Margo Guryan
Margo Guryan is one of those: in 1968, Spanky & Our Gang charted with her “Sunday Morning”; that number and more of her smart, upbeat, beautifully crafted tunes were recorded by Harry Belafonte, Jackie DeShannon, Dion, Cass Elliot, Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell, Astrud Gilberto, the Lennon Sisters, Julie London, Claudine Longet, Carmen McRae, and Harry Nilsson. But by the time Guryan hit her stride, in the late 60s, the line dividing singer from songwriter was being erased by rock artists like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. Aspiring singers felt the heat immediately, and by the end of the decade many career songwriters, seeing their market eroded, were venturing into the spotlight as well. Guryan was an attractive young woman with a voice like an angel, but for a variety of reasons she refused to perform; her only album, Take a Picture, was released by Bell Records in 1968 and sank without a trace. The indie soft-pop craze of the late 90s buoyed it back to the surface–by the end of the decade, vinyl copies were selling on eBay for close to $200. In 2000, the independent Franklin Castle Recordings released it on CD in the U.S., and last fall it followed up with the career-spanning 25 Demos. Together the reissues reveal one of the most overlooked talents of that explosively creative time, a reluctant vocalist whose songs, perversely, were indivisible from her voice.
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Now in her early 60s and living in Los Angeles, Guryan takes a dim view of the singer-songwriter revolution. “That really ruined two branches of entertainment,” she says. “You got a lot of people who were writing who were really not terrific writers, and you got a lot of people singing and performing who were not terrific singers and performers. And I think that music has suffered because of that.” She emphatically consigns herself to the second category. Born in Far Rockaway, Queens, Guryan began learning classical piano when she was six, and at 17 she got a chance to play her pop songs for Jerry Wexler and Nesuhi Ertegun at Atlantic. Ertegun gave one of her songs to jazz chanteuse Chris Connor and also signed Guryan as a singer, but her first demo session, recorded by the now legendary Tom Dowd, revealed a fatal flaw in her voice. “I have a range break, right around G above middle C,” she says. “Above that I can sing, but it’s almost falsetto. Below it I can sing in full voice. It was an inconsistent sound. And the more they told me to sing out, the worse it got.”
Her material was often surprisingly challenging. “I had no idea how complex her songs were until I tried to record them myself,” says Linus of Hollywood (aka Kevin Dotson), the LA indie-pop artist who runs Franklin Castle. He covered two of Guryan’s songs on his 1999 solo debut, Your Favorite Record. “When you listen to her compositions, her melodies and grooves sound so smooth and flowing,” he says. “But hidden beneath the surface are some pretty complex chord and time changes.”
In February 1968, Guryan had her biggest hit when Spanky & Our Gang, one of the coed vocal groups following the Mamas & the Papas on the west coast, took an elaborately produced single of “Sunday Morning” to number 30 on the pop chart. The relentlessly minor-key melody is unusual for Guryan, but the song is no less arresting for it. Her slinky performance of it is a highlight of both her records, bringing out the New York in the song (“It’s so quiet in the street / We can hear the sound of feet walking by / I’ll put coffee on to brew / We can have a cup or two / And do what other people do on Sunday morning”). The Spanky single was weighed down by near-gothic production and Elaine McFarlane’s somber vocal; Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell released a limp remake of the hit version on their 1968 album together, and Julie London recorded it for her 1969 stab at rock ‘n’ roll, Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.
