Post by petrolino on Aug 27, 2019 23:47:42 GMT
Janis Ian
"A singer/songwriter both celebrated and decried for her pointed handling of taboo topics, Janis Ian enjoyed one of the more remarkable second acts in music history. After first finding success as a teen, her career slumped, only to enter a commercial resurgence almost a decade later. Janis Eddy Fink was born on April 7, 1951, in New York City. The child of a music teacher, she studied piano as a child and, drawing influence from Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, and Odetta, wrote her first songs at the age of 12. She soon entered Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, where she began performing at school functions. After adopting the surname Ian (her brother's middle name), she quickly graduated to the New York folk circuit.
When she was just 15, she recorded her self-titled debut; the LP contained "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)," a meditation on interracial romance written by Ian while waiting to meet with her school guidance counselor. While banned by a few radio stations, the single failed to attract much notice until conductor Leonard Bernstein invited its writer to perform the song on his television special Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. The ensuing publicity and furor over its subject matter pushed "Society's Child" into the upper rungs of the pop charts, and made Ian an overnight sensation.
Success did not agree with her, however, and she soon dropped out of high school. In rapid succession, Ian recorded three more LPs -- 1967's For All the Seasons of Your Mind, 1968's The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink, and 1969's Who Really Cares -- but gave away the money she earned to friends and charities. After meeting photojournalist Peter Cunningham at a peace rally, the couple married, and at age 20, she announced her retirement from the music business."
When she was just 15, she recorded her self-titled debut; the LP contained "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)," a meditation on interracial romance written by Ian while waiting to meet with her school guidance counselor. While banned by a few radio stations, the single failed to attract much notice until conductor Leonard Bernstein invited its writer to perform the song on his television special Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. The ensuing publicity and furor over its subject matter pushed "Society's Child" into the upper rungs of the pop charts, and made Ian an overnight sensation.
Success did not agree with her, however, and she soon dropped out of high school. In rapid succession, Ian recorded three more LPs -- 1967's For All the Seasons of Your Mind, 1968's The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink, and 1969's Who Really Cares -- but gave away the money she earned to friends and charities. After meeting photojournalist Peter Cunningham at a peace rally, the couple married, and at age 20, she announced her retirement from the music business."
- Jason Ankeny, AllMusic
"Those were my heroes. To suddenly be on speaking terms with Joan Baez or Tom Paxton, that was amazing. I was 13 the first time I played out at a real gig, I submitted the song to Broadside magazine and they invited me to perform at what was then called ‘The Hootenanny’ in Greenwich Village at the Village Gate, which was normally a jazz club. The owner Art D’Lugoff would donate it once a month to a bunch of folk singers and so there I was on stage with all of these people that I had been listening to for years.
It was just an amazing group and I did well and then we moved to New York and I fell in with a group of kids who were hanging around with the Reverend Gary Davis. He was blind and he would have his hand on your shoulder and we would lead him around New York. His wife liked me because I loved her chicken. She made the best potted chicken ever. Gary asked if I could open for him at the Gaslight Café when I was 14, when they said no his wife said that he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t think that he’d be able to do the show, and so they said yes. They were pretty amazing."
It was just an amazing group and I did well and then we moved to New York and I fell in with a group of kids who were hanging around with the Reverend Gary Davis. He was blind and he would have his hand on your shoulder and we would lead him around New York. His wife liked me because I loved her chicken. She made the best potted chicken ever. Gary asked if I could open for him at the Gaslight Café when I was 14, when they said no his wife said that he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t think that he’d be able to do the show, and so they said yes. They were pretty amazing."
- Janis Ian, Songwriting Magazine
Bruce Springsteen, Janis Ian, DJ Ed Sciaky & Billy Joel
'And I Did Ma' - Janis Ian
Barbara Keith
"Barbara Keith started singing and playing her songs in the 1960s at Cafe Wha? in New York City’s Greenwich Village (the famous club that helped along such performers as Dylan, Hendrix, The Velvet Underground, Joan Rivers and countless others) and a strong folk music heart still beats within her band The Stone Coyotes — an electrified, armor-plated, guitar-wielding warrior kind of folk music heart."
- Ken Maiuri, Daily Hampshire Gazette
- Ken Maiuri, Daily Hampshire Gazette
"Having been intrigued by the so-called ‘Bosstown sound’ of Ultimate Spinach and their 1968 debut, I stumbled across Kangaroo and Barbara Keith while searching for bands of a similar ilk also releasing through MGM. The owner of a record store near the Leidseplein in the heart of Amsterdam suggested on one particular visit that I should check out Kangaroo’s self-titled LP from the same year, with particular attention paid to track three.
It took less than one play to convince me; the moment I heard Barbara Keith’s voice, the owner had a sale. It didn’t matter that ‘Daydream Stallion’ was one of only a few tracks on which she sang lead on the album (as well as being the only one she wrote), nor that Kangaroo never made another record, having split in ’69 in the wake of a lukewarm reception for the album. (It’s really not so bad, but in the avalanche of bands on the late ’60s East coast rock scene, no sales meant no trace.)
Barbara went on to release a pair of solo records – both, confusingly, titled Barbara Keith – in 1969 (Verve) and 1972 (Reprise) with minimal sales despite some good press. Not even the fact that her own ‘Free The People’ had been a minor hit for Delaney & Bonnie (find it on To Bonnie From Delaney) and picked up by Barbra Streisand for her Stoney End LP (which featured a trio of Laura Nyro remakes) could accelerate interest in Keith’s career.
In 1972, she and producer/husband Doug Tibbles took the rare step of returning an advance received from Reprise for a third album and cut all ties with the music business. The couple did eventually return some twenty years later as The Stone Coyotes (with their son John on guitar and bass), but they’ve made good on their vow to dodge the major-label mechanics of which they’d grown so weary. ‘Daydream Stallion’ reminds of a more naïve time. The young Barbara’s voice is Boston through and through. It’s a voice that can turn an “endless variety of grey days” around, a bad mood into a good one. And, just like her imaginary steed, it demands to be noticed."
It took less than one play to convince me; the moment I heard Barbara Keith’s voice, the owner had a sale. It didn’t matter that ‘Daydream Stallion’ was one of only a few tracks on which she sang lead on the album (as well as being the only one she wrote), nor that Kangaroo never made another record, having split in ’69 in the wake of a lukewarm reception for the album. (It’s really not so bad, but in the avalanche of bands on the late ’60s East coast rock scene, no sales meant no trace.)
Barbara went on to release a pair of solo records – both, confusingly, titled Barbara Keith – in 1969 (Verve) and 1972 (Reprise) with minimal sales despite some good press. Not even the fact that her own ‘Free The People’ had been a minor hit for Delaney & Bonnie (find it on To Bonnie From Delaney) and picked up by Barbra Streisand for her Stoney End LP (which featured a trio of Laura Nyro remakes) could accelerate interest in Keith’s career.
In 1972, she and producer/husband Doug Tibbles took the rare step of returning an advance received from Reprise for a third album and cut all ties with the music business. The couple did eventually return some twenty years later as The Stone Coyotes (with their son John on guitar and bass), but they’ve made good on their vow to dodge the major-label mechanics of which they’d grown so weary. ‘Daydream Stallion’ reminds of a more naïve time. The young Barbara’s voice is Boston through and through. It’s a voice that can turn an “endless variety of grey days” around, a bad mood into a good one. And, just like her imaginary steed, it demands to be noticed."
- Lemonade Kid, Steve Hoffman Music Forums
"I've read that Kangaroo played sets with The Castiles. Bruce Springsteen played guitar in the Castiles for a time. Springsteen would attend Kangaroo gigs with Steve Van Zandt to study the wild guitar technique of Teddy Speleos. Speleos went on to join Holy Moses; some hailed them as saviours, while others accused them of practising the dark arts. Kangaroo drummer N.D. Smart moved on to Mountain before joining Todd Rundgren's band Runt. When John Hall was forming Orleans, Barbara Keith had already gone solo."
- Umberto Petrolino, imdb2
Barbara Keith
'Blue Eyed Boy' - Barbara Keith
Laura Nyro
"Laura Nyro wasn't the most commercially successful singer-songwriter to emerge from the fertile New York City music scene. Yet this piano-playing songbird, whose hard-to-peg sound incorporated gospel, jazz, R&B and other styles, pursued her art with an unfettered spirit that her peers envied and future generations of musicians would emulate."
- Felesia M. Jackson, The Plain Dealer
"Laura Nyro was born of Jewish and Italian parents in the Bronx in 1947. Her father was a jazz trumpeter and even outside her home, music was a constant visceral presence, like air or electricity. "I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was one of the joys of my youth," she wrote in the liner notes to "Stoned Soul Picnic." The doo-wop and girl-group rock that filled the streets of New York then informed her songs (an influence paid homage to in the '71 release "Gonna Take a Miracle"), but so did the jazz she grew up with, the folk she heard in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village, gospel, show tunes, soul music -- Nyro's music was like the polyglot city from which it sprang, rich and surprising with an odd hint of danger."
- Sean Elder, Salon
Laura Nyro
'Tom Cat Goodbye' - Laura Nyro