Summer’s waning fast, and you won’t get many days as perfect as today for a picnic. Delawareans can legally make it a stoned one, and Laura Nyro can provide the soul.
Like most of Nyro’s compositions, it was a hit for somebody else, in this case the 5th Dimension. The song appeared on her second album, “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession,” in 1968. The impressionistic lyrics include the cryptic neologism “surry,” used as a verb. (It’s not “surrey,” a kind of carriage.) When her producer asked her what it meant, Nyro told him, “Oh, it’s just a nice word.”
The 5th Dimension had one of their biggest hits with the tune, brought to them by producer Bones Howe, who had an ear for that sort of thing. His arrangement and their harmonies gave the group a No. 3 hit in 1968, their highest to that point. They got a lot of TV guest slots out of it, and worked up choreography that made the Pips look like lampposts. They toned the dancing down a bit for this appearance on a 1968 Frank Sinatra special because they’re singing into live microphones.
Jill Sobule, who had a way with pop hits of the ’60s and ’70s, covered it for the tribute album “Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro,” released shortly after Nyro’s death of ovarian cancer in 1997.
