Album Reviews

(Laura Nyro was nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame December, 2011)

The late Laura Nyro's performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival was declared a disaster based upon audience reaction, though it was an artistic success. The audience judged it as slick and "show biz-y" but they just didn't understand Nyro's fusion of jazz/gospel/funk/pop and rock. David Geffen got it and through him Nyro signed to Columbia records, which in 1968 issued  Eli and the Thirteen Confession.

(Laura Nyro was nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame December, 2011)

The late Laura Nyro's performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival was declared a disaster based upon audience reaction, though it was an artistic success. The audience judged it as slick and "show biz-y" but they just didn't understand Nyro's fusion of jazz/gospel/funk/pop and rock. David Geffen got it and through him Nyro signed to Columbia records, which in 1968 issued  Eli and the Thirteen Confession.

While that was her major label introduction, a few years earlier she'd recorded an album for Folkways called More Than a New Discovery that was a commercial failure though the musical cognescenti took notice.  After the modest success of Eli and the Thirteen Confession Verve/Forecast picked up the rights to the first album and in 1969 reissued it as Laura Nyro The First Songs... (Verve/Forecast FTS-3020)

The First Songs was a remarkable debut, in part because of the quality of the songs. It included now classics like "Wedding Bell Blues," "Blowin Away," "Hands Off the Man (Flim Flam Man)", "Stoney End," and "And When I Die," all of which were hits covered by the likes of The Fifth Dimension, Barbra Streisand and Blood, Sweat and Tears."  Eli and the Thirteen Confession also produced a spate of successful covers by Three Dog Night ("Eli's Comin'") and The Fifth Dimension ("Stone Soul Picnic"). Nyro was 19 when it was recorded.

Nyro's New York Tendaberry issued a year and half after Eli and the Thirteen Confession finally broke Nyro with a relatively wide audience. It's considered her finest album. It was reissued by Pure Pleasure and reviewed here: http://musicangle.com/album.php?id=738

In 1973 Columbia secured the rights to the Verve/Forecast album and reissued The First Songs with new, more colorful cover art compared to the dark Verve/Forecast edition.

Audio Fidelity's new gatefold reissue combines the Columbia reissue's front and back cover with the Verve Forecast's front and rear cover on the inner gatefold.

Sumptuously produced by industry veteran Milt Okun (Peter, Paul and Mary, John Denver, Chad Mitchell, Harry Belafonte, etc.) the record puts Nyro front and center backed by a superb grouping of studio session veterans arranged and conducted by Herb Bernstein who also worked with The Monkees, Bob Dylan, The Four Seasons, Dusty Springfield and many others. Bernstein's arrangements are showbiz-y and slick but they work well with aspects of Nyro's sensibilities at that particular time. Nyro loses herself in intense emotions and expresses them intimately and directly with a raw subtlety few female singer/songwriters today exhibit.

The sometimes lush arrangements are well-captured by engineer Harry Yarmark, who puts the backing group on a vast, wide and deep soundstage. Nyro's voice, bathed in reverb, manages to cut through and pierce the listener's subconscious with songs of love, death and bad times all presented in one of the unique voices of here generation.

While Audio Fidelity's reissue is somewhat drier and less expansive than Columbia's 1973 reissue, it is less metallic sounding than the Verve/Forecast reissue and manages to capture much of the spaciousness, delicacy and air of the Columbia reissue that produces an enormously wide, deep and airy soundstage populated by silky, natural sounding instruments.

Audiophiles tend to have love affairs with female singers from Julie London to Diana Krall but somehow they've managed to overlook Laura Nyro. Perhaps this overlooked gem will remedy that. This album retains its musical charm more than forty five years after its original release.