Love Is Gospel

Listening to Laura Nyro through the haze of post-adolescent trauma that not only included sex and drugs with a man who was the rebellious product of a German Catholic household and nonetheless noncomital regarding his own sexuality but not the sexual act itself. Nyro's music and passion seemed the perfect accompaniment to the post-Stonewall personal turmoil that many newly committed gay people experienced.



From Norman McKendrick in New Poets New Music, 1970:

"Laura Nyro sings from velvet shadows, even when she sings of joy and and the beat is insistently happy. She has something to say, something to attend to. She is a little girl dressed up in her mother's clothes and her language is poetry.

"... Her love comes in the end to the pain of incompatibles: god in a world; god in a man, god in all, in everything. But where is it found? On a trip. In love. In ups and downs. Can you hold it?

"... She gropes, really she claws at an answer. To find your love in god, to hide in a womb god, a mama god, is wrong, is to be bound, is to die, is to fail to mine the gold, to fail to realize and reveal the god in yourself, which is the only real god available.

"...We hear in her the cry of lovers, of poets, of saints since anyone started to care. She resisted, I think, but in the end is a woman.

"Much more could be said, but this is the core: the child in the woman needing, wanting, fearing, hiding, revealing, exulting, seeking, and always begging: love me. And she is perfectly correct: love is surely gospel."

McKendrick definitely gets to the nitty gritty of Nyro's art, but he misses some of the grown up aspects. It was written before Christmas & the Beads of Sweat the source for our current song of the week -- an album which showcased more creativity and more complex emotions.

Laura, like her contemporary Dusty, left us too soon, due to the ravages of cancer.

Part of her legacy is a son. Another part was that she, too, was a daughter of Sappho.