052: The Lovin’ Spoonful, ‘Girl, Beautiful Girl’

Girl, Beautiful Girl, The Lovin’ Spoonful

One weekend night in 1969 I was working the door at the Ludlow Garage, a rock emporium in Cincinnati, when a party of four hotshots approached. The cheesiest of them asked from behind his sunglasses, “This where Mountain is playing?”

And I answered, “Yeah”. That was me, always ready with a rapier comeback.

And he said, “We would like to bestow upon you the honor of inviting us in.”

“For free?”

“Of course.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because this,” indicating one member of the group, “is Mr. ***.”

Mr. *** was a young and upcoming director of films from the state of California on the west coast of the United States. I don’t know who the hotshot was trying to impress by dropping that name, because it wouldn’t be recognized by anyone in Cincinnati other than a bored, film-obsessed 21-year old follower of young and obscure directors. Coincidentally, the guy working the door at that moment was a bored, film-obsessed 21-year old follower of young and obscure directors.

So I said over hotshit’s shoulder, directly to Mr. ***, “Mr ***, it would be our pleasure to host you this evening.” (I’m not quite sure from whence I drew the authority to make that decision, but I did.)

Just how obscure was Mr ***? Well, he at that time had two Hollywood films released. The first began as his MA thesis at UCLA film school, but became an $800,000-budget Hollywood release. It was a coming-of-age comic-drama starring a bunch of B- and C-list actors – Peter Kastner (who?) as Bernard, The Innocent; Karen Black (Nicholson’s waitress girlfriend in Five Easy Pieces) as The Good Girl; Elizabeth Hartman as The Bad Girl;  Tony Bill as The Friend; and Method-school bluebloods Rip Torn (born Elmore Rual Torn, Jr., nicknamed “Rip” by his father) as The Father, and Geraldine Page (premier interpretress of Tennessee Williams’ heroines) as The Mother. Bernard’s film parents were married in real life as well (well, ‘real’ in Hollywoodian terms.) Their country estate was named Torn Page.

The story takes place at the boy’s place of employ, the labyrinth stacks of the NYC Public Library, which Bernard traverses on roller skates, shelving books and moaning about his lack of a sex life. His friend incites him to rebellion, drugs, and sex, the latter focused on Barbara Darling (Hartman).

But you have to remember that we’re talking 1966 here, and movies like that weren’t made. Establishment ‘youth’ films were still Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello Beach Blanket Bingos. That’s why Richard Lester’s Beatles Hard Day’s Night and his The Knack (and How to Get It) were so mind-blowing for us. Later, in 1967, the The Graduate used the Mrs Robinson soundtrack precisely and evocatively, but it was background music.

That’s why Mr ***’s You’re a Big Boy Now made such an impression on me, and on the other 2000 people who had seen it. It had the unique quality of taking the rock music soundtrack seriously. Written and performed by The Lovin’ Spoonful, the music actually served as a cinematic tool, organically integrated in the goings-on on screen (even more than in Hard Day’s Night.)

Apparently I wasn’t the only one impressed with the use of The Spoonful’s music in the film. The next year, Woody Allen hired them to provide the music to his film What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, in which he took a grade-Z Japanese spy movie and added his own soundtrack, which became the story of agent Phil Moskowitz’s deadly mission to secure the recipe for the world’s greatest egg salad.

You have to remember, this was 1966. The only American rock bands of significance were The Byrds from California, and The Lovin’ Spoonful from New York. By the time of You’re a Big Boy, The Spoonful already had under their collective belts “Do You Believe in Magic?,” “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice,” “Daydream,” “Summer in the City,” and “Nashville Cats“. Not bad, huh? And lots of their lesser-known songs are just as good.

But I’m not going to deal thoroughly with The Lovin’ Spoonful here, because I’m such a giant John Sebastian fan. He’ll get his own SoTW. Many of them, I hope, because so many of his songs are deeply engraved in my heart and soul and memory. Here we’ll just mention that the song has some pretty darn funky brass, and even strings, juxtaposed with the raucous rockous almost-song, with Sebastian’s knockout lyrics barely noticeable. (Check them out, down at the bottom here.) Sebastian’s lyrics here, as always, are witty, urbane, sly, goofy, charming, and full of surprising delights. The movie score also included the great ‘Darling, Be Home Soon’ (the video shows why Zal already had one foot outside the band) and the title song, later memorably rerecorded by Sebastian solo.

Anyway, after that movie Mr *** had gotten a hack job directing a real-budget Hollywood musical, ‘Finian’s Rainbow’, a rather embarrassing blurp in his filmography. And at the time he came to see Leslie West at The Garage, he had probably finished making his new film which had yet to be released, a way-before-its time road movie about a pregnant, angst-ridden housewife who just gets up and walks out, drives and drives, picks up along the way a hitchhiking former pro football player with mushed brains. They travel together, two lost souls, Shirley Knight and the young and unknown James Caan. But as I said, The Rain People had yet to show in Cincinnati, and my respect and admiration for Mr *** was based solely on what I had seen in You’re a Big Boy Now.

Meanwhile, back at the Garage, during a break, I went up to tell him that.

“Mr. ***,” I said, “I’m an admirer of yours.”

“Thank you,” he said. An auspicious beginning.

“I think that You’re a Big Boy Now is the first movie ever to really use rock music seriously.” He looked at me.

“Like in the first scene [and thank you so much to YouTube for enabling us to revisit it]. The gut-wrenchingly slow zoom in from the far side of the main reading room of the NY Public Library, so quiet you’re not sure the movie has really started until you hear a background cough, no movement, no noise, no activity other than the turning of pages. As still as a tomb. And then the camera ‘zooms’ (crawls, actually) into those big, staid double oak doors. Painfully slowly. And then, Boom! Zal’s slashing, grating guitar chords, as jarring as the opening chord of George’s in that Lester film, as the doors are thrown back, and Barbara Darling comes strutting in, all the movement and brashness and color and music in the world. I think that’s a really fine scene. Never seen anything like it. That’s the way to make a movie that rocks.”

And he looked at me, and said, “You from around here?”

And I said, “Yes.”

And he said, “Well, if you’re ever in California, come look me up.”

Three years later, Francis Ford Coppolla made The Godfather. And the year after that he produced George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which redefined the use of rock music in films.

But even then California was La-La Land for me. When Mr Coppolla was making those movies, I was already settled in Israel, with a wife, kid, mortgage and war on my head.

Well, you never can tell
But you’re looking so well
That I gotta stop and say “How do you do?”

I know it’s a long shot
But judging what she’s got
I’m hoping that my judgment is true

Girl, beautiful girl, can I look at your insides?
Girl, wrapped up in fur, I’m just mad for your outsides!

Tags: Film, Personal, Rock

033: Radka Toneff, ‘The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress’ (Jimmy Webb)

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Everybody goes for a love story. Okay, here’s one. I’m in love. Love at first sight.
Well, maybe not love. But real, true, deep infatuation that will last at least until I open my eyes.

The biggest problem right now is that I have a lot of trouble remembering her name. Radka Toneff. You have to admit, that’s objectively a hard name to remember, even if you’re in love with her. Just as lovers revel in reconstructing how they first met, I’m trying to remember how I stumbled on her. I guess I was looking at all the YouTube hits for ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most‘ or – hey, Jeff, the music?
Right.

Radka Toneff (1952-1982) was a Norwegian singer “of legendary stature”. Well, in knowledgeable jazz circles in Oslo, perhaps. For me she was new. But I’ve been listening to a lot of Scandinavian music over the last couple of years, and I’m working hard at cultivating that taste and broadening my knowledge.

I admit a certain bias towards Nordic singing. At its best, it’s flawless, perfect, precise, technically refined on a level we just don’t encounter in our more familiar neighborhoods. With male pianists, that can get pretty boring for me. But with female singers it can be intoxicating.

It all depends on the material. When my new love Radka (I need to practice using her name) hits on the right material–which she does sometimes, not too regularly–it can really be breathtaking.

For convenience’s sake, we’ll call Radka Toneff a jazz singer, though that’s not really accurate. She recorded a wide range of material – from rarified jazz to hackneyed pop, a pinch of Bulgarian folk (her father was a Bulgarian folk singer), with a little bit of soul thrown in, paying her Nordic dues to the mothers of her music.

If you did the math above, you got that she died at the age of 30. It’s usually called a suicide, but the fullest version I found (in English) says: “Her sudden death was described by newspapers as a suicide, but friends said that although she brought it on herself, it was an accident.”

A few weeks ago I wrote about Eva Cassidy, in Song of The Week 29. The similarities between Eva and Radka are rather uncanny. Eva died from cancer at 36, a restrained and tasteful singer of an unclassifiably wide range of material. If you remember Eva’s “Over the Rainbow“, especially as compared to the other versions we compared it to, it’s a model of good taste and control, of the tension created by strongly felt passion being expressed without histrionics—a fan dance of the heart.

Eva had no career whatsoever. Radka recorded 3 albums–”Angel Heart”, “Fairy Tales”, and the posthumously released “Live in Hamburg”. There are also 2 compilations of other cuts, and a lot of live videos in all kinds of settings–small combo, big band, orchestra, many with material not found on the CDs.

Radka’s material includes classic jazz. One of my favorites is her treatment of ‘My Funny Valentine‘. I have a lot of respect for that song, and I’ve heard it butchered and demeaned more often than I care to remember. Her version is heart-rending. (Ever wonder why singers always make the song mournful? The lyric is quite loving. Hmm.) There’s also ‘Nature Boy‘, sung pretty much perfectly, but a song I’ve never warmed up to; a Nina Simone; one by Kurt Weil and Maxwell Anderson!; two personal beatnik favorites of mine by Frances Landesman and Thomas Wolf, ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men‘ and ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most‘.

But there’s also a lot of ‘pop’ (ouch): Michael Franks, Kenny Loggins, an unfortunate Bob Dylan, 2 surprising Paul Simon selections (a lovely live ‘Something So Right‘ and the rightfully minor ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Day’), Elton John, Jerry Jeff Walker, our Song of The Week, Jimmy Webb’s ‘The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress’.

Her upbeat songs, and the ones that try to be black, are uniformly unsuccessful. Oh, but when she hits the bulls-eye, it’s right to the heart of your heart.

Jimmy Webb is a story to himself. Excepting Burt Bacharach, the only ‘non-performing’ (we wish) songwriter of our time to get his name above the title. He’s the auteur of hits such as ‘Up, Up and Away’ (5^th Dimension), Glenn Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Galveston’ and ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, and the Richard Harris epic ‘MacArthur Park’. That’s some very, very fine music there.

But there are a couple of problems with Mr Webb. First of all, he kept trying to become a singer, which only damaged his reputation. But more significantly, he was so talent-inebriated that he couldn’t walk a straight line, constantly teetering from the sublime to the grotesque, from the poignant to the maudlin. ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain’? C’mon. If that’s not bad enough, he (or someone) chose that as the name for one of the compilations of his greatest hits. Jimmy Webb, haunting at his best, embarrassing at his worst.

I don’t want to detract from those Glenn Campbell songs. Glenn Campbell is also a story in and of himself. (Why do people say I ramble?) He was a studio guitarist on Blonde on Blonde!!! He has the God-given voice of a cowboy angel, and the good sense and taste and intelligence of a Texas Longhorn steer.

Glenn Campbell had the initial hit of ‘The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress’. Judy Collins also got a hit out of it (you’re lucky I couldn’t find that on YouTube—it’s a pretty horrifying experience), as did Joe Cocker (well, Joe, you know). It got a lovely, respectful treatment by  Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny on “Beyond The Missouri Sky”. Versions such as Jimmy Webb’s own and that of Joan Baez, believe me, you don’t want to hear.

It’s not hard to get why so many people want to do this song. The title, by the way, is that of a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, “about a lunar colony‘s revolt against rule from Earth. The novel expresses and discusses libertarian ideals in a speculative context.” (Thanks, Mr Wikipedia). What that has to do with this lovely song is beyond me. Listen to the mean modulation at “I fell out of her eyes,” right at the shift in the lyric from the outer to the inner.

The one other version I do recommend you take a listen to is that of Linda Ronstadt. We Americans think of Linda as having a pure, gimmick-free voice. Well, listen to her version. Then listen to that of Radka Toneff. I’m sure you’ll hear how precise, fine, dignified, and moving a singer she is. And maybe you’ll see why I used to be in love with Linda, but now it’s Radka who holds my heart.

See her how she flies
Golden sails across the sky
Close enough to touch
But careful if you try
Though she looks as warm as gold
The moon’s a harsh mistress
The moon can be so cold

Once the sun did shine
Lord, it felt so fine
The moon a phantom rose
Through the mountains and the pines
And then the darkness fell
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
It’s so hard to love her well

I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I — I tripped and I missed my star
God, I fell and I fell alone, I fell alone
And the moon’s a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone

The moon’s a harsh mistress
She’s hard to call your own.

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029: Eva Cassidy, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’

045: Julie London, ‘Bye Bye, Blackbird’

080: Tim Ries w. Norah Jones, ‘Wild Horses’

Tags: Ballad of the Sad Young Men, Eva Cassidy, Glenn Campbell, Jimmy Webb, My Funny Valentine, Nature Boy, Nordic, Radka Toneff, Rock, Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress, Vocal

046: James Taylor, “Never Die Young”

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This is one of those cases where I didn’t find the song of the week – it found me.

By a certain confluence of happenstances, the four living subjects in the picture here have been in contact with each other this week, some of us for the first time in 40 years. Sweet Mitty, the Great Pyrenees, lives on in our hearts and in that Great Kennel in the Sky.

The photo was taken in the winter of 1969-70. Those weren’t ordinary times, by any criterion. Just after Woodstock and Mai Lai, just before the breakup of the Beatles and Kent State. Those glorious, heady days of the Woodstock Generation just before the floor fell out.

Four college buddies, waxing nostalgic, practicing ‘collective memory’– not in the Halbwachian sense of that which is “shared, passed on, and constructed by the group or modern society,” but in the sense of the four of us trying to piece together our fragmented recollection of the seminal events of our lives. “Hey, do you remember when Sandy took us to that hotel gig as pranksters, you rented an Indian chief’s costume…”; “Ah, it was Sandy who got us the gig? I always wondered how that happened, but it was you who was the Indian chief, I was an Indian with a dot. But do you remember what happened with you and the model who was getting her body painted?” “Oh, jeeeez…”

Some of us hadn’t spoken for 40 years, so there is some serious and uncomfortable catching up to do. How do you start talking to someone with whom you once shared so much, and now today–perhaps–so little? Or perhaps we’re still the same people we were back then, just playing out our lives along our disparate paths. One leads a celebrity-laden self-help foundation; one writes adventure novels; one took an expatriate refuge in religion; one is looking for a job. Roots and routes.

Those got-the-world-by-the-balls smiles not withstanding, not too long after that picture was taken, each of the four of us touched a very low place. To tell the truth, all five. I just learned that Mitty was traumatized by an intruding thief. Most of us reassembled the pieces, or reconstructed ourselves by inventing for ourselves replacement parts.

Which brings me to James Taylor, and our Song of The Week. James is half a year older than me, and at the time our bathtub picture was taken, he was in rehab for drug abuse and paralyzing angst. He recorded his first album for Apple, which brilliantly and harrowingly documented the deepest and darkest corners of his soul. And mine. But for our SoTW, we’re going to skip forward to 1988, 20 years on, for his look back at those days, and his own bathtub friends. The song is ‘Never Die Young’ from the 1988 album of the same name, but I find the arrangement there way too glitzy and glib. Here it is in the 2007 “One Man Band” version.

We were indeed ring-around-the-rosy as children, and circles around the sun in the summer of Woodstock. Have we given up? Have we slowed down? Well, I’m sure there’s a substantively different answer for each of the four of us.

There’s a statement by Hank Thoreau (if my memory serves me well–a tenuous postulate at best–the redhead with the beard in the black and white photo read him religiously), part of which is famous: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Well, James and Hank, all four of us inside the tub are still kicking. “With the song still in us”? Well that’s ambiguous. Three of us have written books, so I guess you can’t say we haven’t achieved self-expression on some level. I won’t speak for the others, but I like to think of my life as one of ‘quiet inspiration’. For me, very much informed by the music from The Day. It’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t from that generation just how integral a role the music played in our lives. How each Dylan and Beatles album charted new courses for our minds and spirits. ‘The song’, in that sense, remains in me, and I assume in my four rub-a-dub hoodlum friends.

“Never Die Young”, for me, is the multifocal prism through which I squint at that past. In this live version, James himself says he has no idea what the song means exactly. I think I do. It contains all the love and pain and hopes and disappointments and optimism and disillusionment that our lives have traversed. In that, I suppose, we’re like all golden boys grown old. But we were fortunate enough to be children of a very special time. As always, James puts it best:

But our golden ones sail on, sail on
To another land beneath another sky

We were ring-around-the-rosy children
They were circles around the sun
Never give up, never slow down
Never grow old, never ever die young

Synchronized with the rising moon
Even with the evening star
They were true love written in stone
They were never alone, they were never that far apart

And we who couldn’t bear to believe they might make it
We got to close our eyes
Cut up our losses into doable doses
Ration our tears and sighs

You could see them on the street on a Saturday night
Everyone used to run them down
They’re a little too sweet, they’re a little too tight
Not enough tough for this town

We couldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole
No, it didn’t seem to rattle at all
They were glued together body and soul
That much more with their backs up against the wall

Oh, hold them up, hold them up
Never do let them fall
Prey to the dust and the rust and the ruin
That names us and claims us and shames us all

I guess it had to happen someday soon
Wasn’t nothing to hold them down
They would rise from among us like a big baloon
Take the sky, forsake the ground

Oh, yes, other hearts were broken
Yeah, other dreams ran dry
But our golden ones sail on, sail on
To another land beneath another sky

Tags: Personal, Rock

036: Laura Nyro, ‘Sweet Blindness’ (“Eli & the 13th Confession”)

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I had an epiphanous listening experience today, of the type that make all that training and preparation and drudgework worthwhile.

I had a playlist for the day of things I wanted to get through: Don Friedman (a fine Bill Evans-styled pianist), the 5 CDs I own, because he’s coming to town next week, and I’m planning on seeing him; a new one by Liz Story, a youngish Californian Bill Evans-styled pianist who impresses me greatly every time I listen to her; and ‘At Last’, recorded in 1959 by cool bop clarinetist Tony Scott, backed by the very young, um, Bill Evans himself. Now, it’s true I start my listening most days with Bill Evans and 2 cups of brewed coffee, to ease my way into the real world. But by 9:30 I’m usually awake enough that the grey matter is beginning to stir, and I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that I’m going to have to activate it at some point. That’s when I put on something a bit spicier than Bill Evans. Pick up the tempo. Add a saxophone or a singer.

But today Messrs Friedman and Evans and Ms Story held me in this very elegant, very gentle groove till way into the afternoon. So by about 4 o’clock I was ready to rip the roof off. And I’d been listening to new music, so it was time to allow myself my daily portion of the familiar. If I ever have rocking hours, it’s those.

And what did our fancy fall upon? One of our 10 Desert Island Rock Albums. Now, that’s a special occasion because, believe me, folks, no balanced person walks around listening to his DIRAs regularly. You gotta save them for the DI, right? You don’t want to wear them out. But the catch is how did they become DIRAs? Because you’ve known them and loved them and listened to them so hard and for so long that they’re often consigned to the same box in the back of the attic of your mind as the security blanket you slept with until you were six. Or fourteen.

So it’s 4:30, and we’re on the treadmill at the gym, and thank heavens there’s no one there and I’ve put MTV on mute, plugged into my Zen Creative, and–whoosh, my old aural lover, Laura Nyro’s “Eli and the 13^th Confession”.

I had to pick one song to present you from this almost uniformly sublime album, no easy choice for me. So we went for one that’s fairly well known, “Sweet Blindness“, a paean to getting drunk on wine. But it just as well could have been ‘Luckie‘ or ‘Lu‘ or ‘Eli’s Coming’ or ‘Timer‘ or ‘Stoned Soul Picnic‘ or ‘Emmie‘ or ‘The Confession’.

How much do I love Laura Nyro? Well, enough that at the time my friend Mike and I intended to drive from Ohio to NYC to tell her how just much we loved her. (The pilgrimage fell through when Maybelline, my 1962 Triumph Herald, broke an axle.) She accompanied me through the darkest night of my life. And I’ve been listening to her for, well, 42 years now, and my admiration and enjoyment haven’t diminished a whit.

A lot of people don’t love Laura Nyro (pronounced ‘nero’). She was booed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. She was affected, eccentric, at times self-indulgent and annoying. Her voice could put a banshee to shame.

But she also wrote a more than respectable list of hits embedded in the public’s ear: The 5th Dimension’s “Blowing Away”, “Wedding Bell Blues”, “Stoned Soul Picnic”, “Sweet Blindness”, “Save The Country” and “Black Patch”; Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul & Mary’s “And When I Die”; Three Dog Night’s “Eli’s Coming”; and Barbra Streisand with “Stoney End”, “Time and Love”, and “Hands off the Man (Flim Flam Man)”.

But of course that’s not the music I have cared about so deeply and so long.

She was born Laura Nigro in 1947 to an Italian musician father and a Jewish mother. Grew up in NYC, listening to ’50’s and ‘60’s girl groups, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions, Mary Wells, Dusty Springfield, and the early Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs of Dionne Warwick, Leontyne Price, Ravel, Debussy and Persicetti, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Beatles. Laura always “adored” the music of Van Morrison.

Her writing is a unique blend of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, show tunes and rock.

Her first album (1967) included a few enduring gems despite a disastrous recording session: the divine, ebullient “Wedding Bell Blues“, the prescient “And When I Die“. She was considering an offer to become lead singer for Blood, Sweat and Tears after Al Kooper split, but was dissuaded by her new manager and close partner David Geffen.

“Eli & the 13^th Confession” was released Feb 15, 1968. It was her second album, it had a perfumed lyric sheet insert (at a time when lyrics were not yet being printed), and it made her a cult heroine upon its release. That’s no small achievement, considering that at that time it was competing for attention with The White Album, Beggar’s Banquet, Astral Weeks (in my mind, always Eli’s soul brother), Music from Big Pink, Bookends, Notorious Byrd Brothers, Cheap Thrills, Child is Father to the Man. Pretty heady company, huh? And it takes a back seat to not one of them.

Then the fine but less-than-divine follow-ups “New York Tendaberry” and “Christmas and the Beads of Sweat.” Then in 1971 a very funky album of covers with Labelle, “Gonna Take a Miracle”. Then she married a carpenter and retired from the music business at the age of 24. Then in 1976 she got a divorce and made her first of several comebacks, accompanied by a handful of lackluster albums over the next 20 years. Then in 1977 she began a life-long relationship with painter Maria Desiderio. Then she had a kid. Laura Nyro died at 49 in 1997 of ovarian cancer.

During these last 20 years, she wrote and sang songs about her pregnancy, animal rights, the unjust relocation of the Navajo people, and her menstruation cycle – you don’t believe me? “The descent of Luna Rosé (dedicated to my period)” from her 1993 CD “walk the dog & light the light”.  But that doesn’t diminish what she did in 1968.

Joni Mitchell owes her a great debt musically. The influence on Rickie Lee Jones can’t be overstated. She’s been praised most highly, and her impact acknowledged by the likes of Elvis Costello, Elton John and Bob Dylan (who reportedly went up to her at a party and said “I love your chords”). Alvin Ailey choreographed 5 dances to her music.

In recent years, Laura has been widely promoted as a lesbian voice. Well, that’s fine, I suppose. I do think that interpreting a song such as ‘Emmie’ (‘You were my friend, and I loved you’ as a Sapphic statement is creatively rewriting history. In any case, I’m sure not going to get passionate about any music or musician because of his/her/its sexual predilections.

So why do I have this intimate, passionate relationship with “Eli & the 13^th Confession”? It’s a pageant of bright lights and fierce emotions. It’s gospel and doo-wop and a spiritual carpet ride through sex, love, the elation and deflation of relationships, drugs, God, the devil. The entire gallery of experiences of an eccentric, passionate, spiritual, loving person. She embraces her lover like a god, her God like a lover. It’s a trip.

Her words: There’s an avenue of Devil who believe in stone, Walking on God’s good side. A little magic, a little kindness. God is a jigsaw timer. Time and wine, red yellow honey sassafras and moonshine. The natural snow, the unstudied sea, a cameo. Super ride inside my lovething.

Catch the lyric—insisting that she “Ain’t gonna tell you what I’ve been drinking”, and then she does just that: “Wine of wonder”. Listen to the ebullient vocals, lead and backing. Laura’s wonderful blue-eyed soul piano. The terrific, brash, brassy New York studio musicianship. The shifting tempos (check the humor and funk in the ritardando when she segues from the intro into the opening lyric, and then shifts back a tempo in the refrain.

Oh, Jeff, shaddup already and let them enjoy this great, glorious music.

Let’s go down by the grapevine, drink my Daddy’s wine, get happy.

Down by the grapevine, drink my daddy’s wine, get happy, happy.

Oh, sweet blindness, a little magic, a little kindness. Oh, sweet blindness, all over me.

Four leaves on a clover, I’m just a bit of a shade hung over.

Come on baby, do a slow float, you’re a good looking riverboat

And ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me?

Let’s go down by the grapevine, drink my Daddy’s wine, good morning.

Down by the grapevine, drink my Daddy’s wine, good morning, morning.

Oh, sweet blindness, a little magic, a little kindness. Oh, sweet blindness, all over me.

Please don’t tell my mother, I’m a saloon and a moonshine lover.

Come on baby, do a slow float you’re a good looking riverboat

And ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me?

Don’t ask me cause I ain’t gonna tell you what I’ve been drinking,

Ain’t gonna tell you what I’ve been drinking, ain’t gonna tell you what I’ve been drinking–

Wine of wonder, wonder, (by the way).

Oh, sweet blindness, a little magic, a little kindness. Oh, sweet blindness, all over me.

Don’t let daddy hear it, he don’t believe in the gin mill spirit.

Don’t let daddy hear it, he don’t believe in the gin mill spirit.

Come on baby, do a slow float you’re a good looking riverboat

and ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me?

Now ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me?

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Tags: Eli & the 13th Confession, Laura Nyro, Rock, Sweet Blindness