April 7, 2010

Harry Nilsson was one of those recording artists who was famous for everything except what he should have been famous for. Although he was a brilliantly sardonic singer-songwriter with a soaring voice that could suddenly shift gears in mid-verse and tear your heart out, you most likely recognize Nilsson as the guy who crooned Fred Neil’s evocative lost-America anthem, “Everybody’s Talkin’,” over the opening credits of “Midnight Cowboy.” He even won a Grammy for his performance of Neil’s tune.

If that doesn’t do it, maybe a sweet little Nilsson number called “Me and My Arrow,” which gained popularity when it was co-opted as, of all things, the theme to a Plymouth commercial, rings a bell. Then again, maybe you know Nilsson’s “One” (as in, “One is the loneliest number”) which became a huge hit for Three Dog Night in 1969, but not so much for Nilsson when he originally released it the year before. Or, if you’re old enough and have a memory for such things, you might be able to hum "Best Friend," his theme to the hit 1970s TV show, “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father."

Hell, Nilsson even gained a streak of rock & roll notoriety for his extracurricular activities - he drank like a fish and drugged like a druggie - with John Lennon, during Lennon’s intoxicated, months-long “lost weekend” away from Yoko Ono in 1974. Most famously, he and Lennon got physically tossed from a popular L.A. comedy club for obnoxiously heckling a Smothers Brothers performance. And they were friends with the Smothers Brothers! (Lennon had a Kotex taped on his forehead when it happened - I’m not making this up - which suggests just how many Brandy Alexander’s had been imbibed during the evening’s revelry.)

The strange part of all this was that Nilsson didn’t really seem to care too much if people latched onto his unique form of pop craftsmanship, and he consistently downplayed his own gifts as a songwriter. He was so stringently quirky, both in song and lifestyle, he probably would have viewed himself as a failure if the masses had suddenly started raising banners to him from coast to coast. I mean, come on— the guy was a singer who seldom performed live, even during his heyday. He didn’t like performing, so he didn’t do it.

What Nilsson actually should have been known for, then, was for being so entertainingly unknowable…but only Dylan has managed that trick for any extended period of time. At any rate, it appeared as if Nilsson couldn’t win for losing, but it’s completely possible that losing with a cigarette dangling from a permanent snicker on his face was the goal from the very beginning. As long as he could pay the bills and buy another round of drinks, he was happy enough.

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Nilsson’s brotherly relationship with Lennon was one of the many unexpected elements comprising Lennon’s post-Beatles journey toward house-husbandry. Although it didn't kick into (if you'll pardon the pun) high gear until later, the friendship actually started while the Beatles were recording “The White Album” in 1968. During a press conference announcing the launch of Apple Records, a reporter asked Lennon who his favorite songwriter was, and Lennon replied simply, “Nilsson.” Later, when Paul McCartney was asked to name his favorite group, he also replied, “Nilsson.”

Both responses dumbfounded most everyone in attendance. It wasn’t until later that reporters discovered the boys were referring to an American performer named Harry Nilsson, who had recently released a critically praised and publicly ignored album, “Pandemonium Shadow Play,” under the name “Nilsson.”

Years later, Nilsson described the shock of such unexpected anointment by his heroes: “That was a day in my life, I’ll tell you. I got phone calls all of a sudden from New York in my little office at RCA. The phone started ringing off the hook. The first phone call came and said, ‘Did you hear the Beatles just say you were their favorite?’ And I said, ‘Come on.’ And they said, ‘No, it just happened. It was the largest press conference since the end of World War II. And you’re it.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’” Soon enough, adulatory phone calls from both Lennon and McCartney confirmed that Nilsson had, in fact, entered a dream world.

“Pandemonium Shadow Play,” like any psychedelic disc from 1967 (including the consistently over-praised “Sgt. Pepper”) is now something of a relic. But it’s a witty, often sharply biting relic— Nilsson closes with a cover of Phil Spector’s legendarily over-produced “River Deep, Mountain High” that some people feel is a tribute, but sounds suspiciously like an elaborate mocking of both Spector’s Wall of Sound and Tina Turner’s screeching vocal. That duality - Is it or isn't it? - is fascinating, and it blows the original out of the water as an emotional experience regardless of how you view it.

It’s easy enough to imagine John and Paul digging Nilsson’s wit and wigged-out music hall sensibilities, especially on his kooky cover of “You Can’t Do That,” which features 22 quotes from other Beatles songs in the backing vocals! Even with Fab support, though, Nilsson didn’t sell many records. But he was allowed to keep cranking out non-popular albums to his heart’s content, and was soon writing songs for scores of other artists, like the Monkees and Blood, Sweat & Tears.

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In fact, Nilsson didn’t have a hit album that he could truly call his own until 1971, when he released the properly bemused “Nilsson Schmilsson,” which made it all the way to number 3 on the charts, due mostly to the hit single, "Without You," and the bizarre yet radio-friendly novelty song, “Coconut” (you know— “you put de lime in de coconut an’ drink ‘em all up.”) But there’s so much more going on with this record, it’s unfortunate that the vast majority of listeners are only aware of "Coconut," its least compelling tune. Once again, Nilsson had found a way to make the Big Score seem more like a minor embarrassment. It was practically his modus operandi.

A ten-song meditation on Los Angeles’ sweeping emotional disconnects, “Nilsson Schmilsson” is Nilsson tapping into an aspect of the zeitgeist that most of his fellow songwriters, with the notable exceptions of Randy Newman and Paul Simon, obviously felt was better left unexamined. Rock & rollers, after all, weren’t supposed to fear encroaching middle-age— any hint of an inner-tube around the waste was to be tucked into a pair of leather pants and ignored. But there was Nilsson on the album’s cover, standing in the kitchen in his bathrobe, wondering where all the fun went.

In its own way, this is as gutsy a form of pop self-deflation as Lennon’s far less lovable, and hugely more histrionic, “Plastic Ono Band.” Lennon showed major balls with “Plastic Ono Band” because he was throwing his mystique away, or at least trying to throw it away for one supremely pissed-off album. Nilsson, on the other hand, was being reckless because he had so little mystique to throw away to begin with, and he did it anyway. And, of course, he only grew more famous because of it.

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Produced by Richard Perry, who helmed massive hit records by everybody from Ringo Starr to Carly Simon, “Nilsson Schmilsson” is buttressed by a commercial radio slickness that, I think, does Nilsson’s songs a world of good.

Many of Nilsson's previous albums (including a collection of Newman tunes that’s supposed to be a masterpiece, but is virtually unlistenable to my ears) are marred by an advanced degree of feigned coyness that quickly makes you want to strangle him. Here, though, Nilsson often seems exasperated by the foolishness surrounding him, and Perry serves it up on a shimmering cushion of sound. There’s an understated slyness to the whole thing that strongly suggests smart people are involved, and that never hurts.

"Driving Along"

Driving along
You can see all the people
Who seem to have nothing to say to each other
Each day they grow farther and farther away from each other

They seem to say nothing
They seem to go nowhere
They seem to go farther
They seem to go nowhere
They seem to go farther
They seem to go nowhere
They seem to go farther
And farther and farther

Later for the Eagles stabbing that fucking beast with their steely knives bullshit. A seeming trifle that lasts just a little more than two minutes, “Driving Along” says as much about what’s wrong with L.A. as any song I can name, outside of Warren Zevon’s “Desperados Under the Eaves” and "The French Inhaler," and I think it’s fully equal to Zevon’s work.

Nilsson had an ability to boil a complex situation down to its essence, and his love of words - the way they start tumbling out in a repetitive torrent, conveying the insanity of the freeway and strongly suggesting that there’s no exit once you’re buckled in for the long haul - is the mark of a real writer, not just a guy slapping some songs together for his new record.

Brian Wilson never held the cars up as a metaphor for the problem, that’s for sure, even when he was fried. Nilsson’s work was unto itself, and he always enjoyed turning a myth on its head.

"Early in the Morning”

With “Early in the Morning” Nilsson pulls a Mose Allison by dragging an old Louis Jordan r&b chestnut to the suburbs, creating an ironic white man’s blues that isn’t so ironic when the white skin is attached to your own bones. Perry’s minimalist production here is superb, with a lonely Mellotron intoning over and over again, a clarion call that’ll surely grow more cacophonous as the sun rises over the Hollywood Hills and, yes, everybody starts climbing into those goddamn cars again.

The song is so brief it serves almost as connective tissue on “Nilsson Schmilsson,” but its implication that there are many troubled heads drinking a cup of Maxwell House as the smog rolls out like a blanket across the Valley is pivotal to understanding the record as a whole. Once again, this is deceptively simple stuff that runs incredibly deep when taken in context.

"The Moonbeam Song"

Have you ever watched a moonbeam
As it slid across your windowpane
Or struggled with a bit of rain
Or danced about the weather vane
Or sat along a moving train
And wondered where the train has been

Looking at the tracks
Of the careless windbeam
Or moving to the clacks
Of the tireless freight train
And lighting up the sides
Of the weather vane
And the bits of rain
And the windowpane
And the eyes of those
Who think they saw what happened

Simply put, “The Moonbeam Song” is one of Nilsson’s masterpieces, and the best thing on “Nilsson Schmilsson.” He was enough of a fan of the Great American Songbook that he actually recorded a duly career-stalling album of lushly arranged standards at one point. But “The Moonbeam Song” reflects his love of a certain kind of classicism that he pivotally subverts with that mysterious reference to “those who think they saw what happened.”

Who are “those” people, and what, exactly, did happen? Has this guy been accused of something illegal? Did he do something that the neighbors have misinterpreted? Is he just paranoid? That simple little twist moves the tune beyond the realm of Hoagy Carmichael into something truly odd and disturbing. And how can you not love that fence with “bits of crap around its bottom” intruding on such a gorgeous melody?

The album is heavy with "moments." Nilsson sings “Without You,” a cover of Badfinger's heart-on-the-sleeve weeper, as if the protagonist’s fragile existence is truly on the verge of collapse now that the woman he loved poorly has abandoned him, and on the fast-percolating rocker, “Jump into the Fire,” he starts caterwauling about the hopelessness of it all over a drum and bass figure that’s so down-and-dirty, Martin Scorsese utilized it during the “police helicopters are out to get me” sequence in “Goodfellas” (he also used "Without You" in "Casino," for that matter.)

A lot of ground gets covered with "Nilsson Schmillson," to say the least, and it’s peppered with emotional landmines.

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Harry Nilsson, who liked to claim his parents were Swedish circus performers specializing in “the aerial ballet,” finally saw his own hard-living tightrope act come to a close when, after a long illness, he died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, on January 15, 1994. Just hours later, the city was hit by a devastating earthquake that really got people thinking. But not for long.

No one wrote a rueful pop song featuring the quake as an allegory for the collapse of American culture, because the only guy could have managed it wasn’t around anymore. Instead, there was an Eagles reunion.

Download: “Nilsson Schmilsson” (1971) by Harry Nilsson; the whole thing is worthwhile, and Nilsson obviously designed the album as a complete vision. For a solid 2-disc sampler that contains most of what I mentioned here and tons of great recordings I didn’t even get around to, try “Personal Best: The Harry Nilsson Anthology” (released 1995.)

Paul Tatara