Than A New Discovery. \u201cHer music was very different to anything I\u2019d ever heard before, and I loved everything she was saying,\u201d he said in PBS\u2019 American Masters.<\/p>\n

He fell deeper once they started working together, extricating her from Mogull\u2019s contract and buying back her publishing, according to Michele Kort\u2019s Nyro biography, Soul Picnic. By this point, Peter Paul And Mary had covered \u201cAnd When I Die\u201d, and there was a sense that Nyro\u2019s catalogue might become profitable.<\/p>\n

Geffen took Nyro to Columbia, where she performed for new president Clive Davis by the light of a TV screen. When she signed in early 1968, she won full creative control and formed her own publishing company, Tuna Fish Music. Nyro was Geffen\u2019s first big project. She brought out a soft side of this \u201cirascible gossip\u201d, as Ellen Sander describes him. Which made it all the more galling when Nyro broke off the relationship in 1972.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved Laura and her music, but I do not want to talk about her now or ever,\u201d was Geffen\u2019s response to Uncut\u2019s interview request.<\/p>\n

Herb Bernstein<\/strong> had already started recording Nyro\u2019s second album, but Geffen wanted a fresh start. Producer Charles Calello<\/strong> worked in-house at Columbia, but felt underused. He complained to Davis, who offered him the Nyro job. In late 1967, she invited him to her one-bedroom apartment at 888 East Avenue and played him her new songs on a spinet piano. \u201cShe lit half a dozen candles and dimmed the lights,\u201d says Calello. \u201cIt felt like history in the making. I was going through a period of frustration, and all of a sudden, someone gave me the key to the cookie jar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until now, Calello had mostly worked on production-line pop. \u201cWhat Laura played me was unlike anything I\u2019d ever heard before. Songs that change tempo, emanating deep emotion.\u201d His challenge was to bring her songs to life in Columbia\u2019s studio without destroying their integrity. He assembled a looser band than the usual studio staples: \u201cIt was more important that the musicians understood the songs than what was written on paper.\u201d Rather than set up in individual booths, the players assembled around Nyro (who sang at the piano and overdubbed her vocals later). \u201cIt was a thrill,\u201d says drummer Artie Schroeck<\/strong>, even though he found Nyro \u201cvery strange\u201d. A devout stoner, she smoked in the studio and led the other musicians astray.<\/p>\n

Nyro mints her unique vocabulary on Eli And The Thirteenth Confession<\/strong>, from the recurring \u201ccaptain\u201d and made-up words like \u201csurry\u201d, to her antic, driving tempos and vocal physicality. The sessions took two months. The players were enjoying the romance, and Calello was maximising the possibilities of the studio\u2019s new eight-track. Columbia was unimpressed. \u201cI got a call from the legal department when they found out I had spent $28,000 and I still wasn\u2019t finished,\u201d says Calello. \u201cThe head of business affairs said, \u2018You\u2019re over budget. What are you doing here?\u2019 I said, \u2018We\u2019re not making music, we\u2019re making art.\u2019 And he said to me, \u2018We don\u2019t make art here. We make money.\u2019\u201d He collected his pink slip.<\/p>\n

Prior to Calello\u2019s sacking, the ensemble had attempted to start Nyro\u2019s third LP. She only had two completed songs, \u201cNew York Tendaberry\u201d and \u201cCaptain Saint Lucifer\u201d, and according to Schroeck, insisted on transporting her own piano to the studio, despite the Steinways on offer. \u201cShe was trying to write during the day, record at night, and the frustration was enormous,\u201d says Calello. \u201cAfter the first session, I told David I didn\u2019t want to continue. I saw that it was going to be a fiasco.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eli barely made a dent on arrival in March 1968 \u2013 though its innovative lilac-tinged lyrics sheet left a scent. (\u201cAnything she wanted, I would get for her,\u201d Geffen told PBS.) Although The New York Times was calling her \u201cthe hippest thing in music\u201d by October, it was clear Nyro wouldn\u2019t be the face of her success. By autumn, LA R&B group The 5th Dimension had taken \u201cStoned Soul Picnic\u201d to No 3 on the pop charts, and No 1 on the R&B charts.<\/p>\n

This was a reversal in fortunes \u2013 they had been marketed as a pop act, failing to succeed in their natural niche. They would cover Nyro seven times. In 1968, she released the rapturous gospel polemic \u201cSave The Country\u201d following the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Two years on, The 5th Dimension repurposed it to oppose the Vietnam war. \u201cWe weren\u2019t known as a protest group, just a group of singers who tried to make happy music, so it was perfect,\u201d says the band\u2019s Billy Davis Jr<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Despite Charlie Calello\u2019s suspicion that Nyro\u2019s third album was half-baked, she had a firm vision for 1969\u2019s New York Tendaberry<\/strong>, her name for \u201cthe warm, tender core she perceives deep inside the city\u2019s grating exterior\u201d, observed New York Times reporter William Kloman. \u201cI deal in essences,\u201d she told him. \u201cI can\u2019t do things my girlfriend can do, like drive a car or cook a dinner, but I have the ability to see what is at the centre of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

In late 1968, Roy Halee<\/strong> was busy working with Simon & Garfunkel. But as a Nyro fan, he couldn\u2019t refuse Geffen\u2019s offer to work on her new record. \u201cShe\u2019s the best I\u2019ve ever been involved with,\u201d says Halee. \u201cShe\u2019s George Gershwin, phenomenal in a classical sense, as well as a pop sense.\u201d Alone at the piano, Nyro played Halee the entire album. He decided to record her that way to capture her \u201cessence\u201d. The other instruments were overdubbed later. \u201cIt was a terrific gamble.\u201d<\/p>\n

These early sessions were just Halee and Nyro, who rode a horse and cart to Columbia\u2019s studio. She dressed in ballgowns, lit candles and laid on opulent meals. The pair relished the slow process. \u201cListening to her perform every night was like a concert, it was a joy,\u201d says Halee, whose only bugbear was Nyro\u2019s pot habit, which made her sloppy. This time around, there was no pressure from Columbia.<\/p>\n

Once Halee brought in arranger Jimmie Haskell<\/strong>, Nyro started giving his ensemble impressionistic directions. \u201cI think of music in terms of colours, and shapes, and textures, and sensory things, and abstractions,\u201d she told Life in 1970. \u201cBut once I have the instruments to work with, I can do a lot of things. You can take a string, and strings can be brazen, or they can be so sweet, they can be pale.\u201d For \u201cGibsom Street\u201d, she instructed her horn section to play like \u201cIndians on the warpath\u201d. \u201cHer producing chops were great!\u201d says Halee. \u201cShe was hard to please in a nice way. She knew what she was talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Released in September 1969, New York Tendaberry was a sophisticated paring back. Most of the songs start with just Nyro at the piano, her vocals flying from tender meditation to indignant rhapsody as she explored what she perceived as the city\u2019s struggle \u201cbetween health and sickness, god and the devil.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to dig the vibrations I\u2019ve been getting?\u201d she asked the NYT. \u201cThe real United States Of America is about to be born. That\u2019s what\u2019s coming out of the revolution.\u201d Certainly, things were starting to happen for Nyro. She did her first proper tour, including the Troubadour show that Jackson Browne witnessed. Newsweek profiled Nyro, Joni Mitchell and the new wave of \u201cfemale troubadours, who not only sing, but write their own songs\u201d. That Thanksgiving, she had three Top 10 singles thanks to The 5th Dimension, Blood Sweat And Tears and Three Dog Night. \u201cShe was too soulful for radio,\u201d laments noted fan Todd Rundgren<\/strong>. \u201cOther artists had success with the material by essentially turning down the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Nyro was breaking from pop tradition, she maintained a mainstream release schedule. Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat<\/strong> arrived in 1970, her fourth album in four years. According to Michele Kort\u2019s biography, David Geffen told producer Felix Cavaliere, \u201cI\u2019m going to introduce you to the most difficult person you\u2019ve ever met in your life.\u201d But the pair got on famously, sharing interests in soul and Nina Simone. Cavaliere took Nyro on a Sri Lankan yoga retreat where she met Alice Coltrane. She played harp on Christmas\u2019 second half, alongside a New York rhythm section. Duane Allman added guitar licks, praising this \u201creal outtasight chick\u201d.<\/p>\n

Co-producer Arif Mardin hired Muscle Shoals\u2019 Swampers band to back Christmas\u2019 first half. The Southern group found gothic Nyro very strange. \u201cWe were charmed by her!\u201d says bassist David Hood<\/strong>. \u201cShe came off almost like a bag lady on a street corner.\u201d Nyro\u2019s pot supply softened the culture shock. \u201cShe had some good weed!\u201d (The scrupulously professional Swampers usually avoided \u201cindulging\u201d, but Nyro corrupted Hood and guitarist Eddie Hinton.)<\/p>\n

As on Eli, the group set up around Nyro\u2019s piano at Columbia\u2019s studios, and attempted to follow her arrangements. Pianist Barry Beckett found himself out of a job, as (ever since her debut) Nyro had accompanied herself, so he wrote charts. \u201cOn one very complicated song, Barry laughed and said, \u2018Boys, I wanna see you do this!\u2019\u201d says Hood. \u201cAnd that\u2019s one of the ones we did on the first take! We were used to working with guys that were difficult, and we liked the challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having played with the greats, the Swampers didn\u2019t consider Christmas soul. But compared to Nyro\u2019s previous records, it was a forlorn prayer, her soft soprano intermingling defeat and hope. When she told the NYT about the USA\u2019s imminent birth, she envisaged a battle between \u201cthose who love life and those who are on the side of death\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now, she was trying to find goodness in a city that seemed firmly on the side of death in 1970. Violent crime had exploded, Nixon was president, and in 1969, police assaulted the LBGT community (which Nyro would later join) at Stonewall.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is going through a moral revolution and I feel like a mirror in a storm, a mirror that\u2019s smashed against the earth,\u201d Nyro told a reporter in 1970. But she saw politicisation as a sign of maturity. \u201cAt a certain age you become aware of your country,\u201d she said in 1971. \u201cWith my first LP all I thought about was my songs\u2026 I believe there is a world inside and outside each person. The more together you are inside, the more you can reach out with wisdom.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1994, her philosophy had developed. \u201cIf you have a vision of peace, it\u2019s strange to live in a world of war. If you\u2019re a woman who honours her roots, it\u2019s strange to be in a male-dominated business.\u201d Music helped transcend that disparity. \u201cYou get beyond the suffering. You focus on the sweetness of your vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christmas won raves from Melody Maker, \u201cStoney End\u201d turned Barbra Streisand from showgirl to pop star, and Nyro\u2019s hero Miles Davis supported her at San Francisco\u2019s Fillmore East. With Tuna Fish Music at No 23 on Billboard\u2019s Hot 100 Publishers of 1970, Nyro\u2019s valuable catalogue bought her time to pursue a passion project. She was a lifelong fan of Labelle, who covered \u201cTime And Love\u201d for their 1971 debut.<\/p>\n

That year, Nyro and Patti LaBelle met, bonded, and decided to make an LP of classic soul covers. Tapping into the same crossover potential seen by The 5th Dimension, Gonna Take A Miracle was made with Gamble and Huff in Philadelphia, and was an instant success, peaking at No 46.<\/p>\n

In the new year, Nyro\u2019s winning streak ended. Her Columbia contract was up, and Geffen was negotiating a new deal. Michele Kort\u2019s biography recounts the details. Geffen thought that Nyro had peaked, and wanted to sell Tuna Fish Music to Columbia. To create hype, Geffen started talking to the press, and Nyro read that she would be leaving Columbia to join his new LA label, Asylum. Feeling exploited, she fled to Alan Merrill in Tokyo, and chose Columbia for publishing and recording. \u201cHer exact words were, \u2018You\u2019re a great manager but I\u2019m not sure you can run a label,\u2019\u201d Merrill recalls. \u201c\u2018Why don\u2019t you start the label with Jackson [Browne] and see how it goes?\u2019 Geffen insisted she be his first artist. Laura wanted to stay on the same label as Dylan. It ended their relationship and broke her heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Newly wed, the 24-year-old Nyro retreated to Connecticut, where she raised her newborn son alone after the marriage broke down. \u201cShe was disgusted with the whole music business,\u201d says Merrill. \u201cShe had enough money to flip the industry off and live her life without scrutiny.\u201d (In 1979, Joni Mitchell told Rolling Stone that she envied Nyro\u2019s vanishing act.) She wouldn\u2019t reappear until 1975, when she made Smile with Charlie Calello. It was a severe move, but it was in keeping with Nyro\u2019s fierce protection of her vision. Despite the lack of an explicit political viewpoint in her lyrics, she stood for liberation, both from social oppression and creative control. She\u2019d made that clear on \u201cAnd When I Die\u201d, written in her teens: \u201cGive me my freedom,\u201d she sang. \u201cAll I ask of living is to have no chains on me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was always very private, very reclusive, even in the middle of all her success and audiences that adored her,\u201d says Jackson Browne. \u201cMaybe it was exactly what she wanted all along.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of felt like I was losing the rhythm of my youth,\u201d Nyro said of this period in 1984. So, as ever, she simply set a new one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Laura Nyro remembered: \u201cA musical force of nature\u201d<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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