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Laura Nyro
It's 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival. Laura Nyro is a 20 year old singer/songwriter at reportedly her second gig ever, and her first public concert. She’s supporting her first album, More Than a New Discovery, and is poised to give one of the greatest, most legendary performances in music history. Except for all the other performances at this festival. Including Hendrix setting fire to his guitar on stage the following night.
She comes on right after The Byrds finished “So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star”, does three gorgeous songs, and leaves in utter devastation and despair, right before Jefferson Airplane started their set with a trippy light show.
Her performance became legendary for all the wrong reasons.
Music writer Laura Snapes:
"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."
She was a New York girl in California, having traveled cross country on what those days would have been an even more arduous journey than it is now. So she was already uncomfortable, unable to perform the way she wanted, on an unfamiliar stage, and later we’d learn she might have been high on codeine cough syrup and maybe some other things.
The Guardian adds this:
"Facing a Summer of Love crowd primed for the Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Big Brother and the Holding Company, she took fright at the sound of booing, and imploded on the spot."
As she would tell it to friends over the years, but never publicly, those boos almost destroyed her.
The video below is part of this concert, one of her earliest recorded performances, a brilliant and nightclubby version of “Poverty Train”. See if you can hear the boos.
Imagine being the Saturday night audience for The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane, and oh yeah, Booker T and the MGs and Otis Redding, and seeing in between all those acts this proper singer in an elegant black dress among everyone else on stage in fringe jackets, ripped jeans, and Grace Slick’s voodoo priestess robe. Now imagine being Laura Nyro in that situation. Though she never said so out loud, she likely felt out of place and unwanted to begin with.
She never really got over the negative feelings from this concert. The Festival producer, Lou Adler, loudly voiced his disappointment in her performance because it didn't "fit in" with what he was trying to show the world about intensely laid-back Northern California bohemian love children.
Thirty years later, When Nyro found out that D.A. Pennebaker was making his documentary of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, she demanded that her part in the concert be omitted because she thought she her poor performance that elicited boos would embarrass her and the film. She had carried that disappointment throughout her life, probably so much so that it was the ultimate reason she became reclusive and rarely sought media attention.
When Pennebaker went over the raw footage for his movie in mid-1997, he discovered that people in the audience weren't booing. At all. Several people in the audience were in tears, stunned, saying the word "beautiful" over and over. She apparently intuited that in her head as stony silence and boos. Why? We can only speculate.
But by the time Pennebaker discovered this, it was too late to let her know. On April 8, 1997, she died of ovarian cancer at age 49, having never heard that corrective detail of her first concert. (Her mother had also died of ovarian cancer at age 49.)
Her concert footage didn’t make it into Pennebaker’s movie. Though some of it is on part of the extras when it was released on DVD.
She’s probably better known for being a songwriter than as a singer. Barbra Streisand "Stoney End"; Fifth Dimension "Wedding Bell Blues", "Stoned Soul Picnic"; Three Dog Night "Eli's Coming"; Blood, Sweat and Tears "And When I Die". Musicians and critics loved her. The music-going public barely noticed. Until after she died.
Here’s her own rousing version of “Eli’s Coming”.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/
She was one of those writers and performers who are revered as gods among musicians but little known outside those circles.
Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Tori Amos, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Suzanne Vega, Diamanda Galas, Bette Midler, Rickie Lee Jones, Elton John, Jackson Browne, Alice Cooper, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, Sarah Cracknell, Melissa Manchester, Lisa Germano, Paul Stanley, Excene Cervenka, composer Stephen Schwartz, Broadway soprano Audra McDonald, and Rosanne Cash all have cited Nyro as an influence as a writer and performer.
Todd Rundgren said this: "It had such an effect on my songwriting it actually killed the band I was in... I stopped writing songs like the Who and started writing songs like Laura Nyro." (In case you're wondering, Rundgren's band at the time was Nazz). Rundgren even started to look like her.
Paul Schaffer, David Letterman's music sidekick, once cited Nyro's 2nd album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, as his "desert island disc". In 1968, this album reached 181 on the US charts.
“It’s Going to Take a Miracle” (1971)
https://www.youtube.com/embed/
That voice.
In 2012, she was inducted into the Rock n Roll hall of fame. She’s been the subject of numerous posthumous releases and celebrations, from being sampled by Kanye West, to having a variety of hybrid daylily named after her.
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