How well known is Laura Nyro in USA/Canada?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Siegmund, Aug 11, 2017.

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  1. Dave S

    Dave S Forum Resident

    As you said, she was probably well liked at Columbia (resigning with them despite an offer from Asylum). She also had the artistic freedom to put out an album when she wanted. So long as her back catalog sold the required numbers, they would never go out of print.
     
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  2. Siegmund

    Siegmund Vinyl Sceptic Thread Starter

    Location:
    Britain, Europe
    A small but devoted audience is better for the long haul than a large yet fickle one.
     
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  3. Dave S

    Dave S Forum Resident

    Yes, although I detect a genuine repect for Laura Nyro. Some of those executives at Columbia would have grown up with her records. Plus it would take a brave executive to ditch an artist with people like Bette Midler on her side.
     
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  4. Chris Schoen

    Chris Schoen Rock 'n Roll !!!

    Location:
    Maryland, U.S.A.
    She played at the closing shows of the Fillmore East, I believe.
     
  5. mwheelerk

    mwheelerk Sorry, I can't talk now, I'm listening to music...

    Location:
    Gilbert Arizona
    For me she is one of those artist I have respected from afar. While being aware of her music, respecting her song writing and voice I could just never quite embrace the performance on record. Hence I have no Laura Nyro music in my library.
     
  6. The Panda

    The Panda Forum Mutant

    Location:
    Marple, PA, USA
    Laura seems to have been very hard to work with in the studio. Miracle almost turned into a fiasco, IIRC. She messed around so much that she didn't get down to business until the very end and Patti had to do the arrangements in a pathetically short time.

    Interesting someone mentions Midler--she used to make fun of Laura during 70's live shows. I had a show where she did it and I tossed it, It seemed mean spirited to me.
     
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  7. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    That was the gist of why Todd Rundgren, who idolized her, was not able to successfully work with her. 22 takes of a song gives you too much to reasonably choose from. That, coupled with Todd's probable ADHD it was doomed. She did ask him to be her bandleader back around the time of Runt, but he was too busy as a producer and with his own career.
     
    Last edited: Aug 16, 2017
  8. The Panda

    The Panda Forum Mutant

    Location:
    Marple, PA, USA
    I think Andy said something like "Todd is not a people person." Ha!
     
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  9. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Well, it's the Billboard 200, and "success" means a lot of different things, -- obviously she had a significant career, a very influential career so clearly she was very successful. But album sales ARE measure by the Billboard charts, and yes, they're a pretty good indication of relative popularity, especially back then when albums actually sold. She wasn't a big album seller. She's never had an RIAA certified gold or platinum record regardless of catalog sales -- maybe no one put in for a cert, but maybe just none of those albums sold even half-a-million copies.

    Obscure? We'll she's not unknown, she's influential and celebrated. We're still talking about her here. But she's also not one of the most famous figures in the history of pop music in the last 40 years -- not a "household name," to use the OP's phrase. She's somewhere in the middle between obscure and household name. If you put a general interest poll up on, say, USA Today, or a poll on some media cite that caters to an audience outside the Laura Nyro demo -- say on Univision -- the number of people able to even identify her would be fractional.

    I know we're talking here about what's the proper measure of relative fame -- since that's the question the OP posed -- and there is no fixed way to measure that, so we can try to come up with something quantitative we can point to. Personally -- and I am fan of Laura Nyro the songwriter, not so much a fan of her singing or the arrangement and production and performances on most of her recordings -- my sense of how well-known Laura Nyro is among the audience for popular music and even rock or singer-songwriter music in 2017, tilts much more toward the obscure end of the spectrum than towards the household name end of the spectrum. How well was she known at the height of her fame in the late '60s and early '70s obviously tilts more toward the famous end of the spectrum. I think where she's least "obscure" or most well known today is among kinda alt-folk-rock style songwriters, and of course among older fans who are still fans and older writers who felt her influence when it was first happening.
     
    Last edited: Aug 16, 2017
  10. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    To be specific, Andy said "He has the people skills of a Dalek, but is a God among arrangers."

    [​IMG]

    But he had a point, which is that music is about the performance. What did she get from the 22nd take of a song that she didn't get on the 3rd? Bat Out of Hell is not going to win any audio engineering awards, but it sold an insane number of copies because it featured great performances - most of which were the first takes.
     
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  11. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Those were also the days when labels were still interested in having "prestige" artists who didn't sell a lot but got good reviews, were respected by their peers, had other people coming to cherry pick their material, etc.
     
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  12. Sneaky Pete

    Sneaky Pete Flat the 5 and That’s No Jive

    Location:
    NYC USA
    Prestige artists are one thing, consistent sellers are another. Even a niche or cult artist with a devoted following can be profitable. If an artists has 30,000 to 50,000 devoted fans who will buy everything they release, a business can work with that artist.

    It's even better if the artist is a perennial and is "discovered" by successive generations. Artists like Van Morrison, Tom Waits, and Laura Nyro fit into that category. They aren't highly profitable but they make some bucks and keep the pot boiling.
     
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  13. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    I'm continually baffled that the record industry has been cutting artists from their roster when the reality of digital distribution means that they could profitably serve far more. Astounding how the "long tail" seems to have completely flummoxed the huge labels while tiny labels like the Numero Group somehow manage to handle hundreds of different artists at the same time.
     
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  14. Guy E

    Guy E Senior Member

    Location:
    Antalya, Turkey
    Yea, the semantics in these discussions get silly. There are very few recording artists from the 60's and 70's who are "household names" in 2017. My mother recently commented that none of the young staff in her nursing home knew who Gregory Peck was. She found that startling. But neither my mother or I have a clue who's on the cover of People Magazine nine weeks out of ten.

    If you put up a general poll on USA Today, would people know who Leonard Cohen is? Al Green? Joni Mitchell? Judy Collins? Joan Baez? Dusty Springfield? Probably not Townes Van Zandt or Gene Clark or Gram Parsons, or any other member of The Byrds (other than David Crosby).

    If you played some of Laura Nyro's most famous songs I think that people would recognize those more than Joni's (OK, Woodstock) or any of the others (maybe Pancho & Lefty would get a nod). In that sense, I think that Laura Nyro's work left a strong mark.

    She SOLD OUT large concert halls nationwide for several years running. She wasn't playing in smokey nightclubs, but she stayed out of the celebrity spotlight. Her own records just didn't sell in big numbers.
    [​IMG]

    I'll also say that, while her fan base was greater than what I'd term a "Cult Artist" there was definitely a cult-like worship of Laura Nyro among my older sister's group of friends (who turned me on to her). In those pre-Internet days, we all thought that she was much older than she was, and that she had released several albums besides Eli & The 13th Confession and More Than A New Discovery. We'd go to big record shops in Chicago, the ones that had those 6-inch thick bound reference catalogues, and we'd get frustrated that all her earlier work was OOP. :laugh:

    I'm not sure why we didn't take the title of her 1967 debut album at face value, but we didn't.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2017
  15. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    No, of course not. Maybe Joni Mitchell. Maybe, though if they're African-American, not Joni Mitchell but maybe Al Green. I know I recently had a conversation with one friend, a Caribbean-American woman, who didn't know anything about Joni Mitchell, but had a vague familiarity with the hook from "Big Yellow Taxi" -- not any knowledge that it was from "Big Yellow Taxi" or that it was by someone called Joni Mitchell -- from the Janet Jackson sample; but she certainly knows who Al Green is. And she's not that young, maybe in her 30s, and she is in the entertainment business. And those people both were vastly more successful and vastly higher profile than Laura Nyro. But that's my point. None of these people is that famous today. And few of 'em were as famous as rock music fans seem to think they were even then -- back in 1972, my mother didn't know who Joni Mitchell was, maybe, maybe she had heard the name. My dad knew these folks, but he was in the ad business, he kept up with pop culture. But Al Green, she didn't know. Joan Baez probably because she had a political profile.

    Townes Van Zandt? Almost nobody knows who Townes Van Zandt was, and almost nobody knows any Townes Van Zandt song other that "Pancho and Lefty" and almost everybody who even knows "Pancho and Lefty" doesn't know Townes Van Zandt wrote it and doesn't know who Townes Van Zandt was. Does that make him obscure? I'm not sure you can call anyone who made records and got songs recorded and was written about in the press "obscure" -- I mean, I'm obscure -- but I'd say he's far from "well-known" also.

    Especially today -- not just because of age, but because of how profoundly different this culture is than it was even 40 or 50 years ago -- then it was the era of mass media and the kind of electronic hearth, the nation was around 85 percent white, and there were only 200 million people; now there's no mass media center, the population is 65% bigger, and it's only around 65% white -- these people aren't vaguely close to household names, to be a household name -- to refer back to the original post -- you have to have a kind of public profile that transcends our diverse demographic and regional pockets, and few musicians ever become those kinds of figures.

    Honestly, if you played even the hit versions of "Stoned Soul Picnic" and "Stoney End" and "And When I Die" to people other than folks of our demographic and age today, I'd lay odds that well less than one percent of respondents would know those songs and records, and far fewer than that number would have ever heard the Laura Nyro recordings of them. Nyro's fame was a temporal blip and demographically constrained.

    I understand that she had a moment of fame in the late '60s/early '70s that she walked away from, and that her fans were very devoted in a way that fans get with singer-songwriter types sometimes. And I understand now that she was able to fill the 3,000-4,000 seat venues at the height of her career. And like I said, I think her influence on songwriters was much bigger and longer lasting than her fame and popularity. Kinda like Lou Reed (though Reed never had half a dozen of his compositions make it to the top of the pops).

    But I think Laura Nyro today is closer to a obscure figure from pop music half a century ago, than anything else. And I think even at the height of her fame she wasn't known to the "general public" -- which is why I use the USA Today poll as a kind of stand-in -- even if, then at least, when her songs were top of the pops and getting lots of radio airplay and the cover artists were out playing 'em on Ed Sullivan or on their own TV specials or whatever, the songs were more generally known.

    None of which is a value judgement about the woman or her art. Just an attempt to parse levels of fame because that's what the original question was.

    Where are the lines between obscure, cult-artist, well-known and household name? Who the hell knows, and what's the way to quantify it? If the general news desk wants the obit when someone dies, and the non-music press runs the obit on A1 or something -- that's a some with a kind of broad general fame that take you from well-known even up to household name status. If the general interest press runs the obit at all -- in the back of the paper with the general obits, or in the arts section off a broadcast or paper or something, that person's probably somewhere in that spectrum between cult artist and well known. If no one notices you when you're gone, you've faded into obscurity. As an artist, you're reputation still change, that's the immortality of art, ask Van Gogh or Melville. But I think this question of how famous these musician are or ever were really almost always needs a qualifier. Laura Nyro was well-known "among fans of singer-songwriters in the late '60s and early '70"; in any other group she was pretty much unknown.

    I also think the OP is English or at least living in England, and I think in the UK there's a way of being nationally famous there, and even for musicians, that's very different from the way it is here. The UK has 65 million people. It still has a strong national mass media outlet on TV and especially radio in the form of the BBC. I think the nature of being nationally famous there is kinda different than it is here.
     
  16. The Hud

    The Hud Breath of the Kingdom, Tears of the Wild

    The Mono Collection is back on sale at Amazon for $17.69!
     
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  17. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    This thread has made me decide to broadcast Laura Nyro for 2 hours tonight. She'll be remembered or she'll become known to thousands (tens of thousands) of people
     
  18. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    It was fun. I decided to play her first 3 LPs in their entirety. Two from the recent mono mix set.
     
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  19. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    I looked up Laura on the web for the first time in a long while and found an incomplete list of concert dates. The list was more thorough in her later years than pre 1973 (when people did not usually document and save that info). What is interesting is that she was actually quite active as a touring artist from 1988 when she returned through 1994 when sickness started to limit her activity. Not the 100+ show per year level of intensity, though I know the listing is incomplete. But her return to the regular concert tours and new official releases is proof that she was back and intended to continue, had illness not taken her from regular activity by her 47th birthday. Those years of 1988-1994, coincidentally, were the same years that Bob Dylan finally decided to return to regular stage and recording activity. But Bob was a road gypsy who could afford to continue, while Laura needed to be home a little more.

    It seems clear that if cancer had not taken her, Laura would have continued to tour and record to today (when she would only be 69), and probably would have released at least four or five new studio albums, and maybe a batch more of live albums and "unreleased session" albums. Those quiet years of the late 70's and early 80's would just be viewed as a long intermission when she dedicated herself to her family and some inner peace.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
  20. Siegmund

    Siegmund Vinyl Sceptic Thread Starter

    Location:
    Britain, Europe
    Did she play any gigs outside the U.S.?

    I've been listening to some of her stuff recently and comparing it to the popular cover versions by the 5th. The 5th were very accomplished and talented but somehow they iron out all the interesting little quirks in the originals - and sometimes I'm sure they hadn't got a clue what they were singing about!

    I would have liked it if Laura's originals had been the hit versions - they are by no means uncommercial or unapproachable and Laura had a great voice (at least as good as any girl group singer from Motown). There was no reason why she shouldn't have been more popular in her own right.
     
  21. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    The 1994 Japan tour was important
     
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  22. lennonfan1

    lennonfan1 Senior Member

    Location:
    baltimore maryland
    I think people interested in classic popular music from 50 years ago will continue to seek her out, what she brought to the art form is considerable....the most important thing, imo, is the song construction itself.

    Her only real competition at this time was Carole King, but where Carole wrote insanely catchy pop songs in a more traditional format (verse chorus verse, consistent rhythm) Laura really stood it all on its head, speed it up, slow it down, bring in a middle 8 maybe that is some completely different style of music...all within a song. At the time it was rather revolutionary and it was widely adored by HER PEERS.

    Whether or not she sold a kajillion records is irrelevant, her influence is considerable not just for her own music or the cover versions, but in the inspiring of many many artists hence. She continues to inspire, and the many Laura threads on this forum are a small testament to enduring inspiration.

    A great artist.
     
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  23. Ginger Ale

    Ginger Ale Snackophile

    Location:
    New York
    Wish I could have listened.
     
  24. Siegmund

    Siegmund Vinyl Sceptic Thread Starter

    Location:
    Britain, Europe
    None of my business, but I can't help wondering what happened to Laura's son, and her ex-husband?
     
  25. Siegmund

    Siegmund Vinyl Sceptic Thread Starter

    Location:
    Britain, Europe
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