POP MUSIC REVIEW : Nyro: Still a Tough Act to Appreciate

Laura Nyro might not have made it to Woodstock, but she does have the distinction of being practically the only performer to get a negative reception at the seminal Monterey Pop Festival two years earlier in 1967. Where that open-eared fest launched the American careers of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and a wide range of others, the rude response Nyro received reportedly soured her on performing for some time.

Still, it wasn’t a bad level to have reached, considering that she was only 19, and in her teens already had penned such future hits (for others) as “Wedding Bell Blues,” “And When I Die” and “Stoney End.” It may be, though, that Monterey set the mold for Nyro’s live shows. The Bronx-born singer’s 22-song performance Monday evening at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano suggested that, except to the converted few, she remains a difficult performer to appreciate.

While the club was far from packed, the faithful cheered on Nyro (and her four-piece band) with the sort of unreserved brio one expects from relatives at school recitals. The fragility of her performance made this support somewhat apt and touching, but it also helped, perhaps, to gloss over the show’s many lacks and lapses.

Chiefly, it was no fluke that Nyro’s only hits came through other mouths. Her own voice, while serviceable in a folkie vein, was woefully inadequate at either powering or finessing the soul-gospel fusion attempted in so many of her songs. The unwarranted melodrama and some of the high notes of her early vocals were largely gone Monday, replaced by a smoother, but no more revelatory style.

Perhaps determined by the material it had to work with, Nyro’s band varied between a pillowy, lounge-ready sound on some songs to a wonderfully sharp focus on others. On “The Wild World,” dedicated by Nyro to animal-rights groups, the band cooked with a rhythmic passion, sparked by an angry blues solo from guitarist Jimmy Vivino, that showed more empathy for wild things than did Nyro’s rote “social issue textbook” lyrics.

Her unaccompanied “Broken Rainbow” also eschewed any empathy-shaking poetry, instead relying on tired catch phrases.

Not all of Nyro’s more recent songs were as bald--”The Japanese Restaurant Song” offered a playful whimsy and skewed vision--but her strongest moments came on her old standards and on some inspired covers. Her lovely, understated reading of “And When I Die” more than reclaimed the song from the bombastic hell that Blood, Sweat & Tears consigned it to 20 years ago.

Nyro’s two encores included equally reflective versions of Curtis Mayfield’s “I’m So Proud” and the 5 Royales’ “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Her closing cover of Carole King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” though, only served to remind that, while Nyro may have predated the “sensitive singer-songwriter” movement that brought King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and others to prominence in the early ‘70s, she also was largely eclipsed by it.