The woman leading the rock band at the Vic last Friday seemed a most unlikely candidate for pop stardom. Overweight, plain, quiet, eccentrically dressed in a style that was part beatnik and part suburban shopper, she sat at her electric piano, never getting up to prance or dance around the stage the way a pop star’s supposed to. The calm center of a musical storm, smiling benignly as the other musicians cooked, she just sat there and held court–benign, complacent, even a little smug–for the rapt audience of aging children who had come to hear her songs.
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Nyro made her first splash in 1966 at age 19, with the release of her debut LP More Than a New Discovery (later rereleased as The First Songs). She followed that up in 1968 with Eli and the Thirteenth Confession–still her best recording, in terms of material and performance. Eli was followed by New York Tendaberry (1969), Christmas and the Beads of Sweat (1970), and Gonna Take a Miracle (1971). Though an absolutely wonderful record, Gonna Take a Miracle–in which Nyro was joined by Labelle–was a troubling one. It consisted only of other people’s songs (“Jimmy Mack,” “Dancing in the Street,” etc), leading one to fear Nyro’s songwriting talent had burned out. It wasn’t until 1975 that she released her next LP of original material, Smile. Though full of lovely moments and beautiful sounds, Smile and its successors, Season of Light (1977) and Nested (1978), were disappointments after Nyro’s dazzling early work. Soon after Nested’s release, she retired to upstate New York to give birth to and raise a son. For the next few years, it seemed, she was indeed nested.
The beginnings of her return to public visibility came in 1984, with the release of the little-noted Mother’s Spiritual; that was followed in 1985 by her theme song for the Oscar-winning documentary Broken Rainbow. Now, with two LPs “in the can” for future release–a new studio album and a live album–Nyro is back on the road for the first time since she toured while pregnant to promote Nested.
With the top-notch band she had behind her–bassist Dave Wofford and high-energy conga drummer Nydia Mata, in addition to those already mentioned–Nyro’s performance gave her audience what they came for: some fine memories and some great singing. But there was nothing there that came close to the spark her early songs struck–that immediate sense of connection, of “Wow! What’s that?”, as one heard “Stoned Soul Picnic” or “Eli’s Coming” or “Time and Love” for the first time–and none of the emotional complexity or conflict that made listeners react so personally to the feelings she expressed. Nyro’s old audience Will surely buy her new records; whether a new one will, too, is less certain. But to the satisfied homebody holding forth at the Vic last week “dark and content . . . with a radical feminist bent,” as she put it–all that may very well not matter.
