Laura Nyro Returns for a Soulful Connection

In the year of the comeback, the touted returns of Brian Wilson and Patti Smith are no more startling than the re-emergence of Laura Nyro, who plays Los Angeles this weekend as part of her first national tour in 10 years.

In fact, Nyro’s original retreat was even more of a shock. After all, the Beach Boys’ commercially successful years were far behind Wilson when he dropped out. And despite a pop hit, Smith was essentially an underground heroine when she withdrew.

Nyro, in contrast, was one of pop music’s hottest properties in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when she was barely out of her teens. The 5th Dimension (“Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Wedding Bell Blues”), Blood, Sweat & Tears (“And When I Die”), Barbra Streisand (“Stoney End”) and Three Dog Night (“Eli’s Coming”) all made the Top 10 with her compositions.

While Nyro’s own records didn’t sell like that, the idiosyncratic blend of street-corner soul music, gospel and jazz and her intensely personal, quasi-religious/mystical lyrics on the albums “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession,” “New York Tendaberry” and “Christmas and the Beads of Sweat” attracted an avid following. “The Bronx Madonna’s” personal eccentricities added to her cult cachet.

Then Nyro walked away from it all in 1973, when she moved to New England. There were albums in ‘76, ’78 and ‘84, but nothing with any real impact. There were no performances after 1978, when she gave birth to her son.

“This is how I see it,” Nyro said this week during a phone interview from Minneapolis while reflecting on her retreat. “Sometimes you trade one success to find another. At any time that I have not been very active in the music business, it means that I’m busy doing something else.

“I really think music is my strongest calling, but at times in my life I did what felt natural for me to do. Over the years I’ve taken time to live life, have different experiences, sort it out, catch up with myself.

“I feel that I’ve always been involved in music, whether I was coming on like the goddess of creativity or whether I was just writing music on the sidelines. I just feel there’s a difference in how you handle the world at 40 than how you do when you’re 20.”

Nyro--who performs with her new band at the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday--is purposely vague when the subject of her personal life is brought up. Her family, for instance?

“It’s me and my son. We are the foundation. And my dog. Let’s put it that way. And then we have others whom we love and who participate in our lives. . . . I think right now I’ll just express it that way.”

Nyro also declined to get too specific about the particulars of her life for the last 10 years. But she fiercely rejected the notion that she keeps it all private.

“I think that I share a lot,” she said. “I mean, I go out and I sing. I do not sing superficial music. I get down. I talk about it . I’m out there doin’ it. I feel that I share quite a bit of my personal life.

“And I feel at a certain point I like to draw boundaries. If there’s anything that I really want to get into a conversation about or feel that it’s important to do I will do it. Otherwise, I feel that other people in my life have a right to their privacy too.”

Nyro, an avowed feminist and, more recently, a strong animal-rights activist, said that one important impetus for her return was quitting smoking last summer.

“I understood that I had quit an addiction, and psychologically I felt very empowered by doing that, and it affected the rest of my life. And also as a musician, my instrument got very stable. . . . My phrasing through the years was strong, but I did not even realize the full timbre of my instrument until I quit smoking.”

Today’s musical climate is also more receptive to Nyro’s kind of music--but that played no role in her decision, she says.

“That had no influence on me. I was influenced by personal inspiration. It just so happens that there is more of an open attitude out there toward creative woman artists, and that’s wonderful.

“But whether there was or wasn’t, I would be out there singing right now. There is nothing on the outside that could ever get me to be doing this. Because this is a special kind of work. I could be writing, and more nested. But this takes you out there traveling, and it’s confrontive work.”

Surprising words from someone who’s been depicted as painfully shy and reclusive.

“Well, I don’t think that I’m reclusive,” Nyro countered. “That’s not true. There’s a part of my personality that used to be more shy. It’s not so shy now. And I think there’s a part of me that actually can be quite bold. . . .

“Singing live is a special kind of work to me, and I wanted to really be there when I did it and really have my joie de vivre happening. . . . The idea of going out and singing, it really goes back to when I was a kid and a teen-ager. We’d go out and sing at night under the stars, the sweet, pure harmonies, and that feeling from the music was life’s sweetest thing to me. That was one of life’s main joys, and I still have that same feeling.”

And Nyro finds that her audience in 1988 feels pretty much the same way.

“I just think that it’s a very soulful connection. Maybe the cult of the mother, the call of the wild. I don’t know. Whatever it is it’s really beautiful. I really feel like my tribe is with me.”