Listen to them on the album and they constitute a novel and a total experience. Laura Nyro has realized that lyrics are not words to be read, but sounds to be sung, and she sings them incredibly. To intellectualize her music any more than I already have is a thankless and impossible task; all I can do is urge you to hear her.
Few albums are as unlike Laura Nyro's as the Grateful Dead's Anthem of the Sun, but in its own way, it is an equally revolutionary album. Here the words are underemphasided to an extreme--rarely can they be deciphered. The music is what distinguishes the album.
Rock in 1968 was dominated by virtuoso solos: Ginger Baker battering away on her drums for twenty minutes while Clapton and Bruce twiddled their thumbs, Canned Heat's bassist doodling by himself for twelve, Jeff Beck soaring for five while his sidemen marked time, the Nice's brilliant organist, Keith Emerson, letting out all the stops for twenty-five. All of us can name the greats: Clapton, Hendrix, Bloomfield, Moon Baker, Beck.... What has been lost in this is jamming, group playing as opposed to individual performances. The song has become a pretext for a solo, a nonentity in itself. Musicians are playing for themselves, not for one another. Canned Heat released a record consisting of fifteen-minute solos by each of the band's members. And of course we have Cream's Wheels of Fire. It's all becoming a drag. One can only listen to so many drum solos; there are too many great guitarists.
Anthem of the Sun is unique in its group approach to playing. The album is a fluent series of performances, some recorded in the studio, some live, spliced into one another to create a continuous, ever-changing yet always consistent group improvisation. No one musician overshadows the others, though lead guitarist Jerry Garcia is frequently prominent. What amazes the listener upon every hearing is that so many disparate moods, tempos, and rhythms can be contained in one organic structure, and that six musicians can play so many instruments so well together. The Quicksilver Messenger Service, on The Fool, is the only group to have come close to such music. Blood, Sweat and Tears are too bound to arangers' charts to approach it.
Were Anthem of the Sun and Eli and the Thirteenth Confession more widely listened to, 1969 would be a more interesting year than it promises to be in rock. As it is, the dollar sign shows no signs of relinquishing its death-grip on the music. It may be discovered that when the Beatles and the Airplane appeared on the cover of Life, rock did not come of age, it became moribund. The reactions to business' supremacy in 1968--gross commercialism, the put-on, the retreats to country, folk, and roll--are not solutions to the dilemma, and if 1969 does not introduce new sounds and new solutions, we may hear rock's death-rattle before the year is over.
Ken Emerson '70 was the rock reviewer for Avatar from the time when Avatar started a regular column on music until its format was radically altered last June by the first of its great internal revolutions.