Monday, May. 01, 1989

Throwing In the Crying Towel

By JAY COCKS

It seemed like a fine time. She was out of school, hanging out in Greenwich Village, and Charlie Parker was teaching her to sing. "Not that Charlie Parker," Phoebe Snow says now, but still, this was a time of awakening. At the urging of Parker, her "first boyfriend," Snow was beginning to experiment with the crystalline grace of her four-octave voice, getting a grip on her crippling shyness, actually starting to perform. She made a debut album, she had a hit, she was on her way. Then her luck faded. So did she.

That was the mid-'70s. There was music after that, but none of it was as consistent or as solid; none of it was as soulful. Now Phoebe Snow is back, with her first album in eight years, whose title, Something Real, is a cool bit of understatement. The record is so real -- so immediate -- that the feelings described in its ten songs become almost palpable. The rhythms swing easy and rock on request, but the tunes have lyrics so vivid that each becomes an epigram from a broken heart.

What gives the songs their staying power is their instant emotional familiarity, the way they seem to carry so much of Snow's emotional freight with no strain. The record's last song, Cardiac Arrest, is a kick, a stops-out rocker that dares to be a little goofy, that cuts the listener a little welcome slack. Even here, though, Snow is laughing at the expense of a mangled heart. The women Snow sings about put themselves at perpetual high risk. I'm Your Girl, the record's midpoint and one of its high points, sounds at first like another improbably beguiling Snow song about love gone bad. I'm Your Girl is a love song, all right, but it is about Snow's mother Lili, who died of cancer in 1986.

Lili Grossman was a former Martha Graham dancer who married an entertainer turned exterminator and raised Phoebe and her sister in the subdued suburban environs of Teaneck, N.J. Phoebe was a shy child. "If you remember," she says, "in high school there were always a couple of kids whose clothes were on crooked, whose glasses were really thick and hung sideways. Their hair was never right, and their clothes didn't match, and they looked like little lost souls wandering down the hallway. That was me."

It was the music she heard, and the music Parker urged her to make, that brought her out of herself. She was making demo tapes the night she heard that Parker had ODed. But he had left her a legacy: a little self-confidence. And some hard luck. Her first album, released in 1974, is still treasured as one of the seminal singer-songwriter testaments of the decade. There were enervating legal problems over record deals. Her subsequent releases turned unfocused, uncertain. And there were personal tragedies. Snow's daughter Valerie was born with brain damage in 1975. Music was no longer so much a refuge and release; it became just another component of a great struggle. Snow resolved to care for her daughter at home, but then almost died herself a few years back from a sickness she declines to specify. She now supports herself and Valerie mostly by singing advertising jingles.

If quality can prevail, then the success of Something Real ought to put some long distance between Snow and ditties for AT&T. "If you survive something traumatic," she says, "you are never the same again. If you survive two traumatic things, you take a quantum leap in your spiritual self. You're never the same again. Life is looking up. I am a crying towel, but thank God I can do that. I don't know where I'd be if I didn't cry at least once a week." That's the real beat beneath her new album. The faint sound of broken hearts mending. The rhythm of life restored.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York