Christmas Eve, 1970. I was at the Fillmore East to see Laura Nyro. A month earlier, Nyro had released her fourth album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, and it had taken up more or less permanent residence on my turntable, alongside all of her previous albums. There I was, about to see the artist whose music spoke to me more profoundly on a personal level than any other, and by my side was the woman for whom I’d been nurturing a deep crush for several years. In other words, it couldn’t have been a more perfect evening. Did I mention that it was Christmas Eve in New York City? If you’ve been there, you know the silent magic that the holy night brings to the great city.
All was right in my world, but that was certainly not true of the world as a whole. Nixon was in the White House; Vietnam was raging on. Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King were recently dead. A few lines from the album’s most powerful statement, “Christmas In My Soul,” pretty much summed up the condition of the world in those days:
“Black Panther brothers bound in jail
Chicago Seven and the justice scale
Homeless Indian on Manhattan Isle
All God’s sons have gone to trial
And all God’s love is out of style
On Christmas.”
