Laura Nyro's Rock and Roll HOF induction a messy family affair

On a recent Internet adventure I stumbled across the factoid that the late singer-songwriter Laura Nyro had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year. Although old-timers in the New York City music scene and people on the gender political and musical fringes know who she is, I wouldn’t expect many “kids” today to have a clue, and the fact is that after a brief burst of fame dating from the late Sixties to 1971—when she wrote songs that were major hits of the Fifth Dimension, Three Dog Night, Blood, Sweat and Tears and Barbara Streisand—her relevance in pop music was largely relegated to the cult scene. Nyro was one of those rare singer-songwriters whose own compositions were hits for other artists, but she herself never had a top-forty hit from her own recordings. Her cover of the Drifters’ top-ten hit, “Up on the Roof,” was her only Hot 100 entry, moving all the way up to #92.

Personally, the reason why Nyro has any relevance to me is that, like Carole King, she was a singer of rare honesty, “liberated from technical decorum. She insists on being heard as she is--not raunchy and hot-to-trot or sweet and be-yoo-ti-ful, just human, with all the cracks and imperfections that implies.” But that was former Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau’s opinion in his review of King’s mega-seller 1971 album Tapestry, not of Nyro. In fact, Christgau was not much of a fan of Nyro’s musical output. Although he granted that “her jazzy pop-gospel synthesis is without precedent or facsimile,” but otherwise she was a “Bronx tearjerker” whose “gloppy sensibility” sounded like “a novice practicing circular breathing.” In regard to her 1975 “comeback” album, he would have said that she sounded “out of training”—except that “she's never been IN training.”

But so much of criticism is a matter of taste. I personally hate 90 percent of the new music I’m hearing on the radio today, but somebody must like it, or else they wouldn’t be playing that tuneless, unmusical garbage. To my ears, Nyro’s original recordings of “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Stoney End” are more satisfying than the subsequent hit cover versions. She also appeared on the Manhattan Transfer album Tonin’, lending her vocals to a fetching cover of the Delfonics’ hit “La-La Means I Love You.” Her posthumous album Angel in the Dark, a recording of mostly R&B and Motown standards, stands out from similar efforts by Michael MacDonald, Rod Stewart and Phil Collins, who treated the material with saccharin reverence. Nyro apparently learned her lesson after her bemusing 1971 album Gonna Take a Miracle, which could have used less of her vocal knots and more of Gamble and Huff; at least on Angel, she let the music’s unpretentious emotions speak. There have been complaints that there have been too many non-deserving entries into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Nyro is among them. But like Joe Namath being in the NFL Hall of Fame despite having distinctly unimpressive career statistics, her entry can be justified as symbolism; for Namath, it was helping make the upstart AFL relevant, and for Nyro, it was as a female musician who was both a singer and a songwriter to be taken seriously.

But this is still just a footnote in the pages of rock and roll history. What made Nyro’s induction of interest to some people was that there seemed to have been some controversy surrounding who was going to be invited to the induction ceremony, and who was going to accept the award on her behalf, since she died of ovarian cancer 15 years earlier. When she died, she left her estate in the care of Maria Desiderio, who was described as her “partner.” Although Nyro was married to a man named David Bianchini in the 1970s and once had a relationship with Jackson Browne, it is assumed in some circles that she was in a fact a lesbian; it is not precisely known, however, if she actually had a sexual relationship with Desiderio. Nyro may have been bisexual, although she never admitted to any sexual preference when asked about her relationship with Desiderio, claiming she disliked “labels.” That Nyro performed later in life in women’s musical festivals, which some of the participants viewed as an anti-male statement, is not necessarily evidence of anything save “gender unity” for others. Nyro was known to be uncomfortable in public and may have suffered from ADD, and perhaps she felt more at ease among people who "understood" her. But unlike Janis Ian, she never came out in public claiming that she had determined after all these years she was gay—after complaining about being the “ugly duckling girl” of “At Seventeen,” pining after boys who were not interested in her.

But Desiderio died herself not long afterward, and she named her friend Patty Di Lauria as executor of the Nyro estate. The problem is that Nyro had a brief fling with a man from India, named Harindra "Hari" Singh some years earlier, and from this union came a son, who Nyro named Gil Bianchini—and who happens to be the sole legitimate heir to her estate. Bianchini was still underage when his mother died, and Desiderio was technically his guardian. It seems that Bianchini and Desiderio didn’t get along, and her friend Di Lauria apparently did not like him, either, refusing to recognize his rights as Nyro’s heir. I suppose one could also speculate that Di Lauria has a political agenda in freezing him out, but you’d have to ask her about that.

Not that Bianchini helped his case; like many children of the “famous,” Bianchini’s life tended to steer off course. In a Village Voice profile in 2009 written by Ira Kantor, Bianchini said that his mother was his “best friend,” but this is something we often hear in fatherless households. According to Michele Kort’s gushing biography of Nyro, “Soul Picnic” his father was just someone this “strong woman” used to have a child with, and meant nothing more; it also appears that Nyro often viewed her maternal responsibilities as an unwanted distraction. Like in many such arrangements, the son tends to seek life counsel and “family” elsewhere. Although not a gang member himself, he certainly immersed himself in gang culture and music. When Bianchini was 15, he was sentenced to two years’ probation on a drug charge. He was sent away to live with his godparents, but they soon sent him back, supposedly because of a “clash in music taste,” according to the Voice. Through the intervention of his mother—who was diagnosed with cancer at the time—he avoided hard time for violating his probation. But after Nyro passed away, Bianchini landed in jail, where he learned a life lesson about freedom. "You locked down—you can go in your dorm or in the cell block, or you can go in the middle of the area where everybody's at or whatever, but you know you locked down” he told the Voice.

Although there continues to be a modest flow of royalties from Nyro’s musical output, Bianchini has seen almost none of this go into his pockets (although some of it certainly has gone into Di Lauria’s). At first Di Lauria was able to take advantage of Gianchini’s ignorance of the law. Although he is technically the heir to Nyro’s estate, Di Lauria’s has been “donating” Nyro’s personal effects without his consent (she claims that she didn’t know he wanted them). In Nyro’s final will, "Everything was designed and built a certain way, where it's not like everything is just mine, you know?” Gianchini told the Voice. “That's just the way it's stipulated, being that I was kind of, like, you know, wild when I was younger. There was a point in time when we wasn't really in contact with each other and, you know, a lot of people kind of tried to count me out of the equation. . . . Now, I'm in better communications, and we're more organized," meaning he and his legal representatives. In the meantime, Gianchini was making a living as a rap artist without a contract, playing an occasional gig. He was attempting to acquire permission from Sony Records to sample his mother’s work for what he termed a “tribute” album, although three years later I haven’t found any evidence that this project was completed. His Facebook page doesn’t make it obvious that “Gil-T” is the son of a “famous” mother, although it does make sure you hear some of his own musical output—which, of course, demonstrates next to no influence from his mother.

It also seems that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of organizers were ill-disposed toward Bianchini, if they even knew he existed. Bette Midler, who was a friend of Nyro, certainly knew of his existence, and expressed concern regarding why he was left out of the ceremony in which she was designated as be Nyro’s presenter by the organizers. She contacted Jann Wenner, the former publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine and who now oversees the RRHOF, about the apparent snub of Nyro’s son. In an email to Joel Peresman, president of the RRHOF, Wenner inquired about why Bianchini was not invited. Peresman replied that

“I told you about this awhile ago along with the Freddie King family situation. We have dealt for a number of years with woman named Patty De Laura who I believe was Laura’s partner but is the person who Laura entrusted and gave her estate and all of her materials too and she disinherited her son. Patty has always lent us things of Laura s and we are just about done on the agreement with Patty to get all of Laura s materials. We offered this fellow two tickets to attend if he wanted to but nothing to do with coming on stage. Patty is our guest but she also is not coming on stage. Sort of the same with Freddie King. Lots of people came out of the woodwork as sons and daughters but only one we have dealt with before who has materials she is giving us and will attend but not come on stage. We will need to fill Bette in on this as there won’t be a person to come on stage and ‘accept’ the award.”

Wenner then contacted Midler, telling her that “This is a policy question for the Hall of Fame, not for the individual presenter nor the inductee’s heirs or estate.” The problem, of course, is that the Hall was likely receiving malicious and false information about Bianchini from Di Lauria, and wanted to "please" her because of her past "generosity." Nyro certainly knew her as Desiderio’s friend—but not as her “partner”—and Bianchini had not been disinherited. Peresman refers to Nyro’s only child as “this fellow,” and only offered him two $100 tickets to sit in the gallery, for which along with travel expenses he would have to pay himself. Midler knew the truth, and apparently she would be the one to “fill in” Peresman and Wenner. Not long afterward, Peresman switched gears and invited Bianchini to not just a full-paid trip to the ceremony in Cleveland, but to appear on stage to accept his mother’s award. There is a video on YouTube of the subsequent event, in which Bianchini reads his speech from loose leaf sheets of paper, and his every statement is greeted with applause, as if the audience knows the backstory leading up to this event.