TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/050189/05018900.071

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 69 lines

MUSIC, Page 74

Throwing In the Crying Towel

Phoebe Snow beats the blues with a fine new album

By Jay Cocks


    It seemed like a fine time. She was out of school, hanging out
in Greenwich Village, and Charlie Parker was teaching her to sing.
"Not that Charlie Parker," Phoebe Snow says now, but still, this
was a time of awakening. At the urging of Parker, her "first
boyfriend," Snow was beginning to experiment with the crystalline
grace of her four-octave voice, getting a grip on her crippling
shyness, actually starting to perform. She made a debut album, she
had a hit, she was on her way. Then her luck faded. So did she.

    That was the mid-'70s. There was music after that, but none of
it was as consistent or as solid; none of it was as soulful. Now
Phoebe Snow is back, with her first album in eight years, whose
title, Something Real, is a cool bit of understatement. The record
is so real -- so immediate -- that the feelings described in its
ten songs become almost palpable. The rhythms swing easy and rock
on request, but the tunes have lyrics so vivid that each becomes
an epigram from a broken heart.

    What gives the songs their staying power is their instant
emotional familiarity, the way they seem to carry so much of Snow's
emotional freight with no strain. The record's last song, Cardiac
Arrest, is a kick, a stops-out rocker that dares to be a little
goofy, that cuts the listener a little welcome slack. Even here,
though, Snow is laughing at the expense of a mangled heart. The
women Snow sings about put themselves at perpetual high risk. I'm
Your Girl, the record's midpoint and one of its high points, sounds
at first like another improbably beguiling Snow song about love
gone bad. I'm Your Girl is a love song, all right, but it is about
Snow's mother Lili, who died of cancer in 1986.

    Lili Grossman was a former Martha Graham dancer who married an
entertainer turned exterminator and raised Phoebe and her sister
in the subdued suburban environs of Teaneck, N.J. Phoebe was a shy
child. "If you remember," she says, "in high school there were
always a couple of kids whose clothes were on crooked, whose
glasses were really thick and hung sideways. Their hair was never
right, and their clothes didn't match, and they looked like little
lost souls wandering down the hallway. That was me."

    It was the music she heard, and the music Parker urged her to
make, that brought her out of herself. She was making demo tapes
the night she heard that Parker had ODed. But he had left her a
legacy: a little self-confidence. And some hard luck. Her first
album, released in 1974, is still treasured as one of the seminal
singer-songwriter testaments of the decade. There were enervating
legal problems over record deals. Her subsequent releases turned
unfocused, uncertain. And there were personal tragedies. Snow's
daughter Valerie was born with brain damage in 1975. Music was no
longer so much a refuge and release; it became just another
component of a great struggle. Snow resolved to care for her
daughter at home, but then almost died herself a few years back
from a sickness she declines to specify. She now supports herself
and Valerie mostly by singing advertising jingles.

    If quality can prevail, then the success of Something Real
ought to put some long distance between Snow and ditties for AT&T.
"If you survive something traumatic," she says, "you are never the
same again. If you survive two traumatic things, you take a quantum
leap in your spiritual self. You're never the same again. Life is
looking up. I am a crying towel, but thank God I can do that. I
don't know where I'd be if I didn't cry at least once a week."
That's the real beat beneath her new album. The faint sound of
broken hearts mending. The rhythm of life restored.


-- Elizabeth L. Bland/New York