Does Anyone Remember Laura Nyro?

I
t happened at 888 Eighth Avenue at 8 p.m. — the kind of coincidence you can’t make up. It was late 1967, and Charlie Calello had just walked into a tiny New York studio apartment with a bed, a kitchenette, and an upright piano packed into one room. Candles were lit everywhere, casting a cozy glow over it all.

The 29-year-old producer and arranger was greeted by a young David Geffen, who ushered him inside. Geffen then turned to the apartment’s resident, a songwriter from the Bronx. “He says, ‘Laura, play him the record,’” Calello recalls. “No smiles, just all business.” Sitting on the piano bench was a 20-year-old woman with dark hair and dark eyes that glistened in the candlelight. She began to play the songs she’d written for her next album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which she had yet to record. She didn’t stop until she had performed all 13 tracks. “I had tears in my eyes,” Calello says. “I had never heard anything like this in my life.” 

Everyone remembers the exact moment they first heard Laura Nyro. Growing up on Miami Beach, hit songwriter Desmond Child was at the home of his friend Lisa Wexler, daughter of famed producer Jerry Wexler, when she played him Nyro’s 1967 debut, More Than a New Discovery. “It awakened me as a human being,” Child says. “Suddenly I was somebody, something. She was magical, and I knew there and then that the effect she had on me was what I wanted to do with my life.” 

Comedian Sandra Bernhard was working on a kibbutz in Israel in 1973 when her friend Emily turned her onto Eli. “The rawness and street savvy was not a normal thing for a woman of that age and that generation,” Bernard says. “She was gritty — a rose in Spanish Harlem. And culturally, there was such a mix. Was she Jewish? Was she Italian? You didn’t really know. And that added to the mystery.” 

Todd Rundgren was a member of the rock band the Nazz when his manager snagged him an early copy of Eli before its release in March 1968. “I was transported to this whole other place,” he says. “It was such a complete vision, and so completely different from everything else that was out then. It was a Beatles moment for me. Suddenly, I had to listen to the record over and over and over again.”

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Nyro was a child prodigy who immersed herself in jazz, classical, soul, R&B, and Broadway musicals, and spent her high school years singing doo-wop with Puerto Rican teens in subway stations and on street corners. That very New York upbringing is reflected in her first four albums, all highly influential: 1967’s More Than a New Discovery, 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, 1969’s New York Tendaberry, and 1970’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. The albums showcased her extraordinary, three-octave mezzo soprano voice, and wild, often unexpected, tempo changes. 

If you listen to any of them, you might expect that this talent would put Nyro alongside superstar Seventies singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Carole King, whose work has endured through generations. But she never got there. Instead, her songs were made famous by others, including Barbra Streisand, the 5th Dimension, Three Dog Night, and Blood, Sweat & Tears. In November 1969, three different Nyro covers landed in the Top 10. According to Alice Cooper, Nyro is more like a female Burt Bacharach. “Many people had hits with her songs,” he tells me. “But her versions were always better.”

Geffen signed Nyro as one of his first management clients, but they had a falling out in 1971, which he describes as the betrayal of his life. “I had devoted myself to her,” he tells Rolling Stone. “And by the way, after she broke up with me, she never had another success in her life.” That’s only a slight exaggeration. Nyro briefly retired later that decade, then continued to make albums through the early Nineties. She died in 1997 at age 49 from ovarian cancer — the same disease her mother died from, at the exact same age. 

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Despite her posthumous induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, Nyro is still severely underappreciated. “One thing that I’ve always wished would happen would be that younger generations would know about [her],” says her brother, Jan. “It’s a very steep drop-off. You have boomers, and then it’s almost nobody underneath that.” But we’re on the cusp of a possible renaissance, thanks to recent reissues, an Elton John/Brandi Carlile tribute song, and a new documentary that is currently in the works. 

After that night at Nyro’s midtown apartment, Calello got the gig, and he produced Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. He spent so much money on it that Columbia fired him, but he didn’t care. “When I walked out of Columbia Records, I said to myself, ‘I made history,’” he says. “I knew I would never, ever, ever come close to making another record like that. We caught lightning in a bottle.”

“LAURA WAS WEIRD,” says her friend Janis Ian, a statement that echoes the nearly 25 participants I interviewed for this story. Nyro was known — and beloved — for her quirks. Friends recall that she preferred to travel around the city by horse-drawn carriage, and that in one of her apartments, she turned her hallway into a bamboo path. And her distinctive, at times gaudy fashion sense is still a frequent topic, all these years later. 

“When I think of Laura, I think of a long, black, figure-hugging dress, ample hips, and a gash of lipstick,” Ian says. (The lipstick was sometimes purple, with Christmas ornaments for earrings, and plaster-of-paris fruits sewn onto her dresses.) “It didn’t tally with the way other people dressed or wore makeup,” Ian adds. “She was really being herself — her true self.” 

Nyro’s sense of style drove Geffen mad. “She had horrible taste,” he told Michele Kort in her fantastic, densely detailed 2002 Nyro biography, Soul Picnic. Once, he even sent Nyro home from the studio after she showed up in a gown that was four sizes too small. “She said to me, ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to get this,’” he recalled in the biography. “‘When I looked in the mirror this morning, I thought I looked great, or I wouldn’t have come out.’” 

In a 1970 interview for Life, titled “The Funky Madonna of New York Soul,” Nyro took the reporter, Maggie Paley, to a Los Angeles boutique before her show at the Troubadour. She designed “five or six dresses for herself by telling the salespeople what she wanted while they sketched,” then paired the outfits with cheap silver platform shoes with rhinestone clips attached. “I’ve always had a flair,” Nyro told Paley. “But my flair is only a part of me. People who just look at my flair are looking at me in a superficial way.”

Rundgren remembers meeting her in person for the first time at her apartment, right after Eli was released. “She had very long hair, very dark eyebrows, and very long fingernails — so long, they curled over,” he says. “She made tuna fish casserole, and she played the piano and sang oldies. I was flabbergasted.” Nyro called two weeks later to ask him to be her bandleader, but the Nazz had just gotten signed. “It was such a torturous thing for me,” he says. “If there was another thing that I would’ve done in the entire world, it would’ve been her bandleader.”

Ian, a prodigious New York songwriter herself, was introduced to Nyro through Geffen in 1968. She invited Nyro over for dinner that September, at the Upper West Side apartment she was renting. But Ian was puzzled when Nyro arrived for their spaghetti dinner with a portable television set in hand. “She explained that her close friend Peggy Lipton was in this new show called The Mod Squad,” she says. “It was premiering that night, and she didn’t want to miss it. What was odd was that Laura would assume that people didn’t have TVs.”

Ian and Nyro had both attended the city’s prestigious High School of Music & Art, but they didn’t cross paths there. (Ian, who had written “Society’s Child,” a controversial hit about an interracial romance, at age 13, only spent a year there before she says she was asked to leave.) “It’s funny, because now they have a plaque of me, and it says, ‘This could be you one day,’ with a gold record. And I’ve written them twice saying, ‘Take that goddamn thing down,’” Ian says. “I hated it, and I know Laura was not fond of it.”

Nyro barely graduated from Music & Art, but she never required musical training anyway. “She had this natural, very powerful gift that was percolating inside of her,” her brother says. “Really like a child prodigy in a way.” She was born Laura Nigro on Oct. 18, 1947, named after Otto Preminger’s 1944 film Laura. Her father Lou was a half-Italian, half-Russian Jewish trumpet player and piano tuner, while her mother, Gilda, was a Russian Jewish bookkeeper. 

Music permeated the family’s Bronx apartment, from Lou’s trumpet practice to his and Gilda’s record collection, which included jazz, opera, show tunes, and classical LPs. Jan, three years younger than Nyro, shared a room with his sister. “We always had a ton of rock & roll 45s all over the floor, and a little record player we’d play them on,” he says. “Lots of doo-wop, early girl groups, and Elvis and the Everly Brothers. And all of that music — between my parents and our stuff — found its way into Laura’s musical life. Her writing is such a unique fusion of all of that.”

The siblings both took lessons on an old Steinway grand piano in the living room, but they didn’t stick for Nyro. “She only lasted about a year,” says her brother, who is now a musician and educator. “I think her piano teacher yelled at her or something. I remember she told my parents, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ She continued, just not schooled.”

Nyro was an intensely introspective kid, later describing herself in an album bio as “a very sad little girl. Sometimes I had good times…. I was always in a dream world… I guess I still am.” She was also hungry for experience to better serve her songs, exclaiming to her Aunt Esther, “I’m 14 years old, and nothing has happened to me yet!”

That changed in the summer of 1964. During one of her family’s annual stays in the Catskills, Nyro fully realized her gift. The siblings were participating in the Color War, an end-of-summer competition at their camp, and a teenage Nyro was tasked with coming up with songs for the green team, which she named the Green Utopians. “It was Color War, so the songs were about how great your team was and how you were going to kick the other team’s butt,” her brother says. “Just pretty lighthearted stuff. But she wrote these incredible songs that had harmonies, and she conducted us. And we completely wiped out the other team.”

The Green Utopians lost the Color War — the opposing team were better athletes — but it didn’t matter. “That was an epiphany of her musical power,” her brother says. “It was instrumental in her realizing that she had this thing that had to come out. When we got back to the Bronx after that, she started to write in earnest.”

After graduating high school, Nyro made the decision not to go to college, and began meeting with publishers. But not before making one pivotal change. “The last name ‘Nigro’ was mispronounced throughout our lives,” Jan says. His sister had a list of possible stage names, but one stood out, and Laura Nyro was born.

SEVERAL MAGICAL MOMENTS came out of Nyro’s father’s job as a piano tuner. Desmond Child — who is such a Nyro superfan that he once stood outside her apartment and waited two hours for her to emerge, and later named his son Nyro — hired Lou to tune his piano in college, “just so we could get Laura Nyro stories out of him.” Lou’s work is also how, at age 18, in the summer of 1966, Nyro was discovered.

When he arrived at the office of Artie Mogull — an aptly named record executive who had signed Bob Dylan to his first publishing contract with M. Witmark & Sons a few years earlier — the piano tuner insisted on introducing Mogull to his daughter. Though Mogull later told Kort that he thought Nyro was “a rather unattractive girl,” he was stunned by her songs, thought she could be a female Dylan, and immediately locked her into a recording, management, and publishing deal. 

Nyro’s debut, More Than a New Discovery, arrived in February 1967. Released on Verve Folkways, it can be best described as an introduction to her incredible talent, yet one that didn’t showcase it well. Nyro doesn’t play piano on it (the first and only time that happened), and, in an effort to make her more radio-friendly, her compositions were restructured and polished. You can hear the stark contrast between the official versions and her magnificent demos on her audition tape, which Omnivore Recordings released in 2021 under the title Go Find the Moon.

More Than a New Discovery features “And When I Die” — one of Nyro’s earliest songs, later covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, and becoming a hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1969 — and “Stoney End,” which Barbra Streisand took to the charts in 1970. But it’s best remembered for “Wedding Bell Blues,” a charming cut about a woman pleading with her boyfriend, Bill, to propose.

The promotion for the single, which was a regional hit in the West Coast, didn’t quite reflect Nyro’s bohemian vibe. The “Wedding Bell Blues” poster featured her looking dismayed in a wedding dress, bouquet in hand, with the words “I DON’T” written across. “Not every girl gets her man to say ‘I do,’” the poster read. “But every once in a while you hear a young girl who sings and writes songs with a groovy conviction.” 

At the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, she had the impossible task of sharing the stage with heavyweights like the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and others. There was Nyro, performing in a black gown with a single sleeve and red fingernails, backed by her band and two members of the R&B vocal trio the Hi Fashions, who sang on her debut. The performance — Nyro’s biggest to date — looked like a slick New York City lounge act smack in the middle of the Summer of Love. Songs like “Wedding Bell Blues” sounded painfully dated to a sea of hippies who just wanted to get high and hear “White Rabbit.” 

There were other artists at Monterey who were also somewhat out of place, like Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar, but they matched with the crowd better than Nyro did. “She was the opposite of all of it,” says longtime fan Rickie Lee Jones. “And what courage it took. That’s who she wanted to be onstage. That was elegant and feminine to her.”

“She was somehow not right for the festival,” the Mamas and Papas’ Michelle Phillips wrote in her 1986 memoir, California Dreamin.’ “She didn’t do well, and she knew it. I really felt for her as she came offstage, so I put her in a limo and lit her a huge joint and opened a beer and drove around for about thirty minutes comforting her.” 

Nyro requested her performance not be included in D. A. Pennebaker’s film of the concert, and a rumor that she got booed at Monterey Pop circulated for decades. That was until 1997, when Pennebaker digitized the tape for the movie’s 30th anniversary,  debunking the myth that there was ever any booing. In fact, at the end of the Eli track “Poverty Train,” one audience member even shouts the word “beautiful” several times. “It’s strange karma to go all those years without that being known,” her brother says. “But better late than never.”

A few days after the festival, Nyro was with the Hi Fashions in her San Francisco hotel room when she decided to re-do her set in private. In attendance was music journalist Ellen Sander, who had befriended Nyro back in New York. “We were eating Chinese food and we were talking about the festival, and she was tired of wondering if everything was going to be OK about that or not,” Sander recalls. “And she just said to her backup singers, ‘Let’s do our set now.’ They opened up these doors out onto a French balcony. Laura loved gestures. And they began to sing a capella, and they were rocking pretty hard. It was just wonderful. One of the best performances I’ve ever heard.”

Unbeknownst to Nyro, the 5th Dimension were on the floor above them. “I said, ‘Y’all want to cut out all that racket downstairs?’” Billy Davis Jr. tells Rolling Stone. “They lean their heads over, and come to find out it was Laura Nyro.”

Geffen wasn’t at Monterey Pop, but shortly after the festival, his client Steve Binder, a director and producer, introduced him to More Than a New Discovery. “I was blown away by the record,” he says. “And then I looked her up, got together with her, and started representing her.” They instantly formed a bond, and Geffen made it his mission to save Nyro’s career — and make her the biggest star in the world.

By all accounts, Nyro and Geffen never dated, but they impacted each other’s lives so significantly that they’re often spoken about like exes. “She was his first big love, his first huge ongoing passion,” Ian says. “There are marriages in the music business — Grossman and Dylan, Epstein and the Beatles, and I would say Geffen and Nyro — that are just astonishing. And when they end, they always end badly. I’ve never heard of one ending well. But when it works, it’s brilliant.” 

First on Geffen’s to-do list: get Nyro out of her contracts with Artie Mogull and his partners, which was cleverly done through a loophole. Then she auditioned at Columbia Records, home to Dylan, Streisand, and Simon & Garfunkel. She met with executive Clive Davis at the label’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan, and requested all the lights be turned off, save for the nearby glow of the television screen. Davis signed her right away.

Geffen made sure Nyro’s contract gave her full artistic control, and formed a publishing company with her. They called it Tuna Fish Music, alluding to one of Nyro’s favorite foods. (Her friends can recite her tuna salad recipe by heart: Bumble Bee white meat, Hellmann’s mayo, cream cheese, red onion, and a dash of lemon and pepper.)

“The deal that David negotiated for her publishing was extraordinary,” says Ian. “He was somebody who rabidly fought for her rights as an artist. I mean, rabidly. David would go up against the universe for Laura to be allowed her vision.”

According to Ian, every musician in New York bought three albums in 1968: Dr. John’s Gris-Gris, the Band’s Music From Big Pink, and Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. “You basically have Christ singing doo-wop on a street corner,” she says. “That album is severely unrecognized. Dr. John and Robbie Robertson got all these accolades, but Eli is the late-to-the-party stepchild. It’s not a surprise. God forbid women be recognized for orchestration or arranging.”

Calello remembers recording Eli as if it happened yesterday. “People who play me records I did in the Sixties, I can’t remember who the artist was,” the producer, 87, says on a Zoom call from his home in Florida. “But with Laura, every detail stuck with me.”

Working with her at Columbia’s studios in early 1968, Calello tried to make Eli sound almost exactly like the intimate performance he first heard that evening in Nyro’s apartment. “My contribution to making the Laura Nyro record was to stay out of her way,” he says. 

Unlike on her debut, Nyro got to play her instrument this time, much to her delight. As Calello recalls, “She said, ‘So I could play piano?’ I said, ‘Of course you can play piano. Why?’ She said, ‘Because they didn’t let me play piano on my first record.’ I said, ‘That’s what was wrong with the record. They took you out of the equation.’”

Letting Nyro be Nyro also led to some shenanigans in the studio, like the time she rolled two joints, wrapped them together, and got stoned with her band. Calello, who didn’t partake, recalls Nyro becoming increasingly giddy, staring at the piano keys. “Here we are at CBS,” he says. “You’re talking about a public company, an icon. And the engineers were union guys with shirts and ties. They don’t know how to react to this. And David walks in. He hits the roof. ‘Charlie! You can’t stop this?’”

Released on March 13, 1968, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is often regarded as Nyro’s masterpiece. “I wasn’t at Monterey,” Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone‘s review later that year. “Consequently, I don’t really know what Laura Nyro did there that turned so many people off. She must have done something, because the word was so thick that it convinced me that there wasn’t any point bothering with her first album. It took a lunatic friend of mine, barging into my apartment a couple of weeks ago, frothing at the mouth about the record, to get me to listen to it seriously. All I can say is I’m glad he did.”

Alice Cooper says Eli is his favorite album of all time. With her long black gowns and dark lipstick, he says, her image was “very goth.” The two met in Los Angeles in the late Seventies, backstage after one of Nyro’s shows. “I brought her a rose,” the shock-rock godfather says. “At that time, I was on the cover of every magazine, so she knew about me. She was stunned. She was going, ‘You listen to my music?’ I went, ‘I devour your music.’” 

BY THE FALL OF 1968, Nyro had left her Eighth Avenue studio for a 17th-floor penthouse on West 79th Street. It had a terrace with a black water tower, and a view that overlooked the Upper West Side, an area she nicknamed “uptown downtown.” She did an interview with The New York Times at the penthouse, where she told writer William Kloman her “groovy” plan to secretly paint all the water towers in the city different colors and patterns (hers, she said, would be red). She served her usual tuna fish, as well as Sara Lee blueberry cheesecake, chocolate ice cream cones, and, according to the Times story, canned elephant meat, which she ended up feeding to her German Shephard, Beautybelle.

The Times gave that story the headline “Laura Nyro: She’s the Hippest — and Maybe the Hottest?” She was at the height of her career. Eli was far from a hit, barely making a dent in the Billboard 200, but artists were covering her songs and racking up hits of their own — especially the 5th Dimension, a vocal group who were still looking for an identity of their own after an early hit cover of the Mamas and the Papas’ “Go Where You Wanna Go.”

Geffen brought “Stoned Soul Picnic” to the group, and they were floored. “We said, ‘Oh, my God, this is really good,” says the 5th Dimension’s Davis Jr. “Laura’s writing had a lot of R&B flavor to it, and that’s what we were looking for, because we needed to cross over to our own folks.” 

The 5th Dimension would go on to cover several Nyro songs, including “Wedding Bell Blues” — a Number One hit that later appeared in 1991’s My Girl — and “Sweet Blindness,” which they performed with Frank Sinatra on his 1968 television special. “One thing that’s so beautiful is that whenever we go out to perform, people are always looking forward to us doing her music,” Marilyn McCoo says. Adds Davis Jr.: “We can’t get offstage without doing [‘Wedding Bell Blues’]. There’s still a lot of Bills out there.”

Blood, Sweat & Tears gained a massive hit around the same time with Nyro’s “And When I Die,” but Nyro’s relationship with the jazz-rock band goes much deeper than that. When they needed a new lead singer in 1968, following the departure of co-founder Al Kooper, Nyro was their first choice. They arranged a rehearsal at the Café Au Go Go, and kicked off with “Eli’s Coming.” As drummer Bobby Colomby recalls, “She sits at the piano — ‘Eli…’ — and we start playing. It’s magic. It is ridiculously great…. David and I were talking and he’s saying to me, ‘It’s going to be the biggest thing of all time.’” 

But Nyro, Sweat & Tears was not to be: “The next day Laura calls me and says, ‘I don’t think it’s going to work,’” Colomby continues. “‘What are you talking about?’ She goes, ‘Well, David doesn’t think that you guys are going to make it.’”

Nyro went on to date the band’s bassist, Jim Fielder, who briefly moved into her Upper West Side penthouse (she was also romantically linked around this time to Jackson Browne, as well as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young drummer Dallas Taylor). They’d take Beautybelle for walks around the city, sleep in and get stoned, and eat her favorite meal. “She’d always have a whole tray of tuna fish sandwiches ready whenever I came up there,” Fielder says. “She was an easy person to spend time with. I always loved her, and I still listen to her songs and get a real queasy feeling in my stomach. I mean, gosh, I was there for all that.” 

Calello briefly began production on Nyro’s next album, New York Tendaberry, but backed out after seeing the state of the songs, and feeling that Nyro was listening to too many people. “I saw the whisperers gathering around her and I saw that what she was going to do would be OK, but it wasn’t going to be Eli,” he said. “I just said to David, ‘I can’t do this.’” Instead, Nyro and Geffen enlisted producer and engineer Roy Halee, who was working on Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water at the same time. 

The recording process was strenuous and stretched on for months, as Nyro was meticulous with her vision. In the Life interview, she’s seen standing in the studio in a black jumpsuit and headphones, reading from a notepad titled “Very Important Plans.” Since Nyro had a form of synesthesia — a neurological condition in which sound elicits an experience of color — she’d command the musicians to add a little more blue here, a little yellow there. “I have my own language,” she told the magazine.

Before Calello left the project, Ian remembers him inviting her to come down to the studio. “When I walked in, there were all these musicians sitting around, and Charlie was literally carrying a screaming Laura out of the studio over his shoulder,” Ian says. “I asked her what the problem was, and it was essentially that the musicians persisted in not understanding what she wanted the feel of this song to be. I asked her to explain it to me, and she said that she wanted it purple.” 

Joni Mitchell, who has spoken highly of Nyro’s influence many times, also has synesthesia. “It used to be embarrassing to myself and to Laura Nyro in particular to play with technical musicians in the early days,” she said in 1988. “It would embarrass us that we were lacking in a knowledgeable way, and that we would give instructions to players in terms of metaphors.”

Still, the sessions had their moments, like when Nyro’s hero Miles Davis paid a visit. He almost added a trumpet solo to one track, but changed his mind after hearing it. “I can’t play on this,” he said. “You did it already.” (He’d later open for her at the Fillmore East in the summer of 1970.) 

Nyro knew her unwillingness to compromise had paid off, and that she had another masterpiece on her hands. “I’ve always had my own…madness…somewhere in my mind, and people were always frightened to let me try things,” she told Life. “With this album, at the beginning nobody knew what I was doing. Nobody. I knew what I was doing.”

 She went on to point out the blatant sexism in the music industry: “It’s usually men that you associate with hard work, with really crushing things. But women have a great capacity for things … certainly women have a great capacity for pain and if doing what I do is a painful process, a woman can take it.” 

New York Tendaberry arrived in September 1969, the same month as Abbey Road and the Band’s self-titled. It became Nyro’s highest-charting record, peaking at Number 32. With the exception of the jovial “Save the Country,” most of songs on the record — the gorgeous, almost vampiric “You Don’t Love Me When I Cry,” the highlight “Captain for Dark Mornings” — are chilling and dark, the perfect companion for a snowy evening in the city. 

“It had what I needed, the strains and colors of music that moved me as a kid,” says Rickie Lee Jones. “I’d never heard anything like it.”

In the October 1968 New York Times interview, Kloman wrote that Monterey affected Nyro so strongly that she had “not been willing to perform publicly since.” But that was about to change. She returned to the road while making Tendaberry, and performed two sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall over Thanksgiving weekend in 1969. “In this town, when you open your windows, it doesn’t smell like flowers,” she told the crowd. “It smells like … pizza.”

Fans were ecstatic over the shows, giving ovation after ovation, but critics were less than kind. Writing for Rolling Stone, critic Vince Aletti noted that Nyro was “not just another chick singer but a woman of some complexity.” And yet his description of her was devoid of any complexity at all, reducing her to her looks. “With her black hair falling over her plump white shoulders, she looked like an Italian housewife-whore or real life lady madonna,” he wrote. 

Janis Joplin, another artist on Columbia, reportedly didn’t take a liking to Nyro, either. In his memoir, Davis remembers bringing Nyro backstage at one of Joplin’s concerts so the two could meet, but Joplin reacted coldly, swigging sips from her bottle of Southern Comfort. “I can see I’m not the number-one female in your eyes anymore,” Joplin later told Davis over the phone. “You’re turned on to Laura now.” In December 1969, Nyro attended a party Davis threw for Joplin after she headlined Madison Square Garden, but ended up hiding in one of the bedrooms. When Bob Dylan found her there, the two ended up chatting for an hour. 

In 1970, the Young Rascals’ Felix Cavaliere received a call from Geffen. “These are his exact words: How would you like to produce the most difficult person you’ve ever met?” he recalls. But Cavaliere instantly took a liking to Nyro and agreed to produce her next album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. “I don’t want to say I fell in love with her at first sight,” he says, “But I fell in love with her at first sight. She was just a magical human being.”

Cavaliere recruited arranger Arif Mardin (“I knew I was going to need a little help with this lady”) and got to work in the spring. The album marks a slight return to the sunniness of Eli, from the rollicking “When I Was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag” to the blissful “Blackpatch.” 

You can credit that joyous rock & roll vibe to the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, who played on the record’s first side. “They were Southern gentlemen,” Cavaliere says. “When she would come up with these nuances, they said, ‘Yes, ma’am. Whatever you want, that’s what we’ll do.’” More special guests continued on Side Two, including guitarist Duane Allman on the groove-heavy “Beads of Sweat” and Alice Coltrane providing harp magic on the eight-minute “Map to the Treasure.”

Christmas and the Beads of Sweat arrived on Nov. 25, 1970, and is considered the end of the classic trilogy that began with Eli. Nyro refused to change the album title, despite warnings that it could limit her sales potential. “She could give a damn if she had a hit record or not,” Cavaliere says. “Clive Davis said, ‘If you put “Christmas” on the album, then after Christmas season’s over, they’re going to pull it off the shelves.’ Well, you see how much that mattered.” 

Though she remained uncompromising in the studio, Cavaliere describes the recording as a blast. And as usual, on at least one evening, Nyro got all of the musicians stoned. “The next day, Arif comes in and says, ‘Laura, you know the marijuana you had last night? I drove to Queens,’” Cavaliere remembers.

“SOME PEOPLE JUST aren’t made to cook,” Patti LaBelle tells me. “Laura was not made to cook.” The legendary soul singer attempted to teach Nyro in the early Seventies, but even an easy dish like creamed corn proved difficult. “You have to cut the corn off and cream it and then put it in the pan with butter, salt, and pepper and cook for about five minutes,” she says. “She never really even learned that. And she definitely couldn’t fry chicken, so she would wait for me to cook it. She loved to eat, and I loved cooking for her. I mean, she was like one of my sisters.”

The two singers’ paths intersected early in LaBelle’s career, several years before her group — also named Labelle — released the funk classic “Lady Marmalade.” They met through LaBelle’s manager, Vicki Wickham, and quickly became best friends. “We’re at each other’s houses all the time, and we exchange tips on food, men, and babies,” LaBelle told Rolling Stone in 1975. 

After years of other artists scoring hits off of her songs, Nyro was finally taking a stab at some cover songs herself — an entire album full. She enlisted LaBelle, and her bandmates Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash, for her fifth album, Gonna Take a Miracle, a collection of standards and Motown classics she grew up listening to in the Bronx. “She had this soft quality of bringing the songs to life and making them sound so different,” LaBelle says. “They were her songs. She had that ability.”

Produced by Philly soul architects Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, the album contained classics like “Spanish Harlem” and “Dancing in the Street,” and it glistened with hand claps and warm melodies. Reviewing for Rolling Stone, Lenny Kaye wrote that Nyro had “the best record collection on Central Park West.” 

After the covers album, Nyro and LaBelle remained close, even traveling together to Japan. “My son Zuri was made in Japan, thanks to Laura Nyro,” LaBelle jokes. They became godmothers to each other’s sons, and she remembers Nyro taking care of her when she was suffering from postpartum depression. Nyro would stay with LaBelle at her home in Philadelphia, rocking her baby on the swing in the front yard. “She had that soothing power,” she says. “She was just all that and a bag of chips. So talented and so earthy, and so mellow and everything good. And when she passed, it was very hard for me to accept. It left a big empty hole in me.” 

The early Seventies brought two pivotal changes for Nyro, involving two different men who were both named David. The first, David Bianchini, would become her husband. They met in 1971, while she was visiting her great-aunt and uncle in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Bianchini had just returned from Vietnam, where he served in the Army in the long-range reconnaissance patrol, making more than 60 missions to gather intelligence behind enemy lines. Twice, he says, he was the only member of his group to survive, which left him with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. 

They might not have been an obvious match — a Vietnam vet and a free spirit who wrote hit songs — but they instantly fell in love. “She detested the music business,” Bianchini tells me. “And I was different, and she could trust me.” The couple traveled the world together and embarked on wild adventures, like the time they briefly lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, or when they visited the grave of Hermann Hesse in Switzerland. Nyro was insistent on getting married, and they finally tied the knot that fall in Alexandria, Virginia, before throwing a celebration at a hotel near Central Park. Fittingly, Nyro performed “Wedding Bell Blues” at her own party.

They moved into a home in suburban Danbury, Connecticut, purchased from the yoga guru Swami Satchidananda, where Nyro would live the rest of her life (she still kept a Manhattan apartment on Central Park West). Bianchini taught the lifelong New Yorker how to drive and how to ride a bicycle. “One thing about Laura, she was always working,” Bianchini says. “I could be going down the road with her at 100 miles an hour, and she’d be sitting there, writing.”

Amid all this happiness in her personal life, Nyro experienced a major shift in her career. Her contract with Columbia expired after Beads of Sweat, and Geffen wanted to make her the first signing at a new label he was starting with help from Atlantic Records. 

In June 1971, Rolling Stone reported that Nyro would be leaving Columbia for the new Asylum Records. “Two ladies of two canyons — Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro — are rumored ready to split their respective labels, Warners and Columbia, to help assure the success of a new record company started by their respective managers, Elliot Roberts and David Geffen,” the piece read. 

According to Geffen, Nyro had agreed to go with him to Asylum, but then she changed her mind. Bianchini explains it as a simple enough decision: “Geffen was going to California, and she’s not a California person. She’s a New Yorker,” he says. Ultimately, Nyro decided to re-sign with Columbia, and it marked the end of her relationship with her fiercely dedicated manager. 

“You can’t imagine how heartbreaking it was for me,” Geffen tells me over the phone. “I tried to call her after it happened, and I was informed that she’d left the state and she wasn’t going to come back as long as I was trying to get ahold of her. And that was it.”

Tuna Fish Music was sold to Columbia, in a seismic deal worth $4 million (roughly $32 million today), which Nyro lived off of for the rest of her life. Asylum became a groundbreaking label credited with shaping the early-Seventies California rock scene, signing the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt, along with cult songwriters Judee Sill and David Blue. Geffen later founded Dreamworks alongside Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg and amassed a $9 billion fortune, making him one of the wealthiest people in the entertainment industry. 

“I think the decision she made to re-sign with Columbia and not come with Asylum Records was a tragic decision for her career,” Geffen says. “It was such a blow and an incredibly stupid thing for her to have done. Even today, for the life of me, I can’t imagine why she made that decision.”

Geffen never forgave Nyro. Throughout the years, he’d get offered tickets whenever she played clubs in L.A., and he’d always turn them down. “She called me a few years later and said, would I like to get together?” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ She said, ‘Don’t you miss me?’ I said, ‘Why would I miss you?’”

Fifty years later, Geffen says he periodically listens to the four Nyro albums they worked together on. “I remain a huge fan of her music,” he says. “I’m able to listen to her records and enjoy them even now, but I get no emotional charge. None whatsoever.”

Following her breakup with Geffen, Nyro retired from the music industry. “She didn’t like being famous,” Ian says. “So disappearing is a really good way to stop being famous.”

I’M STANDING IN a pitch-black living room on the Upper West Side, with a window providing the only source of light. A little eerie, considering it’s exactly how Nyro preferred to perform her music. But I’m not with Nyro. I’m with her 46-year-old son, Gil Bianchini, and he’s fiddling with a standing lamp, searching for an outlet. 

Gil wasn’t expecting me on this April evening. But he welcomes me in anyway, wearing a black Champion sweatshirt and Yankees hat, and ends a phone call with his eight-year-old son, whom he lovingly calls Lil Gil. 

Gil flips on the light, illuminating the living room. It’s packed with various items that belong to his roommate: a cabinet with dinner plates and a bottle of Hussong’s Tequila, and a rectangular glass table with a white plastic dog figurine perched on top. There are two large stacks of shoeboxes, a vintage blue exercise bike, and a silver boombox on the wooden table. Bianchini tells me he spends most of his time tucked away in his bedroom, with a large TV and a queen-size mattress that has four inches of memory foam.

Unlike his mom, Gil hates tuna. “Hell no,” he says. “I hate everything about it, man. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it smells. She used to make these huge bowls. We’d be in a hotel room, and I’d be over there by the window, trying to get the fresh air.” 

But like his mom, Gil loves to get stoned. During both of my visits, he rolls joints from a Mason jar full of weed, and we pass them back and forth as he walks me through his life, which has been far from easy. “It’s very strange,” he says. “My mom had a connection to Spanish Harlem, and then I wound up in Spanish Harlem,” he says. “In the Jefferson Projects on 115th and First. That’s where I grew from a boy to a man.” 

Nyro returned from retirement in 1976, when she reunited with producer Charlie Calello for the jazzy Smile, followed by 1978’s Nested. She had divorced David Bianchini (he says his PTSD flashbacks were a major factor), but decided to give Gil his last name. “My mother was very private,” Gil says. “That’s why my last name is Bianchini.”

Gil’s biological father is Harindra Singh, a self-described Indian prince whom Nyro met through her brother, Jan, when he was living overseas. Though their relationship was short-lived, Nyro had been dying to have a child. “She always wanted to have a baby and a family, and a house with a white picket fence,” LaBelle says. 

Nyro made an entire album about this next phase of life — 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual, which Rundgren was brought in to produce. But he quickly became frustrated and left the project. “The whole atmosphere was kind of bizarre,” Rundgren says. “She would have a bunch of girlfriends over for lunch. They would all sit at a table together, and then the males would have to sit somewhere else. So that made me a little bit uncomfortable, too. Essentially, I bowed out and let an engineer finish it. That was pretty much the last time I saw her.”

Nyro spent the rest of her life with a new partner, Maria Desiderio, a painter who co-owned a women’s bookstore in Newport Beach, California. “She said that she was done with men,” Rundgren says. Adds Janis Ian: “It was an open secret, like the rest of us. But I don’t think she wanted the publicity.”

Gil lived with his mom and Desiderio in a small cottage on Nyro’s Danbury property, which was located above a pond and waterfall; no longer able to afford the main house, she rented it out. He has fond memories of his childhood in the late Eighties and Nineties — building forts out of blankets, reading comic books, playing with G.I. Joes, and seeing Aliens and Eddie Murphy Raw in theaters. Nyro introduced him to Buddhism, while he exposed her to Tupac (she loved “Dear Mama,” he notes) and Aaliyah. He toured with Nyro as well, and traveled to Manhattan to see his mom play the iconic Bottom Line in 1988.

Nyro died of ovarian cancer on April 8, 1997, at 49; two years later, Desiderio died of the same cause. “Laura didn’t want to go to a hospital,” Desmond Child says. “She slept on a futon bed in this alcove of the house with windows that were all around. She died with dignity in that bed, listening to the water rushing underneath, and looking at the stars above her.” 

Gil, who faced legal troubles stemming from drug use starting in his teens, spent years in and out of detention facilities and group homes; that’s where he was when he found out his mom died. (Geffen says he read it in the paper, while David Bianchini, imprisoned for owning a marijuana farm in Vermont, was told by a fellow inmate.) But more than anything, losing his mom was the hardest thing he went through. 

“It was rough times, I guess,” Gil says. “But the roughest thing for me was dealing with my mom. I was lonely. I was supposed to be playing and having fun as a teenager, but I spent my time crying myself to sleep every night because my mom is dying, and I’m over here locked down.”

Gil spent 10 years as a barber, and he’s worked in construction. But his lifelong passion is making rap music. And like his mom, he’s wary of the industry. “I got all the talent in the world,” he says. “That’s not the problem. The only thing is this industry. It’s dirty. I operate off of principles and morals. I’m a little too pure for that shit, for real.” He sends me the track “Reminisce,” where he raps, “I remember I was trying to be a kid/14, talking to my mom in the crib/Just me and her/Thinkin’ bout how long she’d live/Cancer is a bitch, but it is what it is.” 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Laura Nyro estate is a mess; Gil’s lawyer, George Gilbert, confirms that Gil is one beneficiary, alongside a woman to whom Desiderio left her share. Gil never received any of his mother’s belongings, but he doesn’t care. Being her son is enough for him.

“I never met my father,” he says. “So my mom rubbed off on me a lot. In a way, I’m like a version of her — a different kind of version. So I don’t need her stuff. I’m damn near her.”

FOR YEARS, SONGWRITER Becca Stevens had a torn piece of paper taped to her fridge that simply said “Laura Nyro.” At gigs, she’d constantly get asked if she was a fan, but she’d never gotten around to digging into her catalog. That changed when jazz pianist and composer Billy Childs messaged her on Facebook, asking if she’d like to be a part of a Nyro tribute album he was arranging. “I finally started to do my homework,” Stevens says, “and was kicking myself for not doing it sooner.”

Released in 2014, Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro features Stevens, Rickie Lee Jones, Esperanza Spalding and Wayne Shorter, and others covering Nyro classics. “I like the images that get conjured in my mind when I listen to her music,” Childs says. “It’s almost like she’s singing to me. Her music is unmistakably human, because it ebbs and flows. It has these vast dynamic shifts — loud to soft, fast to slow, stops for no reason, and then she starts up again. It’s completely how life is.”

James Batsford, who was introduced to Nyro’s music by his father, spent years putting together two comprehensive box sets: 2021’s American Dreamer and 2024’s Hear My Song: The Collection 1966 – 1995. “As my career went more into reissuing and putting together catalog releases, I was left thinking, ‘Why has no one done a collection of her?’” the 34-year-old producer says. 

Last fall, singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright appeared at Joe’s Pub in New York City, performing a tribute show of Nyro songs; she covered “God Save the Country” on The Tonight Show. And more Nyro content is coming to the big screen: The upcoming documentary, directed by Lisa D’Apolito, will hopefully introduce Nyro to younger generations, and make her as cool as Joni Mitchell, Cher, and Stevie Nicks are today. 

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Who knows? Maybe they’ll fall hard for her music the way Desmond Child did on Miami Beach all those years ago. “I wish that more people knew about her, and fell into the potion of her majesty,” Child says.

But as every fan knows, Nyro never really needed that recognition. “I don’t think she’d care,” Sandra Bernhard says. “If she could hover over us and whisper in our ear, I think she’d say, ‘It’s fine. This is cool. My songs live on, even if people don’t really fully understand where the music came from.”