Laura Nyro’s Save the Country has never been more pertinent.
I recently listened to it on the Spread Your Wings and Fly CD, a record of a concert she gave at the Fillmore East in 1971. I just bought it; I hadn’t listened to her in a while.
But as a teen in the late-70s, I really grooved to the way that Nyro understood so many emotional weirdnesses—adolescence is of course a time when you’re saturated with them.
I wasn’t at the time so interested in her political bent, for all that I’ve been political at least since I was ten, when I marched in the Vietnam Moratorium in November 1969.
Nyro may insist, “In my mind I can’t study war no more!”
But war has become part of the core, required U.S. curriculum.