By John Eklund

I was asked recently to name my favorite album of all time. To a music junkie with an aversion to superlatives, this should be a painful exercise. Yet Laura Nyro’s Eli & the Thirteenth Confession (1968) springs immediately to mind. I’ve burned through any number of obsessions—musical and otherwise—over the past 35 years, but when I listen to those first few notes of “Timer,” the sensation is as sharp as the day I first heard it on my hippie girlfriend’s stereo in 1969. I thought it was the most amazing voice I would ever hear, and I was right.

Uptown
Goin’ down
ole life line
walkin’ down faster
walkin’ with the master of Time

I was an absolutist and certain of everything then, so my 17-year-old self would not be surprised that I’ve stuck with Laura. But my 54-year-old one, which gets less certain of anything by the week, is a little startled to realize that my love for her may be the only thing in my life that’s survived the decades intact.

She’s an acquired taste, or so say some of the friends I’ve tried to enlist. Her music over the course of ten albums was full of contradictions. She wrote dozens of pop songs which, when recorded by others (“Stoned Soul Picnic” by the Fifth Dimension, “And When I Die” by Blood Sweat & Tears) often sounded banal. Her melodies, especially when she sang them, were always soulful, catchy, and meticulously constructed. But her lyrics were eccentric, confounding, and aggressively idiosyncratic. The early themes—love, betrayal, religion, politics, the urban landscape, and, always, harmony—were woven into the music in profoundly original ways.

Laura once described her own style as “bright gospel rock,” and it’s the jazzy doo-wop musicality of her tunes that has endured, and influenced dozens of other artists. It’s as if she absorbed a little bit of every pop genre in history, and remixed them into brilliant little jewels that defy easy categorizing, and don’t seem to even live in a recognizable time frame. Usually, there’s nothing staler than old pop music, yet a Nyro tune, heard by virgin ears, can rarely be accurately date-stamped.

A signature Nyro technique involves abrupt changes of tempo, melody, and mood within a song. In “Money,” from Smile (1976), a driving guitar hook, twitchy percussion and intermittent angry horns accompany a bitter lament about the increasing commercialization of modern life, and her own.

A good friend is a rare find
A good pimp’s gonna rob you blind.

But halfway though the song skids to a halt for a slow, ethereal break that almost seems as if it’s from another record.

Mothers pull the night-time in
Calling their children with spoons in the wind.

And then it’s back to the hustle.

Listen to Eli or New York Tendaberry (1969), the follow-up album, and ponder the unbelievable fact that these songs were created by a teenager.

It’s been said that Nyro ran from stardom—as if celebrity-hood is the natural state of things—and shunning it is pathology. But she loved her audience and would have loved a bigger one. A great purist, she simply valued her integrity and artistic independence more highly than commercial success.

Her creative choices did not always go down easy. For many of us who got on board at the beginning, her later work was a challenge. She abandoned the imagery of the dark side, the devil and the captain, for lyrical preoccupations like motherhood, animal rights, The Earth. These are the sort of topics that makes me cringe when taken up by others. But she delivered them with such utter warmth and sincerity, in a voice that only seemed to get richer with age, and I forgave her every time the rare new album wasn’t Eli.

I saw her in concert maybe a dozen times. It was always a surprise to see the ferocity of her other fans, when my devotion felt so personal, like it was just Laura and me. Once in Madison, Wisconsin I spent all my money on red roses, my first floral purchase ever, and left them at the theatre before the show. My heart leapt when the curtain parted and they adorned her piano. I later learned that a lot of other people had the same idea, so whether they were actually mine will remain a mystery.

Laura recorded her last album in 1993, Walk the Dog & Light the Light. She died of ovarian cancer on April 8, 1997, one of the saddest days of my life.

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For Angela Davis, serious trouble began
in 1970 when she took up the cause of the Soledad Brothers, three Black inmates in the California prison system who were framed for the beating death of a white guard. They would eventually be acquitted, but the most charismatic of the three, George Jackson—a smart, political, literary prison activist, with whom Davis fell in love—would be killed in prison under suspicious circumstances.

Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan, a 17-year-old revolutionary (he published a newspaper at his Pasadena high school called Iskra), had become an eloquent critic of the California penal system. One day in August of 1970, he burst into a courtroom where several inmates were on trial for assaulting a guard, carrying a bag full of weapons, and crying “All right gentlemen, I’m taking over now.” None of those guns were ever fired, but he was shot and killed by courtroom guards, along with the judge and two of the prisoners. Officials and the press immediately alleged that Jonathan had hoped to somehow force the release of his brother, George, who was nowhere near the courtroom. The guns he brought in were registered to Angela Y. Davis. She was promptly indicted for murder and conspiracy.

Davis had been a thorn in the side of California authorities for several years. After studying at Brandeis, the Sorbonne and the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt, she was hired as an assistant philosophy professor at UCLA in 1969. That year, she also joined the Communist Party. When called before the State Board of Regents to explain herself, she said “Yes I am a communist, and I will not take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, the Agnews, the Reagans.”

She was promptly fired, under the logic that a communist by definition is incapable of independent thinking and therefore is professionally incompetent—a form of reasoning that has made a comeback in the treatment of some Islamic scholars at American universities. But a State Superior court ruled this action unconstitutional and she was ordered reinstated.

California conservatives, who had just elected Ronald Reagan governor, were enraged by this woman as she continued to expose the excesses of the California prison system in her speaking and writing. As the trial of George Jackson and his co-defendants proceeded, it became increasingly clear that the evidence against them was slim to non-existent. The scene was pure spectacle, and full of shockingly racist treatment. At one point the judge ordered the court audience to “conduct yourselves properly and not sit as if you are in a pool hall or at a barbecue table.”

The jury found the inmates innocent. But in this atmosphere, convinced that a fair trial was impossible, Davis fled. After the warrant for her arrest was issued, light-skinned black women all over America were hauled in for questioning. She was eventually arrested in New York in October 1970.

There was a wave of immediate support from Black communities across the country. Every black newspaper editorialized for bail. James Baldwin, in “an open letter to my sister Angela Davis,” mused that “one might have hoped that by this hour, chains on black flesh would be so intolerable a sight for the American people that they themselves would rise up and strike off the manacles.”

Demonstrations swept the planet—thousands in African cities, 60,000 in Paris, 100,000 in Moscow. Ossie Davis and Gloria Steinem headed a fund-raising appeal. Aretha Franklin offered to stand bail, saying “I’ve been locked up for disturbing the peace. I know you’ve got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.”

The trial of this black intellectual communist woman was a farce. There was no evidence presented that she knew Jonathan had access to her legally registered guns or was planning to invade the courtroom. Conspiracy was alleged yet never demonstrated, and the not guilty verdict on June 4, 1972, from the all-white jury was greeted with joy on six continents.

For 18 months I lived and breathed the “free Angela” movement. Like small groups in every city, her Milwaukee supporters raised money by hitting up wealthy liberals, selling chicken dinners and holding car washes. We woke before dawn to distribute flyers at plant gates, and collected signatures on petitions at supermarkets and ball games. I had the feeling that they would really not be able to get away with this. And when they didn’t, I had the sense that we had stopped them.

In a letter from Angela, dated January 6, 1972, North County Jail, Palo Alto, California, she thanks me for sending a package, though I don’t recall what it was. “My gratitude to you in Milwaukee who have contributed a part of your lives to this struggle must be expressed in the form of a promise. When I am finally able to experience once again the less diminished freedom on the other side of these walls, my life will belong in its entirety to the oppressed.”

Unlike many of us who relished the fights of the early 70s but shrink from the harder ones of 2005, Davis kept her promise, and works, writes and lectures relentlessly against “the prison-industrial complex.

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If you have read the novels of Anita Brookner, “fierce” is probably not a word that comes to mind to describe her. I’m pretty confident that her name has never appeared in the same sentence as Laura Nyro and Angela Davis.

But she shares Nyro’s unshakeable creative integrity and resistance to the demands of cultural commerce. An art historian by training, Brookner began writing novels in her mid-forties and has just published, unbelievably, her twenty-third, Leaving Home. In 1984, her fourth book, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker prize, but since then her sales have stalled, and she now writes for a small but devoted audience.

Reviewers have faulted her for writing the same book again and again, and it’s true that there are immediately recognizable Brookner tropes: damaged lonely people, usually but not always older single women, reflecting on the unfulfilled life. Possibly the sort of people Nyro had in mind on “Lonely Women,” a song she later dropped from her repertoire as her feminist politics began to coalesce (No one hurries home to lonely women is a lyric you would never find in Nyro’s later work but is a sentiment rampant in Brookner’s).

My friend Robert, who is puzzled by my Brookner obsession, suspects she is feeding my “inner spinster.” It can take an entire novel for one of her self-conscious protagonists to perform a simple act, but while the reader anticipates this we are treated to many delicious layers of complex, nuanced psychological reflection. She will be read in future centuries for the reasons we read Jane Austen today.

A recent review of Leaving Home advised “If you seek joy in your reading, be warned.” In Brookner world, virtue is rarely rewarded, good does not necessarily prevail over evil, and loneliness is a constant. In these respects, at least, Brookner may be the anti-Angela Davis. The confidence required of a political activist, the focus on the world rather than the self, the optimism needed to take on and prevail over the powerful, Brookner’s characters are simply not up to it.

Yet I would suggest that Brookner is the most accomplished and, in her own way, brave novelist writing in English today. Every word in a Brookner novel has a hand-picked flavor, every phrase exudes style, and the books as a whole are as elegantly written and artfully constructed as any contemporary novel you’re likely to read. Her Polish-Jewish origins and her grounding in nineteenth-century novels, especially French, Russian and English, give her work a sad, wistful European sensibility.

She doesn’t travel, she doesn’t do television and radio, she does nothing really to help her books along once published. In my 23 years as possibly her most devoted American reader, I have never heard the sound of her voice. She writes one novel a year, over the course of a summer, in longhand, and never re-writes. That such lush and interesting sentences could flow from her pen without tweaking is a marvel.

For Laura Nyro and Angela Davis, love is a major theme. Anita Brookner once offered these thoughts on the subject:

There are two kinds of love. There’s the one impossible love that really takes up all your dreams and all your longings and that rarely resolves itself into anything practical. The love you settle for may be simply a form of friendship in which there’s no fear, no dread, no anxiety, and you’re very wise if you do settle for that, except that the true romantic never can. Romantic love is a terrible thing. It is a form of madness, I think, and the people who are never visited by it are extraordinarily lucky. I don’t think it’s got anything to be said in its favor. Except that it does sweep you up to a very exalted level of feeling. But it’s also very punishing. I think it’s more creative than the other kind. It enables you in an extraordinary way. It gives you powers you didn’t know you had. You discover yourself.

Last year, while in London, I learned from my friend Kate that Anita Brookner could be seen every Saturday morning shopping at the Waitrose supermarket in Chelsea. Naturally, I had to go. I staked out a vantage point across the street and lurked. At 8:25, as promised, Brookner rounded the corner. She looked exactly like herself: sensible shoes, a smart plaid suit, carefully coiffed hair, and those huge blue eyes that have stared out from the jackets of all those books.

I followed her into the store, keeping a discreet distance, and watched as she selected an orange, a yogurt, a can of soup—just the sort of shopping a Brookner character might do. I wanted to speak to her but eventually, when she began to pick over cosmetics, I became self-conscious. My stalking seemed an invasion of privacy. I lost my nerve and fled.

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