I've never cared about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, nor for top ten lists in general, but I was unexpectedly excited on Wednesday to hear that Laura Nyro is to be a 2012 inductee. I was almost as excited as if I'd won the award myself, and I beamed about the apartment for a good half hour, humming to myself and cleaning, before I went off to teach. It's strange to be excited about such an award, especially as it comes from an operation that hasn't had a history of being too kind to idiosyncrasy or to modest record sales. At the very least, it will help to keep the work around, just at the point when it felt like Laura was about to slide out of awareness. Here are seven I love. The first two are covers, the last five are originals.
7 comments:
I first learned about this on your twitter feed and was THRILLED, this should have happened a long time ago, so excellent. I wish I had just stayed in that place of thrilled-ness and not sought more information, because the list of who else got inducted and who was not chosen... Red Hot Fucking Chili Peppers and Guns and Roses over Heart? Joan Jett? Chaka Kahn? The Cure? ...is appalling. Oh, rockism. One step forward, two steps back.
Try ny tendaberry, Paul! I saw her perform inthe tiny shakespeare amphitheater behind the English dept in boulder not that long before she died...thanks for this
Thanks, Tim! Rockism must be in some part be about capital (i.e., the big bucks.) I'm hoping the others will see their day. Laura apparently didn't make the final cut twice before they finally got the sense. It's as if the underrated have to be kicked around a few rounds before they get let into the circle.
Hi, Unknown. New York Tendaberry is brilliant (as if the first album, Eli, Christmas...) I think I wanted to nod to the stuff that usually gets overlooked. Great to hear that you got to see her in Boulder. I only saw her once, back in 1989 at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia. A very sweet memory, but I had the feeling that the audience only wanted to hear "Wedding Bell Blues."
Love, love, love Laura. She is greatly missed.
Thanks, Collin. I wonder what would LN have been writing and singing if she'd lived longer. I can't help but wonder.
I think it's in either Slate or Salon today about the appalling ratio of Women to Men in the RRHF Which is just so weird: in the 70s and 80s it was almost all women who were doing all the really interesting music making and expanding the possibilities of what "Pop/Rock/Folk music was all about.
For me, I could never possible get enough of those deep, somber, foggy, joyous, soul stirring, left hand chords in the opening to "Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp."
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