Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
his superstar-producer days. The writing on Nyssa specifically, though, was slim. A short, cryptic interview in a weekly that folded two months after it launched in 1975. A “throwback” blurb in a British style magazine in 1991. I tunneled and excavated, sneezing dust and breaking microfilm rolls in university library basements. Did he discover her, or did she discover him? Were they true partners? Or was she his unwitting tool – overpowered and manipulated – as so often happened to women in the industry, back then and still today. I couldn’t pin down the nature of their collaboration. I had to talk to her. She was impossible to find. Until she wasn’t.
Brain Maze, 2022 (oil on canvas, 24x30) by Jeremy Russell
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I unearthed her in the mountains of western North Carolina. Or, I should say, she let herself be unearthed by me. When she agreed to the interview, through the organic-farmer nephew of the spouse of an old college friend of mine, I was amped, the dial to eleven. And intimidated. And most of all, mystified. I twisted myself through the spiraling wisps of quotes and hearsay and documentary-film-musings – the traces of her life – a thousand times, it seemed, in the months before we met. It could be some kind of truth, what I had ferreted out and pieced together. Or no kind of truth. I wouldn’t know till I sat down with her. Or wouldn’t know, ever. But I was sure it was worth the gamble. The famous-and-then-forgotten album is eponymous. The cover art: a frontal shot of a couple staring into the camera, a riff on a family daguerreotype you might find in a rusty locket in your great-grandmother’s attic. A pen-and-ink, brier-and-rose wreath twists along the oval border of the portrait. In the photograph, Virgil wears his trademark railroad cap. He gazes at the photographer with a lazy, just-waking-up hunger – a courtier catching a first glimpse of his fated damsel. When I first saw the album on my uncle’s shelf, at thirteen, it was Virgil I ached for. As for the other half: in the Times, Phil Galperin wrote, “Nyssa Adcock is a cipher. Her gaze tells no tales. La Belle Dame Sans Merci through the masking planar brushstrokes of a Modigliani.” Randall Quint in Riot Xpress: “We hear in the music she (supposedly) makes that the lady is not lobotomized. But you wouldn’t know it from the looks of her. Anybody home?” Other critics, too, scoured that photograph for clues. But the woman on the album cover – she wasn’t Nyssa. I was just beginning research – bookmarking web sites in my mildewy studio apartment in an underserviced edge of the city – when eureka struck. Down an internet rabbit-hole, I stumbled upon a public-television documentary from years before. One of the interviewees, aging rocker Jeanie Skull, spoke of the hippie commune outside Oakland into which she was born; how its freewheeling icon-smashing artistic ethos shaped her sensibilities.