The Dustbin

HOW IN THE NAME of god did the music of Dory Previn slip down the culture drain? Probably nobody but Dylan and the Residents have been able to do what she did with a lric.

I don’t even know if she’s alive. I’ve tried to find out on the web, but the few references bounce off each other. Someone thought she died about five years back. Another said she may have changed her name in the last decade, but if so, that name doesn’t lead you anywhere either. Her music was nominated for an Oscar, for, of all things, Valley of the Dolls, in 1967. And then she went nuts and was institutionalized because of fear of flying. One of the reasons her music disappeared is that she refused to tour.

The ex-wife of Andre Previn and the victim of Mia Farrow (who stole her husband before casting him off for Woody Allen), Previn, starting in 1970, pushed a quirky, often unfinished voice across maybe a half-dozen albums to record the history of someone who was abused by her father and the Catholic Church long before it became hip.

But Previn’s much more than that. She drags human disaster into the small room down the corridor and reads to it there from a quiet, penetrating book. A little-girl fear runs through both voice and lyrics, overlaid by cynicism and the wisdom of years. (Previn was about 40 when her first album came out.) I don’t know a combination quite like it anywhere else. "Mr. Whisper," on her first album (On My Way to Where, 1970), is an agonizing description of being ripped apart in the shock-therapy mill of mental hospitals. It ends in spoken echoes of extraordinary pain.

"Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister?" she asks on her untitled album (put out without notes to save paper during the energy crisis of 1974, though why it’s without title is less clear), then tells you what the Holy Sibling’s life would have been like:

Did she long to be the saviour

Saving everyone

She met?

And in private to her mirror

Did she whisper

Saviourette?

There’s a pacifist sentiment to some of her songs that you could agree with or not, but it’s not important. The human aspect is foremost. Did Jesus have a baby sister?

Previn’s few but enthusiastic fans seem to like the album Mythical Kings and Iguanas. I don’t, much. She wanders off here from the personally based tales that hit like nails in your feet. I think the untitled album is her best. You could drop a couple of tracks ("New Rooms" and, especially, "The Empress of China"), but what’s left is a modern Cole Porter turned confessional. The opening two songs–"Lover, Lover, Be My Cover" and "Coldwater Canyon"–dig deep into the soul. "Coldwater Canyon" is intensely visual, with each image ramming home the underlying emotion:

She ran ran wild

Like a paranoid child

And nothing was aware

Of her flight

Except the eye

Of the sleeping sky

And the ear

Of the infinite

Still and silent night.

Okay, you can’t hear the music behind these written presumptions, and the music is vitally important because it sets up something like cognitive dissonance. While she was putting the first album together, she didn’t trust herself to compose her own music (or so a reviewer said at the time). But after she heard what her composers had drummed up, she ditched it (except for "With My Daddy in the Attic") and put together her own work. After that, she needed no help.

Much of Previn’s tunesmithing is bouncy, almost danceable, an easy, conscious affront to the lyrics, including such apparent contextual nonsense as pedal steel. Think of Penn and Teller. Is there any reason these two should make sense together? And is there any way you could improve on their totality?