Michael’s Musical Musings: Livingston Taylor and Laura Nyro
Recently, I was fortunate to see Livingston Taylor perform at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage (along with humorous songsmith Loudon Wainwright III). He’s a talented musician who not only revels in all types of song, he is also a music professor at the Berkelee College of Music in Boston. Although toiling in the shadow of his older brother, Livingston’s talents still shine bright as a composer and outstanding song interpreter. His stage presence is amazingly warm, relaxed, and inviting, accompanied by his consummate guitar and piano playing. Among others, he covered Laura Nyro’s soulful ‘Sweet Blindness’, her ebullient bacchanalia-laden song filled with free-falling poetry cascading over blue-eyed soul piano. As I listened, I remembered how much her music meant to me during the latter half of the 60s.
As we all know, Laura Nyro and her incredible songs burst on the scene in 1966. Covered by many artists, the talented singer-songwriter had an amazing three octave vocal range. Peter Paul and Mary first covered her song, ‘And When I Die,’ in ’66, and later recorded by Blood Sweat and Tears in ’69. I remembered my musical ‘cognoscente’, Todd Rundgren, had been smitten early on by her extensive songwriting abilities, which had a soulfulness that favored ‘an old-fashioned R&B quality’. In his autobiography, The Individualist, he remembers: ‘When I heard her second album, Eli and the 13th Confession, I was knocked on my ass. I fell in love with the record, I fell in love with her, and I started gravitating toward the piano as a compositional tool. When I fortuitously met her, she was dressed like a gypsy, and though she was still not 20, she came off as a slightly world-weary (older) woman. She made a tuna casserole and I spent the evening in her aura and left dazed. I had never experienced this kind of crush before, later gazing at her album and feeling I was in the personal private presence of this priestess. Sadly, we never had the opportunity to work on any projects together but my first experience of her most powerful musical expression remains uncannily vivid today.’
