by Alan Light
In October, Nina fulfilled another ambition—though it was more Andy’s vision than her own. “She will play Las Vegas yet,” Stroud had told jazz journalist Leonard Feather. “When she does, it will be just the way it has been everywhere else she’s worked: wild cheering crowd, standing-room-only replays and then, of course, they let her sing anything she likes.”
She was booked into Caesars Palace, but in the lounge known as Nero’s Nook rather than the main stage; she shared the bill with Xavier Cugat and Charo. The market still represented a pinnacle for “mainstream” entertainment, but the results were predictably disastrous.
If she was still having issues with the audience in New York, the Vegas crowd and their short attention span infuriated her. Nina’s attitude antagonized the technical crew, who paid her back with a microphone that frequently cut in and out.
“I gave up in two weeks,” she said. “I was supposed to play four weeks. It was very hard. We had to play five shows a day. And you had to play when nobody was there—at five o’clock in the morning, when there was nobody there, I had to play anyway, and it was too hard. So I cut short my job there after two weeks.” (Even a two-week stay might have been an exaggeration on Simone’s part. In her memoir, she said that she bailed after four days.)
The experience at Nero’s Nook may have fueled her desire to go more aggressively against the grain, to start pushing her live performances further. “I’ve always thought that I was shaking people up,” she said, “but now I want to go at it more, and I want to go at it more deliberately, and I want to go at it coldly. I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I want them to be in pieces. I want to go in that den of those elegant people with their old ideas, smugness, and just drive them insane.”
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Though she had no further meltdowns for a while, Simone was still walking an emotional tightrope. As a December 1967 diary entry illustrates, her professional life and her personal—even her sexual—life were so enmeshed that she wasn’t sure where to direct her exasperation.
I don’t sleep with [Andrew] too often—I am not needed—Everything I’ve had in terms of security (most especially my music) seems to be slipping right between my fingers. And Andy (he’ll get out of it without any feelings of guilt) he like an analyst just sits back + says “She wants no part of me; there’s nothing I can do”!
I haven’t been needed in a while. No where in the press am I mentioned, voluntarily. Am I evolving again??? What is left for me now? I get no preferential treatment from Andrew.
At this moment, Stroud didn’t seem overly concerned with his wife’s mental state. Keeping her on track was a matter of continuity rather than an urgent crisis. “I didn’t picture it as a problem,” he said. “I pictured it as a situation that could be managed like I did everything else. I figured with enough success that would alleviate a lot of these phobias that she had, and ghosts. She never frightened me—she frustrated me.”
One achievement capped the up-and-down year of 1967: she received word that her recording of “Go to Hell” from the Silk & Soul album had been nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Female Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance. Ultimately, she lost the award to Aretha Franklin.
Simone ended the year spending the holidays with her family, seemingly in fine (and apparently sometimes marijuana-assisted) spirits, still fragile but on good terms with her husband and her parents. On Christmas night, she wrote to Stroud to express how much she had missed him—not just during this trip but for months. She wanted to close the distance between them, writing that “unless I get to you soon, I feel as though I’ll dissolve and never be heard of any more and people won’t even remember that there was a me.”
A few days later, she described an idyllic scene with her parents, helping her mother with the wash at the laundromat and watching her father play guitar (“I don’t think I’d ever realized what a great musician he is”). She sounded thrilled to be at such ease around her family, jokingly suggesting that Stroud start managing her father. “This vacation is wonderful,” she wrote, “I’m really enjoying myself.”
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After an active, productive year, Simone was becoming very aware that she was employing a lot of bodies between her band, her business, and her home staff, which meant increasing pressure to continue generating income for everyone.
“There are nineteen people who depend on me for their livelihood—that’s a hell of a lot of people,” she said. “Because I know that if I say, ‘Look, I’m too tired to work tonight,’ I’m gonna get it from both ends. Nobody is gonna understand or care that I’m too tired. I’m very aware of that. Now, I would like some freedom somewhere, where I didn’t feel those pressures, and I think that some songs would flow out of me then, because they wouldn’t have to come.”
The rigor of her schedule was increasingly heightened by the emotional demands of being a public figure and overseeing a growing business. “As the fame grew, and the loss of privacy, her life was not her own, but it was that of the public,” said her sister Frances. “She got to a place where she felt all the burden of supporting thirteen or fourteen people. She would talk about her musicians and their families, and all of her other staff and their families, because their livelihood was dependent on her livelihood. So then she felt responsible for all of those different sectors. That took away the pleasure of doing the songs and the music and rehearsals and so forth. If she didn’t work, other folks’ lives were affected by it.”
She was telling those around her that she wasn’t making money from her albums, only from the concerts. This not only put pressure on her to keep touring but also added to her rising suspicions about record companies. Occupying the top spot on the Nina Simone organization pyramid inevitably meant juggling elements other than music, which was always difficult for her.
Of course, the other way to look at this was that Simone refused to make the effort that would keep her career growing. She still insisted on treatment that severely restricted her moneymaking potential. “If a band does a European tour, you book as many gigs as possible—let’s go out there and make the bread,” said Al Schackman. “You could do five or six concerts a week, and we would do two. Nina demanded a travel day, a rest day, concert day, rest day, travel day. Six days, and maybe we’ve done one or two concerts. She resented working—that was her slogan, ‘You work me like a dog.’
“If you want to get ahead, you’ve got to take care of your business, if it’s going to grow and survive. These are the rules. If you don’t want them, back off. And she’s never been able to accept that.”
But Eunice Waymon hadn’t grown up dreaming of being a pop star. She wanted to be a classical musician, an artist, playing in a world where pianos were perfectly tuned and audiences were quiet and attentive. Where the compensation for all that discipline and practice was respect, not radio play. She believed that excellence would be acknowledged for its own sake, not because you hustled for your reward. So the notion that she wanted a swimming pool for the house but didn’t want to take on extra dates to pay for it presumably didn’t seem like a problem to her; Stroud said that her favorite thing was selling her songs for commercials and getting paid without doing any work at all.
“[Stroud] didn’t understand Nina,” said Sam Waymon. “He did not understand the complexity and the madness of being an artist—the confusion, the joy, the happiness, how one day you love what you do and the next day you may hate the very same thing that you loved the day before.”
The first few months of 1968 saw her returning to Carnegie Hall, traveling to Cannes for the MIDEM (Marché International du Disque et de l’Édition Musicale) trade conference, playing in Detroit and Vancouver and for two weeks at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. In February, a massive birthday celebration was held for Huey P. Newton, the imprisoned cofounder of the Black Panther Party, at the L.A. Sports Arena. During the event, a (short-lived, ultimately) merger was announced between the Pan
thers and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Speakers included H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and Bobby Seale, but not a single woman.
“It was Nina Simone’s voice that bestowed on that gathering an aura of historical transcendence,” wrote activist Angela Davis, one of the event’s organizers. “In representing all of the women who had been silenced, in sharing her incomparable artistic genius, she was the embodiment of the revolutionary democracy we had not yet learned how to imagine. At that moment we were no longer powerless individuals but rather a formidable collective force that was moving irreversibly in the direction of radical change.”
While Simone continued to complain about being tired, there was a sense of new momentum and mission informing her work—a need to draw attention to the condition of her people, to point toward some kind of transformation in society. “It’s very frustrating to find that you’re not moving as fast as you’d like,” she told filmmaker Joel Gold for the 1968 documentary short Nina, “and sometimes I get afraid that I won’t be able to do all I’m supposed to do before I die. But I know where I’m supposed to go and I’m on my way, slowly but going….I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but all I know is that force that’s inside of me is pushing me toward something.”
And then, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and the world would never be the same—not for Nina Simone, not for anyone.
“How did you feel when Martin Luther King died?” the host of the British TV program Hard Talk asked her decades later. “Oh, God, man, I was devastated,” Nina answered. “…I think I must have cried for two weeks, and it killed my inspiration for the civil rights movement, and the United States.”
Following Dr. King’s murder, there was mourning, and there was chaos. Riots broke out in 125 American cities, resulting in 46 deaths and more than 2,600 injuries. The nonviolence he had preached was in danger of turning into something close to civil war. Music was one of the only outlets for black sorrow and rage—in Boston, Mayor Kevin White appealed to James Brown not to cancel his concert but to televise it on the local PBS affiliate; the city, known as a hotbed of racial tension, was one of the few urban centers that remained peaceful.
On April 7, three days after Dr. King’s death, Simone performed on Long Island at the Westbury Music Fair. “We’re glad to see you, and happily surprised with so many of you,” she greeted the audience, in a tone of sorrow and chilling calm. “We didn’t really expect anybody tonight, and you know why…but we’re glad that you’ve come to see us and hope that we can provide…some kind of something for you, this evening, this particular evening, this Sunday, at this particular time in 1968. We hope that we can give you some—some of whatever it is that you need tonight.”
That night, she delivered a version of “Backlash Blues” that far surpassed the studio recording, and a brief, wrenching rendition of the gospel classic “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” She was calling out for guidance, for help, trying to look ahead while straining to make sense of a senseless world. Most notably, she introduced a new song, written for the occasion by her bass player, Gene Taylor. It was titled “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” and it went on for thirteen minutes, ending with the sobering question “What will happen, now that the King of Love is dead?”
“We learned that song that day,” said Sam Waymon, who was playing organ in her band at the time. “We didn’t have a chance to really, like, have two or three days of rehearsal. But when you’re feeling compassion and outrage and wanting to express what you know the world is feeling—we did it because that’s what we felt.”
A five-and-a-half-minute edit of the song would be included on her next album, ’Nuff Said!, but the full live recording wouldn’t be officially released until it was included decades later on a collection of her protest songs titled Forever Young, Gifted and Black: Songs of Freedom and Spirit. The sprawling, pleading performance is almost too much to take. “They’re shooting us down, one by one,” she spoke through tears. In a lengthy, anguished monologue toward the end of the song she reeled off the names of other black luminaries who had died in recent years. “Lorraine Hansberry left us, Langston Hughes left us, Coltrane left us, Otis Redding left us—I could go on…Do you realize how many we’ve lost?”
The assassination of Dr. King was pivotal for Simone, and for black America. Coming on the heels of so many other early, needless deaths, it produced in many a swirl of rage and grief that led to alternating feelings of urgency and paralysis. Nina found herself torn between moving toward an even more radical, outspoken activism and giving up hope in the civil rights movement’s ability to change anything. King’s death was also, of course, a reminder of how high the stakes really were—losing concert bookings because of her politics was one thing, but the true costs of being outspoken about racial equality could be impossibly high.
“Participation in activism during the sixties rendered chaos in any individual’s life,” said Attallah Shabazz. “We had already experienced the risks—we know about Kennedy, we know about Medgar Evers, we know about my father, we know about King. The risk meant that if you crossed a line there could be an ultimate price. So what does that do to a household, and a family, not because of income, but because of your soul not being able to do what you need to do?”
But Simone believed that she had no choice, that her purpose was clear. “I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself,” she said. “That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved. Young people black and white know this. That’s why they are so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country, or it will not be shaped and molded at all anymore. So I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”
And so, Nina went back to work. She returned to what was becoming a regular circuit—back to Europe in June, jazz festivals through the summer—sometimes focusing more on spiritual themes than on activist ones. Introducing a song called “You’ll Go to Hell If You Don’t Pray” at a television taping at the Greenwich Village club the Bitter End, she said, “If you just think about what everybody is looking for—and I really think that even though they use the words ‘I love you,’ and they talk about their boyfriend or girlfriend—what they’re really saying is they want something terribly deeper than that, and I think it’s religion that we’re looking for.”
By this time, more outspoken protest music was growing in popularity. Simone’s own song selection was also incorporating more compositions by current pop songwriters, and, perhaps because of these shifts, in the fall of 1968 there was a sudden burst of interest in Simone’s records. The edited version of “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)” was released as a single and reached the Top 20 on both the US and UK R&B charts.
Right on its heels, her version of “Ain’t Got No / I Got Life,” a medley from the musical Hair, was issued as a single (in a slightly different edit from the way it appeared on the ’Nuff Said! album). Merging one song about lacking material goods and comforts with another that’s a joyous celebration of the human body and its vitality, in Nina’s hands the medley became a call for freedom and respect of all people. It grazed the US pop charts—her first appearance in the Top 100 in seven years—but the song exploded in Europe, reaching number 2 in England and even hitting number 1 on the Dutch pop chart. The follow-up, Jimmy Webb’s “Do What You Gotta Do,” outperformed “Ain’t Got No” in the United States and also got to number 2 in the United Kingdom.
But during this unexpected commercial boom, Simone was having a harder time offstage. It’s impossible to know the exact combination of influences that made it increasingly challenging for Nina to keep herself together. Over a year had passed since her breakdown on the Cosby tour, and life on the road had not grown easier. One can only guess at the effect of the added stress that Dr. King’s assassination and its impact on the c
ivil rights community had on her state of mind. But whatever the causes, it was clear that Nina’s suffering was becoming worse and that she was growing more and more difficult to be around.
“Andy told me that in 1968 something changed in Nina,” recalled her friend Gerrit De Bruin. “From that moment on, it was difficult for him to have influence on her anymore. She felt like she needed to be more aggressive. She got less mellow, she got harsh, and the people around her saw it, too.”
Andy said that Nina was aware of her transformation, that she struggled to keep her ungovernable emotions under control. “In her sane moments, she was very concerned about her inability to handle these fits of depression and anger that came over her,” he said. “She was very concerned about it when she was feeling good.”
They went to various doctors, even a hypnotist, but eventually signed her into Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for a battery of tests that took several days. “She was looking for answers,” said Stroud. “They conducted every known type of examination to try to get to the source of her problems, but they couldn’t find anything showing any probable cause.”
Returning to the studio, Simone followed ’Nuff Said! with an album that was one of her more experimental efforts, Nina Simone and Piano! Other than reprising an exclamation point in the title, the record’s tone was very different from the live-band feel of the previous release; the sound was stripped down to just two instruments—Nina’s piano and her voice.
“If you listen to some of those great recordings from the ’60s, it’s so easy to forget that the same woman that’s singing is playing the piano,” said Paul Robinson, who would later play drums with Simone, describing the multiple musical lines that had transfixed Miles Davis. “The independence of thought, of doing a vocal line one way and still playing the piano and supporting that way, she was great at that.”