July: Mercy on Broadway/Laura Nyro

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As Darius notes, there are plenty of great July 4th songs to choose from, but that was never my personal intention in selecting the <July> theme. lyrics.com shows ~ 2000 songs with July in the lyrics (some repetition), so there's a lot to consider. Somewhere in that long list, among others that I would/could write about, I picked out "Mercy on Broadway". A song I wasn't familiar with, but a name that I was.

When I think Laura Nyro, I think "Wedding Bell Blues". On the second round around, I think "Eli's Coming" [Three Dog Night]

and "Stoned Soul Picnic" [The Fifth Dimension]

and "And When I Die" [Blood, Sweat & Tears].

For these, it's someone else's version of her powerful song-writing that comes to mind first. But rather than diminish Nyro's legacy, the fact that these greats chose to cover her work and hit the top of the charts with them only embellish her rightful place.

On the one hand, I want to lament our loss - Nyro died age 49 of ovarian cancer - the same age as her mother of the same. That IS sad. On the other hand, she left behind a style and a musical repertoire that is still strong decades later, a larger legacy than most can aspire to.

Come to "Mercy on Broadway". Yeah, it includes the per-requisite <July> in the lyrics - more than once in fact (unlike some of the other 2000 in the July lyrics list, where the word shows up once), and she uses month names in various other songs as well - in tune with the seasons?

Nyro was a New Yorker, so her reference to Broadway is apropos. Her references to the fare of the side-streets is equally real - she played the streets and subways of the city in the 1960s.
But it's the combination of her vocal shifts and, as Elton John put it, her "rhythmic and melodic changes" that place her apart. It's her cross over between R&B, jazz, blues and pop that made her songs so accessible to all the other bands. Like several other songs she wrote, it builds/morphs from jazzy blues to full out rocking by the end of the song.

For the record, the Christine Spero Group put out an entire album of Nero songs, but it doesn't include "Mercy".

Wedding: Laura Nyro

Laura Nyro: Wedding Bell Blues
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When we first posited the Wedding theme, it seemed a natural that this song be included. It has the theme word in the title (score one for me). It was the first song that came to mind when I considered "Wedding" as a theme.

The Interweb notes that the song is somewhat autobiographical - one generation removed: apparently Nyro's (aka Laura Bianchini) aunt had a relationship with a "William", and there is a story about waiting for him to propose that pumped the lyrical content. Hard to believe she wrote the song at age 18.

Music critics more expert than myself note her vocal range in addition to her song writing skill. As I listen to the song again, I am struck by the great back vocal work on the song. Nyro had great vocal range - her backup vocals team bring it out.

That said, the song - to me - transcends 1966 - the year she penned the song. That's the year we had such hits as "Wild Thing" and "I am a Rock".

Nyro never realized the same status as others who covered her songs, probably most famously, The 5th Dimension. However, she did get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame back in 2012. She's not only the author of "Wedding Bell Blues," but also of "Stoned Soul Picnic," again, a 5th Dimension major hit. 

Nonsense: La-La Means I Love You

Laura Nyro: La-La (Means I Love You)

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This nonsense song title includes its own handy parenthetical interpretation for those of us who aren't quite sure what "la-la" actually means. Now we know.

There's not a cover of this song that I don't love, which lets me know right away that I need to be checking out the writer – Thom Bell. Just as the songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland defined the Motown sound in the 60's, the same is true for Thom Bell and the Philly Soul sound. Bell was an influential session pianist, songwriter, and producer who, with partners Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, was instrumental in some pretty awesome hits by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the Spinners, Billy Paul, and the O'Jays.

This cover of the 1968 Delfonics tune is by one of my favorite vocalists and a superb songwriter in her own right. She's performed a number of 60's soul hits over her too-short career. This one's from the posthumously released Angel in the Dark and was recorded around 1995.

Blank and Blues: Wedding Bell Blues

Laura Nyro: Wedding Bell Blues

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Ah... dear, sweet Laura Nyro... penner of many tunes made more famous by others: this one, The Fifth Dimension... Stoney End, Barbra Streisand... And When I Die, Blood, Sweat & Tears... Three Dog Night, Eli's Coming - she sadly left us too early in 1997 at the age of 49 due to ovarian cancer...

But mostly, when I listen to this entire album, I think of Elias Livaditas and the Summer of '73 between my freshman and sophomore college years - I was working as a waitress, he was a regular customer and a romance blossomed. He would write me poems on the napkins I brought with his meal... and he would pick me up after work and we'd go back to his place for a while before he'd drop me back home - First Songs was always the soundtrack to our liaisons...

Ah... dear, sweet Elias - thanks for many lovely memories, Laura among them...

Mothers: Mother's Spiritual

Laura Nyro – Mother's Spiritual

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This song comes from one of Laura Nyro's later albums, recorded in 1984 when she was a single mother of a 2-year-old boy. By then, she'd moved away from the jazz and soul–drenched pop that often defined her earlier songs (and made big hits for artists like The Fifth Dimension, Barbra Streisand, Three Dog Night, and Blood, Sweat and Tears). Recorded in her Connecticut home studio and using only a piano and her compelling voice, the title song is a poetic ode to motherhood. And although I love her Brill Building pop sound (she did an entire cover album in 1971 with LaBelle just full of gems from the likes of Martha and the Vandellas, Curtis Mayfield, and Ben E. King), I also love her heartfelt ballads like this one.

Guest post by Geoviki

Leftovers (Drugs): Stoned Soul Picnic

Laura Nyro: Stoned Soul Picnic

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The 5th Dimension: Stoned Soul Picnic

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Laura Love: Stoned Soul Picnic

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Jill Sobule: Stoned Soul Picnic

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It was the summer of 1968, a year before Woodstock, a year after the impromptu San Francisco gathering popularly referred to as the Summer of Love: the free love movement was thick in the air, and though the history books have surely magnified the scale of American awareness and participation in the movement, those of us conceived in the midst of it all have been taught to believe that hope was everywhere.

Into the midst of this swamp of countercultural change came two versions of a song: one by its author Laura Nyro, a popular white R&B and soul singer, the other by the popular African-American R&B quintet The 5th Dimnension, who would go on to chart with the Aquarius theme to the musical Hair in the following year. The dual versions became part of the bridge across the rapidly-closing racial divide, and within weeks, Stoned Soul Picnic was atop both the popcharts and the Black Singles Charts; according to apocryphal record, the song was sung on "every street corner", and - given its simplicity and its message - it's easy to see why.

As much as it reflects the civil rights aspect of the sixties counterculture, Stoned Soul Picnic is a product of its times on its lyrical and sensual merits, too. It's hard to figure out what, if anything, this song is really about, beyond the strange feeling that anything could happen, and should, if people would only join together in communal celebration. Other than the word "stoned" in the chorus and title, there's no direct mention of drugs or drug-taking; this is a promise of mood, not an instruction booklet for a movement.

But there's no denying the summery, soulful, swaying melody line of both original versions, which maintains a tone that clings to subsequent covers as if it were an inevitable aspect of the song. And the organic visualizations of nature that show up in every verse sound like a great trip, indeed.