End of Night

Each year some 4,500 different pop albums appear. Breaking in a new recording act, therefore, usually involves a lot of promotional hoopla. Yet Phoebe Snow, the 1974 Shelter LP, arrived unheralded by the trade-magazine campaigns and autographed T shirts that seem to be the star machine's favorite propaganda weapons. A few disc jockeys liked what they heard and began playing the record. Eventually people were talking about the girl with the willowy voice, so supple that she would wrap it around a note, bend it, put a spin on it, and then zoom up or down a couple of octaves. Her single Poetry Man hit the top ten on the charts, and now square-shaped, frizz-topped Phoebe Snow has walked off with a Rocky for Best New Female Vocalist given at Don Kirshner's Rock Music Awards.

It is a success tinged with irony. Phoebe, 25, is actually a jazz singer in the mold of Billie Holiday. As yet she lacks the white-hot intensity of Lady Day, but the pain that wrenches her voice is genuine. She sings from deep personal emotion, with lightning improvisation and embellished phrases.

She writes most of her own songs, filling pads of paper with words. Sometimes a fragment bursts into several paragraphs. When that happens, Phoebe hums a tune and sets it to music. Most of her early compositions are sad, reflecting disappointment in herself, especially with her looks.

Sometimes this face

Looks so funny

That I hide it

Behind a book

But sometimes this face

Has so much class

That I have to sneak

A second look

"I was an unusual kid. I didn't look like anybody else," she recalls. "Everybody was wearing pageboys, and I had frizzy hair." She changed her name from Phoebe Laub to Phoebe Snow, a sign on boxcars near her home in Teaneck, N.J. She doted on Shirley Temple movies and Judy Garland records. Later she borrowed from early enthusiasms. "I copped that lick for my refrain in Poetry Man from The Continental in the old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie," she admits. Her parents--her mother was a Martha Graham dancer--encouraged her to study classical piano. With Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy and Bob Dylan thrown in, Snow's personal sound track was varied.

Oh mommy mommy, yeah

I stood too near the gaslight

And I cried

The dirty city mist

Had seeped too deep inside

It took me on some kind

Of heady ride

They told me Charlie Parker died

And I don't want the night to end

Phoebe's Charlie was not the legendary saxophonist but a pal nicknamed Harpo. "He had all Harpo Marx's moves down," says Phoebe, "and he played junk instruments like the washtub bass." Charlie introduced her to new music like Spike Jones. Then three years ago, at the age of 20, he died of an overdose.

Phoebe was starting on a similar course. To lose weight she took diet pills; to overcome shyness, she drank. But if pills, liquor and drugs vanquished inhibitions, they also led to paranoia. "If I smoked a joint and went into a restaurant where people were laughing," she explains, "you could not convince me that they were not laughing at me. The lady in the corner holding the compact was looking at me over her shoulder." A year ago, her throat raw from marijuana, she decided to stop using all drugs. Now she avoids even aspirin.

Phoebe sees better times on the way. Recently she set up housekeeping with Guitarist Phil Kearns in Edgewater, N.J., overlooking the Hudson. Her new album will be mostly love songs. "I was a pretty depressed person a lot of the time," says Phoebe, "but I've gotten tired of sad songs. Lately I've just been unashamedly happy."

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