Gonna wash you up, and wash you down
Gonna lay the devil down
GONNA LAY! THAT! DEVIL! DOWN!
Every so often, I come across a record that is so extraordinary that I feel compelled to tell the world about it.
Unfortunately, I am almost never up to the task of putting into words what it is that makes such a record so special.
I give it my best – honest I do. I write, and I rewrite, and flail around until I decide that my efforts are utterly futile, and I need to just delete everything and start all over – usually more than once. But there comes a point where I realize that it’s not going to happen.
That’s when I just give up, and hope that the music will speak for itself.
* * * * *
If you were looking at the November 29, 1969 issue of Billboard magazine right now, you’d see that three of the records listed in the top ten that week were covers of Laura Nyro songs.
Three Dog Night’s recording of “Eli’s Coming” held down the #10 spot. The 5th Dimension’s version of “Wedding Bell Blues” – which had reached #1 the week before – sat as #3. And the Blood, Sweat & Tears cover of “And When I Die” was the #2 single in the U.S.
(Nyro wrote “And When I Die” when she was 17 years old. What, pray tell, had you accomplished when you were 17 years old?)
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| Laura Nyro |
Those aren’t the only three Laura Nyro songs that became hit singles, of course. The 5th Dimension’s 1968 cover of “Stoned Soul Picnic” went platinum, and their cover of “Sweet Blindness” peaked just outside the top ten in 1970. Barbra Streisand’s recording of “Stoney End” was a #6 hit in 1971.
Laura Nyro recorded all of those songs, but none of her originals ever charted. This despite the fact that her recordings of those songs are infinitely better than any of the covers.
* * * * *
While Nyro was a remarkably gifted performer, she was first and foremost a remarkably gifted songwriter.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, I understand. But how can you not take the word of all the hall-of-fame-quality songwriters who have acknowledged her influence on their songwriting – songwriters like Tori Amos, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Elton John, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Todd Rundgren?
“I idolized her,” Elton John once said. “The soul, the passion, just the out and out audacity of the way her rhythmic and melody changes came was like nothing I've heard before.”
It’s telling that Nyro’s fans include musicians whose songs bears no resemblance at all to hers – including Alice Cooper, Paul Stanley of KISS, and X’s Exene Cervenka.
* * * * *
One writer has described Nyro’s songwriting style as “a hybrid of Brill Building-style New York pop, jazz, rhythm and blues, show tunes, rock, and soul.”
He left out gospel, which is the genre that’s at the heart of today’s featured Nyro song, “Save the Country.”
How a white girl from the Bronx whose ancestors were Eastern European Jews was able to capture the essence of gospel – the traditional music of once-enslaved African-American Christians – and combine it with other musical influences to create a song like “Save the Country” is beyond me.
I could go the rational route and explain Nyro as the product of a particular combination of genetics and environment. Her innate musical gifts – perhaps inherited from her father (a jazz trumpeter and piano tuner), her mother (who shared her Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Leontyne Price, and Nina Simone records with the young Laura), or a combination of them both – likely bloomed in such spectacular fashion because she grew up in New York City in the fifties and sixties, exposed to every kind of great music you can imagine.
But I think there was more going on than that with Laura Nyro. I think she was a musical glossolalist.
Glossolalia – usually referred to as “speaking in tongues” – is believed by some to be the result of a divine entity taking possession of a human being and speaking through him or her. I believe that Laura Nyro’s uncanny musical genius – which is demonstrated very powerfully by today’s featured recording – is most likely the result of some form of divine possession.
I’m only half kidding when I say that.
* * * * *
Nyro wrote “Save the Country” just after the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
The song’s third verse refers specifically to the Kennedys:
Come on people, sons and mothers
Keep the dream of the two young brothers
Gotta take that dream and ride that dove
We can build the dream with love!
I have to quote the first and second verses as well:
Come on people, come on children
Come on down to the glory river
Gonna wash you up, and wash you down
Gonna lay the devil down
Gonna lay that devil down!
Come on people, come on children
There's a king at the glory river
And the precious king, he loved the people to sing
Babes in the blinking sun
Sang “We Shall Overcome”!
If that’s not enough to make you a believer, I’m betting the chorus will do the trick:
I got fury in my soul
Fury’s gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can’t study war no more
Save the people!
Save the children!
My family hails from the Ozarks, and I heard a lot of good ol’ country preachers when I was growing up. But I never heard a better altar call than “Save the Country.”
* * * * *
“Save the Country” was released as a single in the summer of 1968, a couple of months before Nyro turned 21.
That 1968 single is a very good but fairly conventional two-and-a-half-minute-long, suitable-for-AM-radio record. The only thing that’s really unusual about it is the ways it ends – the studio musicians and backup singers drop out, leaving Nyro to sing “Save the country” four times, a cappella, and without the expected resolution to the tonic. It’s quite dramatic, although Nyro is singing so softly that you can barely hear her.
The next year, Nyro recorded a completely different arrangement for her New York Tendaberry album. The first half of that 4:36 track features only Nyro’s voice and piano. The volume and tempo vary, and she occasionally drops in extra beats – it doesn’t exactly sound improvised, but it’s a lot more spontaneous and unconstrained than the typical studio recording of that era.
The second half of the album version of “Save the Country” is an extended coda, with lots of studio bells and whistles – including a bunch of female backup singers and a big horn section that plays louder and faster and faster and louder. Nyro herself essentially disappears from the song well before the coda ends.
Have you ever been at a live performance where the singer performs a show-stopping hit as his or her encore, then takes a bow, blows kisses to the audience, and exits stage left while the band keeps blasting along? That’s the effect of the last minute or two of the album version of “Save the Country.”
* * * * *
I’ve chosen to feature a different version of the song – a live performance of “Save the Country” on a TV show in 1969.
That version consists of Laura singing her song and accompanying herself on the piano, sans backing singers, sans backing musicians, sans studio tricks. It’s essentially the first two and a half minutes of the album version of the song without all the Sturm und Drang of the coda.
I’ve listened to a lot of music in my life. Is there a more compelling two and a half minutes of music by a solo artist performing live out there somewhere? Maybe, but I haven’t heard it.
This performance contains one of my favorite musical moments of all time. Listen to the piano chords that accompany “Gonna lay that devil down” at the end of the first verse. That chord progression is utterly unexpected, and she absolutely hammers those chords as well as slowing down her tempo dramatically to make sure you don’t miss it. It is attention-getting as all get out.
Nyro’s performance is very odd by the usual standards of sixties network television. It is as far from the typical lip-synching pop-star TV appearance as it can be. And it doesn’t look like she’s enjoying herself as she performs – the camera rarely catches her eye, and when it does she has the desperate look of a caged animal.
Laura speeds up and slows down, goes from a loud and raucous chest voice to a very light head voice (or falsetto?) and back, and seems to come very close to losing control of the song.
Some of you would probably argue that she does lose control – especially when she shrieks the final “NOW!” (If you want to say that note has the same effect on you as fingernails on a chalkboard, I won’t dispute it.)
Love it or hate it, you’ve got to admit that it’s a completely fearless performance.
* * * * *
I learned about this particular version of “Save the Country” by watching a video by a British guitarist named Fil Henley, who heads up a band called Wings of Pegasus. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting a lot from this guy, but I was pleasantly surprised – it’s good. (His breakdown of that dramatic chord progression I mentioned above saved me from having to do it myself.)
Click here to watch Fil’s video.
* * * * *
I hate to end this post on such a sad note, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do. (I thought about leaving out what comes next, but I simply couldn’t get it out of my head.)
Laura Nyro’s mother died of ovarian cancer when she was only 49 years old.
Laura Nyro also died of ovarian cancer when she was only 49 years old.
I’ve tried to imagine how Laura would have felt when she received her diagnosis, knowing what she knew about her mother.
Would it have struck her as the cruelest joke that an unfeeling universe could play on someone, and left her in despair?
Or would she have been more philosophical, viewing the coincidence (which was not really a coincidence, of course) as unsurprising – something to be expected?
And did her terrible fate weigh less heavily on her heart and her soul because it was shared with the woman who gave birth to her?
* * * * *
Click here to view the divinely possessed (and divinely beautiful) Laura Nyro’s live performance of “Save the Country.”
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