Crying in the Sunshine: Margo Guryan
Posted by: zac | From: May 31, 2004
Anybody want to make a record with me? Okay, here's the premise: we're siblings from a mid-western factory town circa 1967 with no formal training, but tons of heart. The music is sort of unimportant, as long as it's sort of pop, sort of psyche (without particular reference), and incredibly rudimentary. and the L.P. sleeve is KILLER. We then milk the "Songs in the Key of Z" and "lost masterpieces" markets for all they're worth before blowing the lid off the whole thing, as the Greatest Grift of All Time.
The previous paragraph wasn't as successful as I had hoped. What was I getting at here? Oh yeah, the curio fascination of the 90s/00s. Weird scene. And I, seemingly more susceptible than most, get a little embarrassed jumping on the re-issue train every so often. Your Shaggs and your Langley Schools and your Michael Yonkers' and your New Creations and your Free Designs. Vanity projects resurrected for the kitsch contingent as the Most Important Record This Week. But they are, aren't they?
Anyway, before this gets anymore convoluted: Margo Guryan was the benefactor of similar circumstances, when in the late nighties a Japanese company released a bootleg of her single forgotten commercial recording, 1968's mind-blowing Take a Picture, and promptly sold several thousand copies. This prompted an official reissue in the year 2000 (with a few extra tracks), which further prompted Guryan's name to be dropped by millions of music snobs officially "in the know." Regardless of the particular game of telephone it took to see today's light, I feel blessed to be able to have it in my life.
Margo Guryan grew up in the suburbs of New York, where her interest in music took its initial shape. Unlike the majority of the "lost masterpiece" crowd, Guryan was an incredibly well-versed musician, studying classical and jazz piano from Grade School to College, where she studied with the likes of Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Max Roach, and Gunther Schuller. Sometime in the mid-sixties, so the story goes, Guryan's friend and fellow Jazz musician Dave Frishberg played her his copy of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", altering her path completely.
Composing a handful of original pop songs, Guryan was awarded a record contract in 1968, which produced her lone solo album, the aforementioned Take A Picture. Rich with her disparate musical knowledge, Take A Picture reinvisions the feather-weight chanteuse image of the sixties with an hulking undercurrent of jazz rhythm and melancholy delivery. It's incredibly realized for a debut, each song a mini-masterpiece of lilting pop structure and performance. Despite positive reviews, Guryan's crippling stage fright (she once sacrificed a piano degree when she learned she would have to perform for the senior recital) left the album unpromoted, and relatively forgotten. She continued to write for other artists (including Dion, Harry Nilsson, Jackie DeShannon, Glen Campbell, the Lennon Sisters, and Mama Cass) through the '70s, eventually becoming a music teacher.
Thanks are due to the reissue/repackage revisionists, who allow us to revisit the forgotten autumn 1968, when, for a brief instant, Margo Guryan was the Greatest Band of All Time.
Post a comment:
