In Britain, the last number two of the sixties was “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers and The First Edition – downbeat (in
mood if not in key or tempo), introspective, menacing, fearful. In contrast,
America saw out the decade with a defiant upbeat flourish. It is not generally
known that after Al Kooper quit BS&T, Laura Nyro was approached ahead of
David Clayton-Thomas to be their new singer; she apparently was in a
relationship with bassist Jim Fielder and was friendly with drummer Bobby
Colomby. However, after consulting with her manager, David Geffen, she opted to
continue her own solo career, and given subsequent masterpieces such as Eli And The Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry, who is to say she
was wrong?
Nyro recorded “And When I Die” as a teenager in 1966, for
her first album More Than A New Discovery
(or, as we have it on CD, The First Songs)
as a fairly standard gospel workout. She sold the song for $5000 to Peter, Paul
and Mary, who interpreted it as a characteristically upbeat folk romp in 1967.
Then came BS&T’s version, and it is not an exaggeration or an insult to say
that the band – and specifically the song’s arranger, Dick Halligan – have great
fun with what they can do with the song.
Indeed, BS&T’s reading sounds like a lightning-speed
anthology of trends in twentieth-century American music, including the blues (with
lonesome prairie harmonica blown by Steve Katz), staccato marches somewhere
between Aaron Copland and “Wooden Heart,” Broadway show tunes, straight jazz,
cowboy soundtracks, R&B workouts (“HERE COMES THE DEVIL!!
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIGHT BEHIND!” barks Clayton-Thomas, practically welcoming death
and daring Satan to do his worst), Bo Diddley beats and – finally, and most
poignantly – ecumenical church hymnals, with ghostly brass configurations
worthy of Gil Evans.
I first heard this record on the radio when I was about five
or six and the concept of death, or people dying, was still quite alien to me.
Now, of course – and perhaps at the other end of life’s rainbow – I find it
rather affecting, with the knowledge that poor Laura Nyro didn’t, in the end, get
to “go naturally.” Much more than that, however, I can also think of this “And
When I Die” as a loudly positive farewell to that most turbulent of decades –
one which has been viewed through this blog in a new and peculiar but not
displeasing light – roaring and ready to tackle whatever the next decade wants
to throw at it. Die with the sixties? Not without a fight, mate. And with
Clayton-Thomas’ concluding “There’ll be one child born in this world…to carry
on…to carry on, yeah, yeah,” we can
even look forward to the similarly defiant, era-ending 2006 coda of “Welcome To
The Black Parade.” As for Nyro, I am sure she would have enjoyed the fun and
games that the band have with her song – given her mishearing of the crowd at
Monterey, I wonder with hindsight whether Streisand’s bizarre lounge act at an
open-air rock festival in A Star Is Born
wasn’t actually her subtle nod to Nyro (certainly it would have been a considerably
subtler gesture than her grievously overwrought assault on “Stoney End”).
Date Record Made
Number Two: 29 November 1969
Number Of Weeks At
Number Two: 1
Record At Number One: “Come
Together/Something” by The Beatles
UK Chart Position: None
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