TWENTY QUESTIONS


Singer-songwriter MARGO GURYAN’s sole album, 1968’s Take A Picture, is one of the very finest records to ever sit cross-legged between folk, psych and sunshine pop.


JEANETTE LEECH enjoyed a lengthy chat with Margo about her adventures within the music industry, the recording of that classic album and her varied influences from jazz to Mae West.


Shindig!: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us a little about your family and your childhood in the suburbs of New York.


Margo Guryan: My parents met at Cornell University. My mother was a piano major, while my father studied liberal arts. However, it was my father who had the great ear – he played the piano frequently, while I almost never heard my mother play. For birthdays, anniversaries and holidays I was always asked to write a poem; greeting cards were not looked upon kindly. If the words rhymed and the meter was correct, my ‘cards’ were always accepted with praise. The first song I learned to play on the piano was ‘Tea For Two’, taught to me by my father when I was around four or five. I began formal piano lessons at age six. It wasn’t long before I was able to ‘play’ with notes as I had learned to ‘play’ with words with my poems. Voila...songs! I hadn’t learned notation at this point, so I wrote the words down in the back of my lesson notebooks and can still remember some of the melodies today.


SD: So music really surrounded you while you were growing up?


MG: Music was always playing, usually on the radio – classical, popular songs and some jazz. We also had an old Victrola in the basement. I wish I’d kept it along with the 78s that were stored in its cabinet. When I was ten or eleven, my father brought me my first record, to go with my new record player – George Shearing’s ‘East Of The Sun’.


SD: It sounds like jazz had a particular early appeal then.


MG: My father’s love of popular songs and jazz must have been inherited. Jazz has more to do with ‘feel’ than anything else, at least that’s what first attracted me. I was influenced by all the music I liked, whether classical, pop, rock or jazz. Rhythm has always been the most important element in music to me.


SD: How did you develop this formative interest in songwriting?


MG: Early attempts at making up songs were clearly copies of the pop songs I heard on the radio. I absorbed the form and, without thinking, penned my ‘ditties’ accordingly. But when I reached college – Boston University – I really fell hard for jazz. I began to get


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songwriter Frank Loesser]. There I played my songs for Herb Eiseman. He liked my music but found it wasn’t commercial enough for his company and sent me over to Atlantic Records. At Atlantic I met two giants of the recording industry, although I didn’t know it then: Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun. They asked me for my demos. I said, "What are demos?" They looked at each other, rolling their eyes, and said, "Well, what did you expect to do for us?" I answered that I expected to play songs for them. They led me into a room with a piano and I played my songs, one after another, as they didn’t stop me. After I’d played for quite a while, one of them reached into a desk and pulled out a wad of song contracts. Then they asked me to "go around the corner and do exactly what I’d just done" in their studio – but this time with


interest shown in my songs, and I was offered a contract with [legendary jazz label] Storyville Records. However, my parents insisted that a lawyer review the contract, and he didn’t approve of the terms.


SD: Is that how you then came to be involved with Atlantic Records?


MG: Oh, that was an amazing experience! The lawyer thought that since there was interest in my music in Boston, perhaps someone should listen to it in New York. He sent me up to Frank Music [the company owned by Broadway and Tin Pan Alley


tape rolling. The engineer was Tom Dowd, soon to become a legend in his own right. This is how I found out what demos were! A few days later the phone rang in my house. My father answered. I heard him say, "You’d better speak to Margo yourself, because she won’t believe me." It was Jerry Wexler wishing to sign me to a recording contract with Atlantic.


SD: What happened next? Did you record a session with Atlantic?


MG: Yes, and my first session was supervised by Nesuhi Ertegun, another fabled record man. I didn’t know anything about recording and messed up pretty badly. In those days you sang ‘live’ with no tracking. Every time I goofed, I’d turn around to look in the control room, meaning I went off-mike and the musicians had to start over. In addition, I had a range break at about G over middle C. I didn’t know how to handle it, and it caused an uneven, and unpleasant, sound. So my early recording career was a disaster! But the Atlantic period produced my first recording as a writer: Chris Connor’s version of ‘Moon Ride’. I was on my way.


SD: How and why did you make the switch to developing a poppier sound in your songwriting?


MG: I had been married to Bob Brookmeyer, an enormously talented jazz trombonist. Pop music was looked upon as a desecration and never, never


listened to. Therefore, I missed the beginnings of the tidal changes in pop that were occurring. Following my divorce from Bob, my friend Dave Frishberg, a great jazz pianist and a songwriter himself, asked me to "come over and listen to something". It was ‘God Only Knows’ from Pet Sounds. It knocked me flat out! I bought a copy of the record on my way home. I listened to it over and over, turned off the record player, sat down at the piano and wrote ‘Think Of Rain’.


SD: How did your career develop after this?


MG: I was working as a secretary for Creed Taylor [record producer and founder of the jazz-orientated labels Impulse! and CTI] at this time, and played him some of my newer songs. He suggested that I make an appointment with April-Blackwood, which was the publishing arm of Columbia Records. I did just that, playing the songs for David Rosner, the man who was to become my


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