Tell Laura I love Her (Ricky Valance)

 

 

Soon after I arrived in London I met up with John Tobler, a music journalist who has written for many publications over the years. We had started corresponding when I wrote to him about a piece he had written on Rick Nelson in the legendary mag Zig Zag. John was working in the press office at CBS records, in Soho Square at the time, although he was also freelancing for various magazines as well. John was very generous and aware that I was potless, he frequently let me raid his album cupboard and took me out for boozy lunches at CBS’s expense. John also had me as his ‘plus-one’ at many of the gigs for which he got sent tickets and usually managed to get me into the spiritual home of Pub Rock, Islington’s Hope and Anchor, for nothing.

 

John knew of my ambition to be a writer and one day when we were having a lunchtime drink in The Pineapple on Charing Cross Road, John told me there was a vacancy coming up at CBS for a junior to write the trade singles releases and was I interested?

 

Was I?

 

I accompanied John back the CBS, having phoned in sick to work. John introduced me to Elly Smith, who was Head of Press. Elly told me VERY briefly what the job entailed and asked me if I wanted it to which I replied, not surprisingly, yes please. The job would involve one day a week and I could fit that in around my other job where I was working for a firm of solicitors. I told Elly I would start the following week which she was fine with.

 

I arrived at CBS the following week and attempted to try and get down to stuff immediately. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a clue what I was supposed to do, but I sat down and looked at my workload and thought about how to accomplish it. I was under the impression that writing was an honest profession and was incredibly naive with regard to the ‘selling’ element of writing, which is more often how it is employed. My job was simply to ‘flog the product’ to the record shops but I thought I was there to write honestly, creatively and inventively about the singles being released each week. The first record on my pile was by Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge and to say it was bland is an understatement. How could I write anything interesting about that pile of do do? I wrote an honest crit of the required length and moved on to Bugatti and Musker. The only real difference between this and the last one was this was  English as opposed to American bland, so I again wrote accordingly.

I ploughed through about eight singles and apart from one by Sailor, which was ok, they were all tosh. I handed in my ‘work’ to line manager, David Sandison and helped myself to a bunch of albums from the record cupboard before heading home. David phoned me the next day and told me that the stuff I had written wasn’t really suitable and could I have another bash, so I agreed to pop in after work for a couple of hours. Still without any guidance I attempted to rewrite the stuff using more creativity and such as I presumed he didn’t think the writing was colourful enough. I tried again, this time liberally littering the page with alliteration and metaphor but still not really grasping that the only thing I was supposed to be doing was lying through my teeth, so that the stores would buy in records which were extremely iffy. I again stopped off at the record cupboard on my way out, to see if anything new was in there.

 

The majority of space in the record cupboard was taken up by copies of the first two Bruce Springsteen albums Greetings From Asbury Park NJ and The Wild, the Innocent and the E street Shuffle. This was before the ‘I have seen the future of rock and roll’ hype which preceded the Born to Run tour and Bruce was pretty much unknown within these shores. Personally I thought both albums were great, but it was still part of my job to make sure no visitor left without a copy of each album, even if they already had them! We needed to clear some space in the cupboard for the anticipated new releases.

 

One of the only honest bits of writing I got to do whilst I was at CBS was updating Bruce’s biography in anticipation of the upcoming tour. This time I was actually able to write what I believed to be true and that was that Bruce Springsteen was destined to be a major artiste. When Born to Run came out I thought it was a great record and I went to see his first show in the UK at Hammersmith Odeon which was a bit of a disappointment. Bruce didn’t manage to spark the fire on that particular night but an unknown band called Blondie managed to provide a better support than we could have anticipated. Must watch out for them! As everyone now knows Bruce went on to be one of the biggest names in rock music history and as always happens when people I have loved for their obscurity as well as their talent, become popular with the masses, I went off him! With hindsight I feel that he has rarely revisited the quality of the first three albums but I have little doubt he is a phenomenal talent and his title track for the movie Philadelphia still has the power to move me to tears. I have no doubt that this is mainly due to its place in the context of the film, but songwriters with the power to do that are a pretty rare breed.

 

Needless to say my tenure at CBS was extremely short-lived, but I kept in touch with John and occasionally visited his house in Brookwood, Surrey. Like many music journalists, John supplemented his income by selling all the promotional copies of albums he was given, but didn’t want to keep. He was the worst record cupboard raider I have ever seen and would come away from record company offices with so many albums he could have done with a pack mule to carry them. That was to my benefit though because a lot of the albums John wanted rid of were albums I really wanted so at 50p and £1.00 a throw, I wasn’t complaining. Whilst my taste coincided with his in some places, it shot off at serious tangents in most. He didn’t like much soul for example so I was able to relieve him of Look Out For #1 by Brothers Johnson and We came to Play by Tower of Power as well as loads of other great stuff. He did me no better favour though, than when he sold me Smile by Laura Nyro for £1.00.

 

I already had New York Tendaberry in my growing collection but I’d never really listened to it. Like many people of my peer group my knowledge of Laura Nyro was limited to the darkly mysterious Gibsom Street,  a track on the double sampler Fill Your Head with Rock, which had been a must in any serious late-sixties underground collection. I had seen a review of Smile in the NME by (I think) Charles Shaar Murray, who’d sung its praises. The trouble with iconoclastic writers like Charles is that they are often so completely full of shit that you cannot trust them; I mean Charles had said that Marquee Moon by Television was the greatest album on the Elektra label since LA Woman by The Doors when anybody with an ounce of insight about these things, knows that Marquee Moon is the greatest album in the history of rock music, period!

 

Smile doesn’t really qualify as a rock album as it is essentially jazz-rock fusion and before you run away thinking fusion; the worst of all possible worlds, let me tell you that you would be wrong in the case of Smile. It is a beautiful album from start to finish. Smile kicks off with the languidly laid-back Sexy Mama and by the time we get to the end of side one (that’s vinyl my dear!) we have been treated to one of the greatest songs ever written, I am the Blues. It is impossible to convey in words just how great this song is, so I will just say to you, if you haven’t heard it then beg, borrow or steal a copy and you will see exactly what I mean. The song is not about the blues but it is about life and written BY the blues itself.

 

It opens with a line which is just so powerful;

 

‘Cigarettes, I’m all alone with my smoke and ashes’

 

The whole record is an absolute triumph of love over despair and it will always be in my collection. It is hardly surprising that on hearing Smile, I then dug out New York Tendaberry and found that this was a great record as well. Over a very short period I acquired all of Laura’s albums. The reason I did that is because although I am somewhat prone to being a completist, in the case of Laura Nyro I just adored everything she did. Her songs are not of this world and her piano style is so unique as to be instantly recognisable even when she is covering things like Up on the Roof, or Spanish Harlem. Laura may have come to us via the Woodstock Generation but her roots were completely in post doo-wop New York and Spanish Harlem and the marriage of styles and ideologies made for some beautiful music. The last fully-fledged studio album Laura recorded was Mother’s Spiritual. As a whole it wasn’t her best album but the title track is quite simply the most beautiful piece of music I have ever heard in any genre and in case you get the impression from my musings here that my musical taste is limited, I should confess that Johan Sebastian Bach composed a lot of the music I really care about.

 

Laura Nyro may not have been as well known a songwriter as Dylan, Carole King, Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell but for me she was as good as any of them and when she sang her own songs, that haunting voice just blew me away. She was also to my eyes stunningly beautiful; not in a classic way but she had this ethereal quality about her which transcended looks and stuff. Don’t sell her short though, Laura wrote some songs which became very well known in the hands of others, Stony End for Barbra Streisand, And When I Die by Blood Sweat & Tears and Wedding Bell Blues by Fifth Dimension to name but a few.

 

When I started working in the music business I wanted to meet just three people; Leonard Cohen, John Cale and Laura

Nyro. I met the first two but never Laura. When she died on April 9th 1997, the musical firmament lost one of it’s

brightest stars at the relatively young age of 50. It was worse for me though because I lost my metaphysical lover.

 

Ironically once I started working in the media full-time, I saw less of Mr Tobler, but I often read his liner notes on re-issues of just about everything. I was only the other day reading his notes for a Kinks compilation where he said that Ray Davies had probably written the song Victoria about is daughter! Try the late Queen of England me old son, as in Arthur; or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, the album from which it was taken tut-tut!

 

The last time I saw John was at a party in the Bayswater flat of Human League, Heaven 17 and Tina Turner producer fame Martyn ‘Teddy Bear’ Ware. I worked with Martyn on several occasions and we became quite friendly. In fact all the members of Heaven 17 visited my flat in Birmingham in the early eighties for a bit of a chill-out before racing off to their gig in my girlfriend’s newly acquired ice blue Ford Popular. Anyway John was pretty pissed and started insulting Martyn calling him things like electropop ponce and other pleasantries. Not really knowing where to put myself I shrugged at Martyn as if to say I hadn’t a clue what had inspired John’s behaviour and I hadn’t. I discreetly dragged him off to avoid further embarrassment and tried to sober him up outside. I am very grateful to John Tobler for his help but I’m not sure we had an awful lot in common, apart from an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop and rock music and so I think we simply grew apart.