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The
Music and Passion of Laura Nyro |
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Michele
Kort has served as the Senior Editor for Ms. Magazine since 2003 and she says,
“Writing about women in history has always been a guiding light for me. During
my freelance career, I wrote a lot about women in sports and the arts. I figured
that men already got quite a lot of coverage (she laughs), so I wanted to
equalize it a little bit. If I wrote about men in sports I would write about men
in really minor sports.” It is not surprising then, when
one examines Michele Kort’s resume more closely that you notice that she has
also authored three books concerning the lives of individuals associated with
the entertainment industry,
Despite the fact that she wrote many hit songs and she
performed in sold out venues, Laura Nyro remains excluded from the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, although her name appears on the list of nominees for 2010
induction, and she still has not been admitted to the Songwriters Hall of Fame
(Editor's Note: In 2010 Laura Nyro was posthumously inducted into the
Songwriters Hall of Fame.) Michele Kort says of those two oversights, “It is pretty
shocking. There are still artists rediscovering and recording her music.” When asked, if she thought that Laura Nyro would have
cared much, that she has not been admitted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and
the Rock Hall of Fame, Kort pondered the question for a few moments before
replying, “You know I didn’t really know her. Someone told me that she got an
award for a certain amount of sales for “Wedding Bell Blues,” from BMI or ASCAP
or something, but that (she put) it under the sink in a cabinet. I don’t know
that honors were all that important to her. People can say that they don’t, and
then they get the honors and maybe they do care. It is hard to know. I think in
her later years, she was very happy to have a small, but serious audience,
instead of a big one. It was the quality not the quantity that mattered to her.” Michele Kort’s journey with
Laura Nyro’s music began as a teenager in 1966, when her clock radio blasted out
a syncopated piano beat and the words to “Wedding Bell Blues,” and so began a
lifelong fascination with the music and the life of Laura Nyro that has
persisted to this day.
“I
was a crazy fan of hers. When she was at the Troubadour (in One
gets the sense that Michele Kort is just warming up with her stories of Laura
Nyro and her memories, “Another time, I was with the same nutty cousin at The
Music Center in “Many times over the years, I
thought of writing a book about Laura Nyro, but I always heard that she was so
private and I thought that it would be impossible. In the eighties, I was
working for a songwriter magazine for a while and there was another Laura Nyro
fan working there. I think that she was in touch with Roscoe Harring, Laura
Nyro’s road manager and friend, and she (the friend) was trying to arrange for
an interview with Laura. It just seemed so difficult that I discounted the
possibility.” When another well known person,
who Kort had interviewed died and she mentioned that to her friend, the friend
responded by noting that it seemed like Kort had interviewed everybody.
Kort recalls telling her friend, “I said that
the one person that I would really like to interview would be Laura Nyro and a
week later she died. It was kind of weird and poignant. It was very upsetting.
Most of her fans had no idea that she was ill. About a week later a friend said
to me, ‘You should write a book about her.’ I had never thought about that.
I thought, I was going to read that book, so
it took me another week to think, could I write that book? I knew that I had a
lot of material to start with, because I had saved articles about her from the
beginning. My partner was acquainted with Jimmy Haskell, who had arranged New
York Tendaberry.
That gave me a start on one interview and one
concerning the most important album.
After thinking about it
for a week I contacted this agent, who I had never actually worked with, but
whom I had talked to some years before. I asked if she thought this would be of
interest and she was interested so she took the book on a proposal and I went
from there” The
book which Kort originally thought, would take her one year to research and
write eventually became three years, before
The Music and
Passion of Laura Nyro Soul Picnic appeared
in print. “At the very beginning of the project, I knew a woman who knew her
(Laura’s) partner Maria Desiderio, and I got a copy of my proposal to her,
through this woman . This friend of Maria’s called me and told me that I was the
only person they were considering. Then they called me and ultimately they
decided not to, because there was an article written in the New York Times by a
woman, Deborah Sontag and they didn’t like this article, so that was it and they
didn’t want to talk to anybody. The way the woman expressed it to me was, ‘There
are seven of us who have taken this vow of silence,’ and it was kind of
dramatic. I just found it ridiculous that nobody ever cared about these other
seven people. I thought I am not going to try and contact these people now, I am
going to do the rest of my research and over time, people are going to hear who
I am, understand who I am, and where I am coming from, and that I am coming out
of love. I am not trying to write an exploitative book, but I am trying to write
a very respectful book. If she was alive, I would be destroying her privacy, but
now that she was gone, I couldn’t and she belonged to history now. As long as I
was respectful of her dad and of her son Gil, I felt okay about it. After a
number of months I sent a letter to her father and her father responded to me.
He ended up being terrific and her father became very interested in preserving
her memory. When they did a play
called Eli’s Comin’
in Michele Kort who counts “Captain St. Lucifer,” among her
favorite Laura Nyro songs and considers New York Tendaberry as her most prolific
album, something which the music critics of the day agreed with, has not allowed
the legacy of Laura Nyro to remain only with the book she authored, but she
maintains a blog to help preserve Nyro’s memory and to continue to keep her
music in the forefront. “For one thing, I think that when you spend that much
time, and you build up this much expertise about someone, you want to keep going
with it (she laughs). It is still on your mind. The other thing is that Laura
still has not got the recognition that she deserves. It would be amazing if she
got elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. It is totally amazing
that she is nominated, because she is forgotten by most,” says Kort.
Perhaps there was is no more fitting way to define the life and the destiny of
Laura Nyro than to reflect upon a conversation which Michele Kort had with
Nyro’s father, while Kort was doing her research. “My favorite moment was with
Lou, her dad.
I got really fascinated by Laura’s family
history; her Russian grandparents (her Jewish heritage) and her Italian
grandfather. It was just a very interesting family on both sides. I asked her
dad one day, did you name Laura after grandma and Lou said, ‘No I named her
after a song. I named her after the song “Laura.” That’s how I started the book
that she was named after a song. It was one of those great moments. It became
the opening for the book.”
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For those music fans who are not
acquainted with the music of Laura Nyro, perhaps a brief overview of her career,
will help you to appreciate her accomplishments. For those who are younger than
thirty years old, you may need to make good use of google, because tragically
Laura Nyro passed away at the age of forty-nine, in 1997, from ovarian cancer
and many of the hit songs that she penned were recorded in the 1960’s and
1970’s.