Nina Inch Nails

Uncompromising, driven by inner turmoil, external rage, mental health issues, activism, a virtuosic ability to blend mend and bend genres and musical forms and a need to simply and uncompromisingly just be. Miss Simone was as out there as it gets, that she’s filed next to Nine Inch Nails on my shelves is surely the work of Alphabeticus, the Roman god of musical storage*.

A half-assed shuffling through some greatest hits aside, I confess that it wasn’t until one day I heard ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’ on my iPod that I suddenly got it, got her, got with it.

Here are two contrasting LPs, her debut recording Little Girl Blue (1959) and a hugely odd 1972 live LP, Emergency Ward!**

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A classical piano prodigy born into a poor family in North Carolina, Nina Simone’s hometown collected enough money to send her to Juilliard, with hopes of her landing a place at a conservatoire in Philadelphia; she failed the audition, she felt for racial reasons. She began playing piano to accompany vocal groups to make money, was advised she would make more if she sang too and did it, even though she cared very little for popular music.

Little Girl Blue has a clutch of good boppers on it, her cover of ‘Mood Indigo’ is a great case in point, the rhythm bounces and her piano playing feels uniquely precise and robust. ‘Love Me Or Leave Me’ claims greatness by dint of a ludicrous amount of swing, conveyed by her weighty vocal every bit as much as her classically nuanced playing^. I also really like her only composition on the LP, the instrumental ‘Central Park Blues’ which is a low-key jazz where she alternates between quiet to LOUD very entertainingly.

The real genius in Little Girl Blues really does lie in the slower vocal numbers. I’m going to leave the title track out of consideration though because the odd ‘Good King Wenceslas’ mash-up^* unnerves me.

Nina Simone was very unmoved by these first recording sessions, saying she treated herself to three days of playing Beethoven afterwards to make it up to herself. I think you can hear this tension in the album, there is a detachment and a distance in even the most intimate songs here, even in the tone of her playing. Counterintuitively, the focus this distance gives her, brings everything into the most forensic scrutiny.

Take her stunning rendition of ‘Plain Gold Ring’ my favourite track here, the lyrics are minimal, almost trite when you read them but hearing her sing them breaks your heart. That distance is there too in the tone of her voice, you really see the love triangle play out.

Ditto ‘Don’t Smoke In Bed’ and ‘He Needs Me’, that voice saying so much more than the lyrics ever do. As for ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ well, let’s not get repetitive here, every track I’ve ever heard from Porgy And Bess just breaks me in two.

Add in the hit ‘My Baby Just Cares For me’ which is a perfect exercise in poise and timing, the stunning neo-classical workout ‘Good Bait’ and there’s the LP. Not a bad debut, all told.

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By 1972 Nina Simone was in an odd place, by her own reckoning her association with the Civil Rights Movement had hobbled her career, although it has to be said her own erratic behaviour, illnesses and travails are more likely causes. She was that thing to be avoided and feared, a difficult woman; more than that she was even more daunting as an unrepentantly difficult proudly black woman. The narrative is always so different, more indulgent for a white male displaying exactly the same behaviour.

Where do you start with Emergency Ward! a live LP, that has even less claim to that description than certain Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy titles. It’s a three song LP with two tracks recorded in the studio and one more recorded at the NJ army base Fort Dix.

Now you know what troops like best after a hard day’s armying? yup they just want to kick back with some brewskis and listen to an 18-minute experimental dissection of a George Harrison song praising Krishna, intercut with a poem by one of the Last Poets. Its a formula that works every time, a regular tonic for the troops.

Smug me-isms aside ‘My Sweet Lord/Today Is A Killer’ is a helluva thing, there’s no sense of Krishna here, the spirituality has been co-opted into an extended gospel workout, with odd vocal interjections by Simone’s 9 year-old daughter and the talents of the Bethany Baptist Junior Choir of South Jamaica, New York*^. It is the sound of assurance sought, almost lost and then found. I find her interpolation of the words of ‘Today Is A Killer’ very moving and there’s one point where she stretches out the word ‘lord’ for, oh, about 10 minutes. It’s astonishing. Is the end meant to be ironic? jarring? I love music that asks questions and doesn’t give you answers.

Emergency Ward! is often interpreted as Nina Simone’s reaction to the Vietnam war, the LP cover making this explicit. The angst, frustration and disquiet displayed here is universal rather than specific in scope.

Take the non-live ‘Poppies’, which contrasts a boy playing in flowers with the death of an addict. It’s a helluva thing, the music and orchestration up to anything Ike Hayes put out. It’s beautiful on one level, deeply disturbing on another, given the heroin use endemic amongst GIs in Vietnam.

Emergency Ward! closes with a rendition of George Harrison’s ‘Isn’t It A Pity’, bearing in mind her previous LP was called Here Comes The Sun I think Miss Simone may have had a favourite Beatle. She takes Harrison’s song and magnifies it into something incredible, a towering, 11-minute meditation, a hopeful lamentation, an invocation to live, to feel, to care. She never sounded more like a priestess, very few songs ever get to sound as plain BIG as this. I love how she emotes every single line here. By the end of this song Nina Simone isn’t singing to God, she has simply become Her.

Which kind of beats playing your greatest hits, sped up with some carefully prepared ad-libs chucked in between the songs. Wow.

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I beg your indulgence for having written far too much about my current obsession, but hey think of this as my faux live LP, where I just riff and vamp around the very concept of reviews and Lego, whilst ostensibly covering a song by Ringo Starr …

No, ah well. Nina Simone was a genius, I’m not quite there yet myself. Buy these LPs, buy other ones of hers too and love one another. I’m going for a lie down.

1209 Down.

*besides, being next to such, comparatively, puny squirts sets her work even better.

**the front cover carries an exclamation mark, the LP is just Emergency Ward on the labels and spine; I prefer the drama.

^seriously, the middle section sounds like Bach^^

^^of the J.S variety, rather than the Sebastian one.

^*yeah, she seems to have invented those too.

*^I don’t get to type the Bethany Baptist Junior Choir of South Jamaica, New York very often.