NEW YORK TENDABERRY
New York Tendaberry. A record,
vinyl. A musical entertainment lasting about forty minutes. I wore out my copy,
replaced it. Went through an entire period when I failed to remember the record,
failed to remember the artist, forgot how to pronounce her name, Laura Nyro. Writer,
singer, pianist. Remembered when ignorance and conviction came from an
unexpected direction. Picked up her cassette Walk The Dog And Light The Light at a store on the Commons in
Ithaca, New York. They don’t have stores like that store anymore. Still carried
me away. I bought New York Tendaberry
as a CD. Wore it out. Replaced it.
All of
Laura Nyro’s recorded material is good, all of it. Less so, the covers. Some of
her early material is excessively devoted to a certain style of song and can
seem weirdly perky. Some of it can drown in sentimentality, sounding maudlin
and meandering, such that a younger man might say, Do we have to listen to that
woman whining?
Her voice
connects with me on a terrible level. When I first heard New York Tendaberry I played the album over and over again, right
then. I remember the record player, it was portable. Gerry Mullen was with me,
ask him. One day, myself in the Bronx, in the back of a walkup flat on Webster
Avenue, in the kitchen, I heard this voice coming over WNEW-FM singing a new
song and I knew it was her, and it was, from Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat. Her next one. And several
excellent efforts followed. Smile. Nested.
But New York Tendaberry is my favorite. I’ve
written a play, an entire evening of theatre, musical theatre, bringing New York Tendaberry to life, on stage,
with characters drawn from the album, a plot, and all eleven songs, every one.
A theatricalization of a record album. I wrote a lot of that play, New York Tendaberry, standing in the
middle of Pine Creek in northern Pennsylvania. Full disclosure: I did see Eli’s Coming on stage in New York City, near Union Square.
That show was great. I took my daughter Veronica, ask her.
Laura
Nyro. She is the blues. I was angry when she died. At the time I thought her
collaboration with Patti LaBelle, Gonna
Take A Miracle, was a
misdirection. Now I like that album much better. But once one of those songs, a
cover, Dancing In The Streets, came on the radio and I thought, What a
chestnut, and went to turn it off. Crazy. New
York Tendaberry. It’s like opera for me, or what looked like opera in the
movie Philadelphia. Gibsom Street
creates an entire world, a fictional world, unlike the title song, New York Tendaberry,
which creates an entire world called New York City.
Save The
Country is an anthem, could be for all human services, including education and
even juvenile probation. Everyone should sing that song every day. And Tom Cat,
the old rat, what a character! You know he’ll never make a moviemaker. Captain
St. Lucifer. You could make an entire academic career from Laura Nyro’s idea of
gender as presented on New York
Tendaberry, with particular attention to her idea of love. Talk about being
carried away. Have Mercy On Broadway. Approach this record very seriously.
Listen in the dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment