The first night of this year's EMP Pop Conference offered a conversation with Nona Hendryx, for years a member of Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles and then LaBelle, where she, Patti, and Sarah Dash moved from girl-group street-corner harmonizing to spacey glam-funk. She's worked with dozens and dozens of gifted and influential musicians and producers of every genre in the pop-soul spectrum, and had a lot of great insights into the music world.But her conversation with Daphne Brooks and Sonnet Retman was stilted at times, the moderators spending more time rooting through their notes for questions to ask than actually absorbing and reacting to Hendryx's observations. Nevertheless, I was glad to have attended, to have gleaned some history I never knew and to hear stories of a music industry less contrived than today's, in an era when a group like LaBelle could make sonic and visual decisions based on what they wanted, not on what they or their handlers thought was marketable.
The casual music listener likely knows LaBelle only for their #1 hit "Lady Marmalade." I'm going to skip that in favor of one of their less well-known efforts: they provided backing vocals on Laura Nyro's 1971 album Gonna Take a Miracle, garnering a name credit for their efforts. Nyro gives the almost-title track "It's Gonna Take a Miracle" one of her best readings - thankfully, she forgoes the tempo shifts and wobbles that render some of her work dizzying and indulgent. (Like Dylan and P.F. Sloan, she was far better off writing for others than for herself.) Her version of "Miracle" doesn't ascend to the heights of the Royalettes' original (which sadly topped out at #41 on the charts) or Deneice Williams' more successful remake. But it holds up nicely, and those opening harmonies are good for a shiver or two down the back.
And a bit of trivia, courtesy of Nona: on a bet Patti had made with (the producer? I forget), LaBelle laid down all of their backing tracks for the entire album in a mere 7 hours.
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