Dory Previn

Track	Album
Beware Of Young Girls	On My Way To Where
Twenty-Mile Zone	On My Way To Where
Mythical Kings And Iguanas	Mythical Kings And Iguanas
The Lady With The Braid	Mythical Kings And Iguanas
Mary C. Brown And The Hollywood Sign	Mythical Kings And Iguanas
Doppelganger	Reflections In A Mud Puddle
I Dance And Dance And Smile And Smile	Reflections In A Mud Puddle
Angels And Devils The Following Day	Live At Carnegie Hall
Atlantis	Dory Previn
Woman Soul	We're Children Of Coincidence

Dory Previn photo 1
Back cover photo on ‘Reflections In A Mud Puddle’ by Norman Seeff

Dory Previn On My Way To Where

Dory Previn playlist

Dory Previn Mythical Kings And Iguanas 2

Contributor: Merric Davidson

Lyricist Dorothy Langdon (born Dorothy Veronica Langan) married the composer and pianist André Previn in 1959. The previous year the two had collaborated on Dorothy’s first album The Leprechauns Are Upon Me released on the renowned Verve label. The songs on this jazzy album (with André on piano and Kenny Burrell on guitar) are now available on CD and to stream retitled My Heart Is A Hunter by Dory Langdon

A fruitful partnership followed, writing songs for Hollywood movies – just one example – You’re Gonna Hear From Me featured in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and was later recorded, among others, by Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, Nancy Wilson, Scott Walker, Dionne Warwick, Rosemary Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross.

It would be another dozen years, though, before Dory’s next album. The Previns’ marriage broke down in the late sixties following André’s well-documented affair with Mia Farrow. This took its toll on Dory’s already fragile mental health. She went through a period of treatment and hospitalisation which would lead to a series of powerful, therapeutic songs about the fall-out from her marriage and her strict and abusive upbringing.

“How about if I stood up to him mama? Maybe he’d back down and we could get out. He wouldn’t back down to the pope on a bike. What if I answered him back and took my chances of getting hit in the mouth? He wouldn’t hurt you, Dorothy! I’m the main one to him. If you cross him he’ll kill me! And if I die you’ll be responsible. I was certainly scared of his insane temper all right. But I almost hated her.” (extract from Midnight Baby: An Autobiography by Dory Previn)

So it was that in the first half of the 1970s, Dory Previn released six (mostly) critically acclaimed studio albums and one fabulous live double album: On My Way To Where (1970), Mythical Kings And Iguanas (1971), Reflections In A Mud Puddle / Taps Tremors And Time Steps (1971), Mary C. Brown And The Hollywood Sign (1972), Live At Carnegie Hall (1973), Dory Previn (1974), We’re Children Of Coincidence And Harpo Marx (1976).

I’d need at least twenty slots to cover all of my favourite Dory songs but there can only be ten for this exercise and here they are:

Aged 45 when she made On My Way To Where in 1970, she had become a confessional singer-songwriter. Beware Of Young Girls is the standout track, a thinly-veiled account of her marriage breakup: Beware of young girls who come to the door / Wistful and pale of twenty and four. The album was produced by Dory’s friend, the celebrated head of A&R at Capitol Records, Nikolas Venet, and initially released on his Mediarts label before it was acquired by United Artists.

Twenty-Mile Zone is ostensibly light and amusing but it’s about someone screaming alone in a car, so it’s not so light at all. Ironically, it’s one of her funniest and catchiest songs:

Well, along comes a motorcycle
Very much to my surprise
I said, ‘Officer, was I speeding?’
I couldn’t see his eyes

He said, ‘No, you weren’t speeding’
And he felt where his gun was hung
He said, ‘Lady, you were screaming
At the top of your lung’

And you were, doing it alone
You were doing it alone
You were screaming in your car
In a twenty-mile zone

Hear it here.

Maybe her most well-known song – Mythical Kings And Iguanas is the title track of an album that is very much of its Laurel Canyon time with references to Tarot cards and the I Ching. Produced in 1971 in LA by Nikolas Venet again, Mythical Kings And Iguanas is a search for spiritual enlightenment and the centrepiece of this extraordinary album which features Wrecking Crew musicians Larry Knechtel (keyboards) and Joe Osborn (bass).

I have flown
to star-stained heights
on bent and battered wings
in search of
mythical kings …

Maybe her most perfect song – The Lady With The Braid is the tale of a young woman trying to say the right thing in persuading her date to stay the night but getting it increasingly, hopelessly wrong:

Would you care to stay till sunrise
it’s completely your decision
it’s just the night cuts through me like a knife
would you care to stay awhile and save my life?

I don’t know what made me say that
I’ve got this funny sense of humor
you know I could not be downhearted if I tried
it’s just that going home is such a ride

Mary C. Brown And The Hollywood Sign is based on the true story of the death of Welsh-born actress Peg Entwistle in the Hollywood Hills in 1932. The song was re-recorded for Dory’s 1972 concept album with the same title which was to have been the soundtrack for a Broadway musical. Unfortunately, that didn’t come to pass and the record was generally slammed. Let’s look on the bright side, though, and Julia Greenberg’s epiphanic moment on first hearing The Holy Man On Malibu Bus Number Three from the Mary C. Brown And The Hollywood Sign album. Twenty years later, Julia would go on to co-direct a documentary film on Dory Previn (see notes at the foot of this post).

Doppelganger is the opening track of the Reflections In A Mud Puddle side of the third album in this series, a suitably eerie opener for an incredibly unnerving but completely brilliant LP.

I seem to see this stranger
Almost everywhere
I do not wish to frighten you
But you should know he’s there

So that if you’re threatened
If evil’s ever done
You’ll know it’s him who did it
You’ll know that he’s the one

Hear it here.

My next pick should really be the entire second side of Reflections In A Mud Puddle, a 13-minute suite of five songs which goes by the generic name of Taps Tremors And Time Steps (One Last Dance for My Father) and which was my introduction to Dory Previn when I bought this album in 1972. But I’ll pick just one of these five tracks to represent this mighty work. I Dance And Dance And Smile And Smile. It’s just so painfully sad, this yearning for parental love and approval.

The poetic genius of Dory Previn is to the fore in Angels And Devils The Following Day which would have been my fourth choice from Mythical Kings And Iguanas. However, I’m taking the version on Live At Carnegie Hall as the track to represent this excellent double album. Here’s the whole magical thing – move over Leonard – and you can hear it here:

loved i two men
equally well
though they were diff’rent
as heaven and hell
one was an artist
one drove a truck
one would make love
the other would fuck

each treated me
the way he knew best
one held me lightly
one bruised my breast
and i responded
on two diff’rent levels
like children reacting
to angels and devils

one was a poet
who sang and read verse
one was a peasant
who drank and who cursed
before you decide
who’s cruel and who’s kind
let me explain
what i felt
in my heart and my mind

the artist was tender
but suffered from guilt
making him sorry
the following day
and he made me feel guilty
the very same way
in his bed on the following day

the other would take me
and feel no remorse
he’d wake with a smile
in the bed where we lay
and he made me smile
in the very same way
in his bed on the following day

the blow to my soul
by fear and taboos
cut deeper far
than a bodily bruise
and the one who was gentle
hurt me much more
than the one who was rough
and made love on the floor

Atlantis is on the eponymous 1974 album with long-time producer Nik Venet who had been with Dory in the studio since On My Way To Where. With this one, she left United Artists for Warner Bros. The album has a fabulous array of musicians including Waddy Wachtel on guitar and Ron Tutt on drums. There are many fine songs on Dory Previn – Brando, Coldwater Canyon, The Empress Of China – but the one that selects itself is the one where the meaning hovers just out of reach, somewhat like the lost city of Atlantis. It’s a really dazzling song which uses only a few words to say so much about relationships:

I lie in bed beside him
And I know him, outside in
I’ve learned his body’s line and length
And memorized his grin

I’ve counted every crease
At the edges of his eyes
I know his soul’s complete circumference
I know his lies

Hear it here.

Woman Soul is from the final album in this series. We’re Children Of Coincidence And Harpo Marx was recorded in New York City in 1976 and was the second Warner Bros release. Produced by Joel Dorn it again has a stellar cast of support musicians including Cissy Houston, Patti Austin, Eric Weissberg, Don McLean.

Richie Unterberger refers to a Melody Maker feature in his liner notes for the We’re Children Of Coincidence And Harpo Marx CD:

“The lighter quasi-musical feel of the arrangements was broken up by the mildly funk-tinged Fours and the more impressive Woman Soul, which was a throwback to the artily orchestrated songs that had figured more heavily in her previous work. Observed Previn to Melody Maker in 1977, ‘Maybe what I want to do now, and I think I started it with Woman Soul and I Wake Up Slow, which can also be a metaphor for ‘I fall in love slowly, so don’t rush me, I’m slow to commit,’ I think what I would like to do now is write songs of love, but that deal with the reality of love. The negativity, the positiveness … And that’s why I’ve been doing Woman Soul. That’s my favorite song. But that makes no bones, it doesn’t beat around the bush. It says, Hey, there’s a lot wrong with this, but it’s not bad. Let’s investigate it.”

I love him; he’s an artist, but he cannot find himself
With puzzled looks, he ponders books upon some ancient shelf
He does the best he can; that’s why I love that man
But I also love the woman in his soul

Dory Previn Live At Carnegie Hall

Dory Previn poster 1
2024 documentary film poster (see link below)

The Ed Sullivan Show, November 1970

Dory interviewed by Phil Everley between songs on the ‘In Session’ KABC-TV series (1974) – I Ain’t His Child, I Dance And Dance, Brando, Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister?, Woman Soul, Scared To Be Alone

“I decided quite a long time ago that nothing in the human condition short of murder is something that would be distasteful or that I would be embarrassed to reveal. I just feel that I want to say as much as I possibly can about myself without disturbing the listener to a great degree. Sometimes I write things that I then don’t record and I’ll put them in a book of lyrics, but there are certain songs that I sing, that memory of the pain of something as opposed to the joy of some songs, that’s sometimes very difficult for me.” Dory Previn speaking in the above interview

THE LADY WITH THE BRAID

Pulp frontman, Jarvis Cocker, chose Dory Previn’s Lady With The Braid, when he discussed his favourite tracks on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2005 (clip here).

Dory Previn photo 2
Front cover photo (uncredited) on ‘One A.M. Phonecalls’ compilation LP