In recent years, there have been a spate of live recordings released that have
cheered the Laura Nyro faithful, but none from her earliest years of
performance, long recognized as her most exciting and creative musical period.
So you can imagine the expectations for this 1971 Fillmore East concert have
been extremely high indeed.
Unbelievable as it may seem, these expectations have been exceeded, at least to
the ears of this listener. This is only partially due to the fact that Laura's
voice is pure sweetness and power (made all the sweeter by the fact that her
only accompaniment is her piano--no tacky synthesizer here). While two of the
sweet treat covers have been released on other CDs ("Ooh Child," "Ain't Nothing
Like the Real Thing"), they have loss none of their punch and lip-smacking
pungency.
What has moved me so profoundly, though, what has rocked my world and blown my
mind, is the timeliness and special poignancy of the anti-war, pro-peace
sentiments. I, too, have fury in my soul, but I wasn't expecting this live
performance to affirm and even, to an extent, heal that fury. The songs that
bookend this album have never been released and their message is prescient in
the extreme.
One must remember that in 1971, America was enmeshed in the disaster of the
Vietnam War. The first song on the album is the previously unreleased American
Dove, in which Laura works in a phrase from Sam Cooke's "A Change
is Gonna Come" (It's been a long time comin'...). Yet this is no polemic, simply
a soul speaking to the hope that we can ascend from the horrors of war and
inhumanity and "Spread [y]our wings and fly." As I spend each day horrified with
the news from Iraq (Vietnam: The Sequel), "Save the Country" and the line "I
love my country as it dies..." from "Christmas in My Soul" have never resonated
with me more profoundly than they did the first time I listened to this sweet
cry in the 1971 wilderness from Laura. It was another time, more than 30 years
ago, yet so frighteningly, awfully similar to
today.
My Lai/Abu Gahraib--Americans are expected to
embrace torturing the "enemy" as patriotic (or at least, a necessity of war)
would have enraged any American Dove. I am the Blues, too. Anyone who doesn't
recognize Iraq and our involvement there as a return to Vietnam days needs to
listen to this album. American Dove...the title says it all, yes?It's such an
answer to those who should (but won't) listen...those who think patriotism is
licking the boots of our unelected leader and not standing for America's soul,
but its worst fears. Laura was a patriot in the best sense of the word.
How does this album help to heal this American Dove? Laura's words, spoken with
such sincerity and love, are engraved in my heart: "No matter how insane the
world seems, or how bad the times seem, the vibration that you people put into
the world is very important...It all goes down in the Book of Life."
Interestingly, though the anti-war songs speak to our present and moved me
profoundly, the song that made me cry was "O-o-h Child." (You knew Laura would
yet again move me to tears, you just didn't know which song!) "O-o-h Child" took
me back to my junior high school self, a return to a more innocent time for me,
despite the war. Even then Viet Nam was raging, but I was soaking up the soul,
too young to know my country was dying. I cry in part for the beauty of Laura's
delivery and in part for the memory of my innocence...and in part, too, for its
loss. "O-o-h Child" is a call from the past that lives in my bloodstream and I
simply broke down when I heard it.
Don't be afraid from the above that the album is one long heavy torture chamber
(no, that's Abu Gharaib). It's filled with R&B standards like Walk on By,
Spanish Harlem, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, and Up on the Roof...as
well as classic Laura tracks like Emmie and Timer. She puts these amazing
medleys together, reminding me that in later years, she was simply doing what
she had always done--mixed and merged catalogues as citizen of the soul world,
creating little musical altars at each concert.
The last song, "Mother Earth" is prescient in another way. It's a pagan love
song to the earth, something Laura felt and shared long before the Wiccan
bandwagon ("Brown Earth"). I swear the Goddess worshippers I know would think it
was written today. "Mother Earth" shows such reverence for Gaia. Even the album
insert shows what looks like a lunar cycle, but instead of the face of the moon,
we have facets of Laura. Laura was so ahead of her time, and not in a trendy
way. She had core beliefs, and honored them. And shared them. I am so grateful.
This live show made me think there's some strand of connection between her
simpler, less adventurous musical forms of her latter day career and her moving
to the country. It is presumptuous to think she couldn't have created another
or
if that was her choice.
I don't think Laura lost her muse, she simply chose to live a life of simplicity
and harmony--and her music/art reflects that choice, as the two were so
inextricably intertwined. It's not as exciting as the wild dissonance of NYT,
which is riveting and brilliant...but also a paean to chaos and drama and sturm
and drang. It's reflection and maturity, instead--spiritual harmony over
dissonance, no matter how exciting the dissonance was. You can hear in this
album a real merger of those two urges--and it is as fine a gift as anyone could
ask for. --Diane
Laura
Nyro: