High School Education
* Laura Nyro: When I Was Freeport And You Were The Main Drag (4.0 mb) | And When I Die (2.0 mb) | Time And Love/Save The Country (11.0 mb)
From Live At The Fillmore East : Dec 22, 1970 : New York City, NY
To illustrate just how lame my college was, some of the coolest kids I knew were this group of high school kids who hung around the radio station. Somehow, despite living in a small town in Maine, they had all developed incredible music tastes, were incredibly funny, formed bands, and were, in general, really great people. But the ring leader of the bunch was this kid, Casey from Bath. He had been hanging out at the college and had a radio show since he was 14 or 15 years of age. Towards my last year in college, I had kind of lost touch with him, so I was totally jazzed to run into him when I moved to Portland, ME.
One night, after drinking copious amounts of beer, smoking countless cigarettes (and maybe other things) and listening to a bunch of great records, he brings out this tape of his own music and starts playing it. It was great stuff. It was music based in the singer-songwriter tradition but was still kind of jazzy, with odd chords and surreal lyrical imagery.
I said to him, “This is fantastic!”
And he replied, “Yeah, I’ve been listening to a lot of Laura Nyro.”
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Irving DeMalba said,
June 13, 2005 @ 12:46 pm
I think her voice is dope and the keys carry the vocals, or the vocals carry the keys - hmmm I don’t know, I just know this is good music for when it rains.
IdM
Tom said,
June 13, 2005 @ 6:09 pm
I know I say this far too often but thank you! I’ve been trying to track down Laura’s version of ‘And When I Die’ for a long time now. Brilliant work as always.
Charles Hendrick said,
June 14, 2005 @ 12:04 pm
Maine is a funny place. It’s got enough removal from “What’s Happening” to allow for freer explorations.
Ruby said,
June 16, 2005 @ 8:10 am
Oooohhh - love Laura Nyro, “Christmas and the Beads of Sweat” and “Gonna Take a Miracle” tie for my favorite albums. Bless your heart for posting her.
teddy said,
June 16, 2005 @ 9:24 pm
maine is bizarre . the only city with anything near a music scene is portland.
cb said,
June 17, 2005 @ 10:18 am
Yeah, Maine is bizzare. But I totally love it. Portland was a great place to live and hopefully will be a place that I’ll live in the future. It’s small and there’s not too much going on, but what’s there is high quality. there’s a great video store, $3.00 all you can eat vegan food, a little art house movie theatre, a great diner where you can get your muffins grilled, etc. Plus some of the best concert that I’ve ever seen have been in Maine.
-cb