Generally speaking, the minute any star walked into Mediasound their presence was known either through a lively personality and/or a flamboyant posture. However, when Laura Nyro first entered Studio A, I hardly noticed her. She was so unassuming and quiet. She seemed out of place—like someone’s mom who just got lost on the way to the DMV. She was not fancy. There was no bravado. She seemed shy and vulnerable, and for a rock star too casually dressed in a worn and faded black sweatshirt and mid-calf denim skirt. Her dark wavy waist-length hair appeared uncombed. And she was physically different from the female vocalists of that era; she was plump—a whole note hanging low on the staff. Though she remained distant, she looked me straight in the eye and gazing back, I saw that her eyes told a thousand stories none of which I knew.  I didn’t realize, then, that Nyro was the voice behind many of the songs that had once inspired me to sing including ‘Wedding Bell Blues’, ‘Will You Marry Me Bill’, and ‘Eli’s Comin'.

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Columbia Records staff arranger/producer Charlie Calello, a true ‘professional’ in every sense of the word, was recruited to direct Nyro’s Smile LP. Calello had formerly produced Nyro’s hit album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, Calello was  the former singer/bassist for Frankie Vali.  His credits would eventually include Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Roberto Carlos, Neil Diamond, Al Kooper, Bruce Springsteen, Engelbert Humperdinck, Ray Charles, Bobby Vinton, Janis Ian, Barry Manilow, Juice Newton, Nancy Sinatra, the Highwaymen and many more. 

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The orchestration behind Nyro’s records was crafted by Calello from piano/vocal tapes of original songs that Nyro supplied him. Back then, professional charts consisted of stacked musical staffs with each stave containing the notated parts for a single instrument. After the full score was composed, each individual part was copied by hand and then distributed to the prospective players.  The guitar player, for example, didn’t need to see the notations of the drummer and therefore his/her part was given separately.

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Calello finished writing the charts for Smile the day before the session and the transcriber stayed up all night separating the staffs. In the early morning, Calello’s assistant scrambled around by taxi to collect the charts from the scribe in order to get them to the studio on time. Once the charts arrived, Calello stood at a podium, wand in hand, and rehearsed the score with all the players. On the spot, he fixed all the mistakes and adjusted the parts where necessary. Calello was a very low-key and humble person, not a braggart. One would never have guessed he possessed such enormous talent.

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The fact that Calello and Nyro had a good relationship recording a previous album wasn’t all that apparent during the Smile sessions. Between long silences and sideways glances, Calello complained that Nyro was talking in analogies. “Make it sound like yellow, like cadmium yellow!” was one of her directives. In muffled tones, he indicated to the head engineer that he didn’t understand what she wanted him to do and that he wanted little to do with her new style of communication. Later in life, Nyro would compare the 5th Dimension to ‘an ice cream soda—sweet pop’ and call songwriting ‘musical architecture’. She was not only a talented songwriter but a highly dimensional thinker as well and obviously ahead of her time. 

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Friends, neighbors, relatives and/or lovers of recording artists were never encouraged to come to the studio mainly because they often had strong opinions and sometimes even sway over the artist.  This was understandably unwanted by seasoned producers.  But Nyro, on the heels of a divorce from Vietnam Vet, David Bianchini, brought a ‘girlfriend’ named Maria Desiderio. With Desiderio out of earshot and Nyro on the other side of the glass unable to hear any conversation in the control room whispers were abound, “Is she a lesbian? Is Maria her lover? All of this was quite perplexing and even shocking in 1976.

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By ’77, New York Times writer, Deborah Sontag, reported that Nyro and Desiderio were ‘dating’, and indeed Nyro and Desiderio were ‘partners’ until Nyro’s death from ovarian cancer in 1997 at age 49. Despite Nyro’s anti-celebrity pose, Calello’s confusion about Nyro’s obtuse directives and all the hushed talk about lesbians, I listened to the Smile LP incessantly for years. At the time Smile was recorded Nyro owned two cats, Mamasan and Eddie. As fellow cat owners, JANTURAN decided to whip up an acoustic rock version of Nyro’s ‘The Cat Song’.