MOG

The following is the third edition of a MOG by my pops. Hope you enjoy! "It was a chilly rain-swept night in Greenwich Village in late October 1961. Nina Simone was playing at her home club, the Village Gate, and some college classmates and I had driven down from Westchester to see the diva. That evening, there were but seven people in her audience, in a place that held about 300. Gowned elegantly, Nina took the stage before an all but empty house and proceeded to play an entire set for us and an encore. Now, that's class! It was an evening I shall never forget, one of the most emotionally thrilling and intimate performances of my life. She featured several songs from her then-current album "Nina at the Village Gate": Olatunji's gently transformed lullabye, "Zungo" and the similarly-themed "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown, Jr.; plus the subtly gay Rogers & Hart tune "He Was Too Good To Me". That last one wrung us out like rags.

Nina was trained as a classical pianist, but when seeking work she was told she had to sing or she wouldn't be hired. Her first, and only real hit, was "I Loves You Porgy", which she sang on the Ed Sullivan show, introducing her to a nationwide audience. Her vocal range was narrow but deep, and when she punched out an epic like the Brecht-Weil "Pirate Jenny",everyone else's version (vide: Judy Collins almost laughable attempt) fell abashedly by the wayside. She was the mistress of venom on "Mississippi Goddamn", a Sixties spit in the eye at the capital of entrenched racism; the heroine of heartbreak as she played live just hours after Martin Luther King was shot down, instantly composing "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)"; the tempest-tost tearjerker in her Carnegie Hall version of the two-timed lover in "The Other Woman".

A few days ago, a friend of my son's said, "Hey, Nina Simone sounds just like Antony (and The Johnsons)". "No, pal", I remonstrated, "exactly the other way around".

Over the years I had a few personal encounters with her. On KCRW in the mid-eighties she did a live interview in which she broke down weeping about all the inequities of the music biz-mess. When I asked her if she was familiar with Bob Marley, she nearly jumped down my throat. "Hell, yes!" she said. "I even wrote a song about him", which she then sat down at our studio piano to sing. It was just a little short thing with the oddest lyrics: "You took my teeth, doo'n doo do, you took my eyes, doo'n doo do- that is why Bob Marley died, that is why Bob Marley died, you took his teeth." I've yet to figure that one out, but it was sung with such uncompromising passion, I still can't get it out of my head a full twenty years later.

A few months after our interview, my wife and I invited her to dinner. When I arrived at her Hollywood Boulevard apartment, a block from the beginning of the Walk of Fame, just west of LaBrea, she opened the door and in a snarly voice, without preliminaries, demanded, "Can you find me a boyfriend?" I demurred that that might be a rather tricky proposition at this late hour, and she seemed disappointed. We drove back to my home and as we were about to have dessert at 8 p.m., she stood up and said, "I've got to go home. It's past my bedtime." That was the last time I saw her.

Her autobiography is highly detailed in disasters and mental challenges. A recent issue of the magazine called Fader shared fascinating first-hand accounts of Nina's influence, and encounters with her, by her ex-husband and several famous musicians, and is well worth seeking out for some alternate history.

I have yet to find another female singer who can move me quite the way Nina does. Her early Colpix period has several masterpieces, especially each of the live albums at the Gate, Newport and Carnegie Hall. The late sixties RCA era finds her idiosyncratically covering several pop hits by George Harrison and Leonard Cohen, and even "Ain't Got No" from the Broadway musical "Hair". My wife Mary's favorite album is "Nina Simone and Piano" on which she limns hair-raising horror-show readings of "Everyone's Gone to the Moon"and "The Desperate Ones". This is not easy-listening music; her paid-for-with-blood-and-tears works are calls to arms, and once you hear them, you too will never forget them. She is truly an Artist for the Ages."