Rest in peace, dearest Phoebe...
...as Caroline Kennedy was heard to remark after Phoebe's one-night stand at New York's Bottom Line, "She was real."...Phoebe looked dreamily out the window, her finger tapping a snare drum pattern on the counter top. Phil was involved in his lentil soup and the conversation level in the brightly lit deli had subsided to a low hum. A couple walked by the window arm in arm, singles no more. "That jazz music had a strange and wonderful effect on me," Phoebe said, "when I was real small. I remember I first noticed it when I'd be watching Shirley Temple movies and when she'd do her little tap dances, there'd be a hot Swing band playing. And that rhythm, I mean I was ten years old – when you're supposed to be out playing with your friends – and I was having real orgasms to that rhythm. The other thing that got me was this album we had, The Best of Boogie Woogie, with Cow Cow Davenport, Meade Lux Lewis's 'Honky Tonk Train,' Big Maceo's 'Chicago Breakdown.' Yeah, the more I'd listen, the more worked up I'd get."
The family was living in Teaneck by this time, Phoebe was going to school, and there were problems. "I'd always felt like I didn't fit in with the other kids very well and I didn't. I was bigger than they were and gawkier and fatter and clumsier. I knew I was the only kid in the neighborhood with kinky hair, but it took me awhile to find out I was the only Jewish kid. And then I became very ashamed of being Jewish. In fact, I became anti-Semitic. I began to read things about Hitler in Look magazine and wonder if he was right. On top of all that, I was supposed to be gifted. I remember later on I was sent to a camp for gifted children. There was a camp truck that said 'for gifted children' on the side and we all scratched it off and smeared over it with paint because we were so humiliated. Anyway, the only prestige I had among the other kids was that my name was on the trains. We lived right across the street from the railroad tracks and we used to play down there. We'd get under the bridge and it would be very orgasmic when the trains would go by. Especially for me, 'cause all the Erie Lackawanna coal cars said 'Phoebe' on 'em. The kids would say, 'Your name is on a train? Wow!' Only they didn't say Phoebe Laub, which was my real name. They said 'Phoebe Snow.'"...
Phoebe had already developed into a musical original and she had done it more or less on her own. "Sure," she admitted, "I took piano lessons. I was a little piano prodigy for a while, but I couldn't stand my teachers. 'No blues, no barrelhouse, no boogie woogie,' one of 'em would yell. Okay, okay. I would remember what they played and mimic what their fingers did and convince them I was reading the pieces, but I wasn't. I still can't read music, I still haven't learned theory." At age 15 she began taking guitar from Eric Schoenberg, who was involved in arranging Scott Joplin piano rags for the instrument. She studied Stefan Grossman's How to Play the Blues Guitar, bought some Sam Charters Mississippi blues albums, hung out at the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, listening and learning. Still she rebelled at reading notation. Instead, she "would take a chord somebody had shown me or written out in tablature – that I could read – and I'd add a note, move my pinkie up one to see how it sounded. I invented chords; I'm sure they'd been invented before but I found them for myself in very roundabout ways." Several years later she would take voice lessons for a few months with David Sorin Collyer, vocal coach to Paul Simon, Bette Midler and Liza Minnelli. The results were predictable: She rebelled at the teacher/student situation, though not without learning voice exercises which she continued to find valuable....
Phil Ramone would rather talk about the music. "My first impression of her," he says, "was of a healthy Sarah Vaughn. You see chops like hers come along once in a great while. There was even something about the way she played the guitar, a Django Reinhardt kind of rawness. Tie those two things together and you're listening to something that's actually new, an opportunity you don't have very often."
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/phoebe-snow-finds-the-suburbs-of-the-soul-rolling-stones-1975-cover-story-20110426?page=1
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