NORA JOY KANTOR - "eNJoy!"

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Nora Joy Kantor was the lead singer and songwriter for the Sunliners, a mid-sixties sunshine-pop group from Long Island, NY. The short-lived group achieved only moderate success with a pair of top-40 singles in 1966. After the Sunliners disbanded, Kantor collaborated with a New York playwright on a counter-culture stage production called “The Blueberry Soldier,” with Joy writing several original songs. When the show closed rather quickly, she took a hiatus from the music industry, but soon relocated to southern California and signed a deal with Aerie Records, then under the leadership of Neil Liderra, to record her much anticipated first solo album. Liderra secured Bill Babica to handle the production duties, with the stipulation that he was to help her create the album she wanted to make.

Babica had seen the Sunliners on television, miming to a pre-recorded track, and was struck by Joy's songwriting as well as her girl-next-door charm. Having already produced several other artists in a similar musical style, Bill knew that he could take Joy's songs to another level. Babica hired a team of studio musicians and blocked out studio time at The Nest, Aerie's own private recording facility in an A-frame house in Laurel Canyon.

Babica was surprised when Joy announced that she would not be supplying demos, and that she had not yet written any songs. She did say that she had a “framework” of a central theme in mind, and knew how the album would flow, and that she wanted to create the music in the studio with the musicians all at once. Babica decided to “just trust her and go with it,” hoping that the final product might actually be better as a result.

Typically, Joy would sit at the piano and talk to the musicians about what kind of feel she wanted. She would begin to play, the musicians would join in, and suggestions would be exchanged. Slowly, a general form for the song would emerge, and then the tape would roll. She never offered a proper title for anything they played and never sang so much as a scratch vocal. During breaks, she would sit on the sofa in the control room, feet pulled underneath her, and scribble lyrics in her notebook. She never showed anyone her lyrics, not even Babica. He recalls: “While listening to the playback, she would often read her lyrics silently from that little green notebook, and a wide grin would spread across her face, and she would say something like, 'Oh yeah, that's gonna be great,' never revealing her secret.”

After three weeks in the studio with the musicians, all the songs had been completed, save for the mysterious missing vocal tracks. “Joy was over-the-moon happy with how everything sounded, and insisted that this album was going to be amazing once she completed her vocal tracks,” Babica said. She left the studio on Friday evening, headed to Santa Barbara to spend the weekend with a friend, promising to meet on Monday morning to begin vocal tracking.

On the way to Santa Barbara, her yellow Volkswagen left the road and went over the side of a bridge into the water. Authorities who discovered the vehicle had no idea what the cause of the accident might have been, but her body was not found in the car. Also missing was her fringed leather bag that she carried at all times, containing the green notebook with her lyrics and notes about the album. After two weeks, the search for Joy Kantor was abandoned, and the recording project accordingly halted.

Over the years, there was talk of lending the tracks to other songwriters who knew of her and whom she influenced, and allowing them to write their own lyrics and melodies to complete the songs. But for Babica, this “never felt right.” In later years, some of the unfinished tracks were leaked as bootlegs, without approval.

In 1996, the entire catalogue of Aerie Records was purchased by an unnamed buyer. Within six months, this collection of nearly 1,200 songs was bought and sold three more times, finally ending up in the hands of a Finnish holding company. Through some strange twists of fate and serendipity, the single unfinished solo album of Joy Kantor, “eNJoy!” is now in the possession of Retro Instro Records. We are thrilled to bring you these unfinished songs from the “masterpiece that might have been.”

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