Laura Nyro


Laura Nyro was an American songwriter and singer. She achieved critical acclaim with her own recordings, particularly the albums Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry, and had commercial success with artists such as Barbra Streisand and the 5th Dimension recording her songs. Wider recognition for her artistry was posthumous, while her contemporaries such as Elton John idolized her. She was praised for her emotive three-octave mezzo-soprano voice.
Between 1968 and 1970, a number of artists had hits with her songs: the 5th Dimension with "Blowing Away", "Wedding Bell Blues", "Stoned Soul Picnic", "Sweet Blindness", and "Save the Country"; Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul and Mary with "And When I Die"; Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson with "Eli's Comin'"; and Barbra Streisand with "Stoney End", "Time and Love", and "Hands off the Man ". Nyro's best-selling single was her recording of Carole King's and Gerry Goffin's "Up on the Roof".
Nyro was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010, and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

Life and career

Early life

Nyro was born Laura Nigro in the Bronx, New York City, the daughter of Louis Nigro, a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter, and Gilda Nigro, a bookkeeper. Laura had a younger brother, Jan Nigro, who has become a children's musician. Laura was of Russian Jewish and Polish Jewish descent, with Italian-American ancestry from her paternal grandfather. Her father gave her the name "Laura", after hearing the title theme of the 1944 film Laura. After Laura left high school, she chose her own surname, "Nyro", having it pronounced as.
"I've created my own little world, a world of music, since I was five years old", Nyro told Billboard magazine in 1970, adding that music provided, for her, a means of coping with a difficult childhood: "I was never a bright and happy child." As a child, she taught herself piano, read poetry, and listened to her mother's records by Leontyne Price, Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, and classical composers such as Debussy and Ravel. She composed her first songs at age eight. With her family, she spent summers in the Catskills, where her father played trumpet at resorts. She credited the Sunday school at the New York Society for Ethical Culture with providing the basis of her education; she also attended Manhattan's High School of Music & Art.
While in high school, she sang with a group of friends in subway stations and on street corners. She said, "I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was one of the joys of my youth." She commented: "I was always interested in the social consciousness of certain songs. My mother and grandfather were progressive thinkers, so I felt at home in the peace movement and the women's movement, and that has influenced my music."

Early career

Louis Nigro's work brought her into contact with record company executive Artie Mogull and his partner Paul Barry, who auditioned Laura in 1966 and became her first managers. However, Nigro later said he did "not even once" mention Laura to any of his clients.
Mogull had negotiated a recording and management contract for her, and Nyro recorded her debut album, More Than a New Discovery, for the Verve Folkways label. Other songs from the album later became hits for The 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Barbra Streisand.
On July 13, 1966, Nyro recorded "Stoney End" and "Wedding Bell Blues" as well as an early version of "Time and Love", as part of More Than A New Discovery at Bell Sounds Studios, 237 West 54th Street, Manhattan. About a month later, she sold "And When I Die" to Peter, Paul, and Mary for $5,000. On September 17, 1966, Nyro and Verve Folkways released "Wedding Bell Blues"/"Stoney End" as a single. "Wedding Bell Blues" became a minor hit, especially on the west coast. She completed More Than A New Discovery in New York on November 29, 1966; and, starting on January 16, 1967, made her first extended professional appearance at age 19, performing nightly for about a month at the "hungry i" coffeehouse in San Francisco. In February 1967, Verve Folkways released More Than A New Discovery. On March 4, 1967, Nyro appeared on Clay Cole's Diskoteck, Episode 7.23, along with Dion and the Belmonts and others, but the recording of the episode is lost. On March 21, 1967, she appeared on Where the Action Is with videos of "Wedding Bell Blues", "Blowin' Away" and "Goodbye Joe".
On June 17, 1967, Nyro appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival. Although some accounts described her performance as a fiasco that culminated in her being booed off the stage, recordings later made publicly available contradict this version of events. Newsweek reporter Michael Lydon reviewed her performance very negatively, writing that "the evening hit bottom" during Nyro's "melodramatic" set.
File:David Geffen.jpg|thumb|upright|left|David Geffen became Nyro's manager and arranged a contract with Columbia Records.
Soon afterwards, David Geffen approached Mogull about taking over as Nyro's agent. Nyro successfully sued to void her management and recording contracts on the grounds that she had entered into them while still a minor. Geffen became her manager, and the two established a publishing company, Tuna Fish Music, under which the proceeds from her future compositions would be divided equally between them. Geffen also arranged Nyro's new recording contract with Clive Davis at Columbia Records, and purchased the publishing rights to her early compositions. In his memoir Clive: Inside the Record Business, Davis recalled Nyro's audition for him: She had invited him to her New York apartment, turned off every light except that of a television set next to her piano, and played him the material that would become Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. Around this time, she considered becoming lead singer for Blood, Sweat & Tears after the departure of founder Al Kooper, but was dissuaded by Geffen. Blood, Sweat & Tears went on to have a hit with a cover of Nyro's "And When I Die".
The new contract allowed Nyro more artistic freedom and control. In 1968, Columbia released Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, her second album, which received high critical praise for the depth and sophistication of its performance and arrangements, which merged pop structure with inspired imagery, rich vocals, and avant-garde jazz; it is widely considered one of her best works. It was followed in 1969 by New York Tendaberry, another highly acclaimed work that cemented Nyro's artistic credibility. "Time and Love" and "Save the Country" emerged as two of her most well-regarded and popular songs in the hands of other artists. During the weekend after Thanksgiving in November 1969, she gave two concerts at Carnegie Hall. Her own recordings sold mostly to a faithful cadre of followers. This prompted Clive Davis, in his memoir, to note that her recordings, as solid as they were, came to resemble demonstrations for other performers.
In 1969, Verve reissued Nyro's debut album as The First Songs. The same year Geffen and Nyro sold Tuna Fish Music to CBS for $4.5 million. Under the terms of his partnership with Nyro, Geffen received half of the proceeds of the sale, making them both millionaires.
Nyro's fourth album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, was released at the end of 1970. It contained "Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp" and "When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag" and featured Duane Allman and other Muscle Shoals musicians. The following year's Gonna Take a Miracle was a collection of Nyro's favorite "teenage heartbeat songs", recorded with vocal group Labelle and the production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. With the exception of her attribution of "Désiree", it was Nyro's sole album of wholly non-original material, featuring such songs as "Jimmy Mack", "Nowhere to Run" and "Spanish Harlem".
During 1971, David Geffen worked to establish his own recording label, Asylum Records, in part because of the trouble he had trying to secure a recording contract for another of his clients, Jackson Browne, with whom Nyro was in a relationship at the time. Geffen invited Nyro to join the new label and announced that she would be Asylum's first singer; however, shortly before the signing was due to take place, Geffen learned that Nyro had re-signed with Columbia instead, without telling him. When interviewed about the matter for a 2012 PBS documentary on his life, Geffen, who'd considered Nyro his best friend, described her rejection as the biggest betrayal of his life up to that point, and said he "cried for days" afterwards.
By the end of 1971, Nyro was married to carpenter David Bianchini. She was reportedly uncomfortable with attempts to market her as a celebrity and she announced her retirement from the music business at the age of 24. In 1973, her Verve debut album was reissued as The First Songs by Columbia Records.

Later career

By 1976, her marriage had ended, and she released an album of new material, Smile. She then embarked on a four-month tour with a full band, which resulted in the 1977 live album Season of Lights.
After the 1978 album Nested, recorded when she was pregnant with her only child, she again took a break from recording, this time until 1984's Mother's Spiritual. She began touring with a band in 1988, her first concert appearances in 10 years. The tour was dedicated to the animal rights movement. The shows led to her 1989 release, Laura: Live at the Bottom Line, which included six new compositions.
Her final album of predominantly original material, Walk the Dog and Light the Light, her last album for Columbia, was co-produced by Gary Katz, best known for his work with Steely Dan. The release sparked reappraisal of her place in popular music, and new commercial offers began appearing. She turned down lucrative film-composing offers, although she contributed a rare protest song to the Academy Award-winning documentary Broken Rainbow, about the unjust relocation of the Navajo people.
Nyro performed increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s with female musicians, including her friend Nydia "Liberty" Mata, a drummer, and several others from the lesbian-feminist women's music subculture, such as members of the band Isis. She appeared at such venues as the 1989 Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and the 1989 Newport Folk Festival, of which a CD containing portions of her performance was released. On July 4, 1991, she opened for Bob Dylan at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Among her last performances were at Union Chapel, Islington, London, England in November 1994; The New York Bottom Line Christmas Eve Show in 1994; and at McCabe's in Los Angeles February 11 and 12, 1995.

The Tonight Show and the Late Show with David Letterman pursued Nyro for TV appearances, but she turned them down, citing her discomfort with appearing on television. According to producer Gary Katz, she also turned down an invitation to be the musical guest on the 1993 season opener of Saturday Night Live. She never released an official video, although there was talk of filming some of The Bottom Line appearances in the 1990s.