After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Salmon Falls" by Harry Nilsson
The music world shelters its share of addicts, schizophrenics, and the suicidally depressed, who all venture into the darkness and return just far enough to file reports about life on the edge. And they provide a valuable service, don't get me wrong. But all things being equal, I prefer the merely strange to the deeply deranged. I like musicians who maintain a modicum of control over their output, yet still keep returning to the same sounds or lyrical ideas over and over, even when no one's paying attention. Their compulsions are mild but defining, and as these artists continue making idiosyncratic, personal music, after a while we can come to feel like we know them, to the extent that even their weaknesses become endearing.
Prior to 2004, my knowledge of Harry Nilsson was largely limited to his cover of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'," some anecdotes about the year he spent partying with John Lennon, and a vague awareness that he'd written the goofy novelty song "Coconut" and the Three Dog Night hit "One." I also knew that his best-known, most successful album was Nilsson Schmilsson (followed by a pair of ill-regarded sequels), so when that record was remastered and reissued in 2004, I picked it up, and was surprised by how many songs I already knew, including Nilsson's seven-minute raver "Jump Into The Fire" and his hyper-schmaltzy cover of Badfinger's "Without You." Nilsson Schmilsson is in many ways the prototype for the '70s "well-made album," employing state-of-the-art production on a set of originals and covers that show stylistic versatility and an impressive amount of care lavished even on the filler.
And yet, while Nilsson Schmilsson is more contemporary and more immediately accessible than anything else in the Nilsson discography, it still has its kinks. Consider "Driving Along:"
"Driving Along" by Harry Nilsson
In just over two minutes, Nilsson delivers some blunt social commentary—too blunt, really—couched in a song structure that keeps opening up and getting more elaborate until it practically dissipates. Hit-making producer Richard Perry may have ordered up the song's factory-issue guitar solo, but Nilsson's heart is more in an arrangement that keeps changing, unlocking new possibilities. After hearing that song, I knew I had to track down as much Nilsson as I could, so over the next month I bought a slew of import CDs, most of which combined two albums on single discs. One of the first imports I picked up included in its bonus tracks the sublime non-LP single "Down To The Valley:"
"Down To The Valley" by Harry Nilsson
Again, this song takes a simple idea and loads it up with as much orchestration and vocal pyrotechnics as Nilsson can muster, making the presentation far more important than the actual content. Nilsson was clearly someone who loved to play around, both with his songwriting and in the studio. I worked my way through his early solo albums: the wild, Beatlesque Pandemonium Shadow Show, the wispier Aerial Ballet, the somewhat grating soundtrack to Skidoo (featuring the closing credits in song form), and the doggedly retro Harry. On the latter album, Nilsson covered a Randy Newman song, "Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear," and then Nilsson worked with Newman on what, to my mind, is his masterpiece, Nilsson Sings Newman, for which he recorded each instrumental and vocal part over and over, before weaving the best snippets of each into cinematic tracks like "Cowboy:"
""Cowboy" by Harry Nilsson
By this time, in 1970, Nilsson was still mainly a cult act, responsible for a couple of fluke hits of his own and a couple of big hits for other people. That all started to change at the dawn of the decade, first when Nilsson masterminded the trippy animated TV special The Point!, for which he wrote a set of spare, catchy songs about friendship and individuality:
"Me And My Arrow" by Harry Nilsson
And then came Nilsson Schmilsson, the big commercial breakthrough, released that same year. But more interesting—to me at least—is what Nilsson did with that sudden success. His early recordings had been eclectic and eccentric, taking his natural talent for melody and his strong, multi-octave voice and using them as elements in songs and albums that took a little work for fans to fully follow. Once Nilsson went mainstream on Nilsson Schmilsson, he could've easily continued down the path that so many other offbeat pop and rock stars did in the '70s, following the money. Instead, he reunited with Richard Perry and made Son Of Schmilsson, a wildly offbeat rock record that kicks off with the wonderfully perverse "Take 54:"
"Take 54" by Harry Nilsson
I can't even imagine what fans of "Without You" and "Coconut" made of this song about a star who needs his favorite groupie in the studio so that he can sing his "balls off." From the vampire picture on the LP cover to offbeat tracks like the country music parody "Joy" and the crude "You're Breakin' My Heart" (with its chorus "so fuck you"), Son Of Schmilsson is about as flippant a response to fame as any platinum-level artist has ever attempted. And it became the model for Nilsson's '70s albums, which frequently featured oddball cover art, twisted remakes of rock classics, and outright novelty songs like "Kojak Columbo," "The Flying Saucer Song" and "Jesus Christ You're Tall." But sprinkled amid the more out-there material was some of Nilsson's most heartfelt ballads, like the mournful cycle-of-life lament "Salmon Falls" from Duit On Mon Dei, and the quietly desperate "Don't Forget Me," from Nilsson's drunken collaboration with John Lennon, Pussy Cats:
"Don't Forget Me" by Harry Nilsson
And these albums also included some of Nilsson's most effortless pop songwriting, like "Pretty Soon There'll Be Nothing Left For Everybody," from Sandman—a jaunty song that maintains Nilsson's preoccupation with cheerful nihilism.
"Pretty Soon There'll Be Nothing Left For Everybody" by Harry Nilsson
In a way, these '70s albums—often knocked out during long benders, with Nilsson's voice ravaged by misuse—are "well-made albums" too. After all, they do show off a variety of styles, and an expansive sound. But there's something a little off about them. Maybe it's that the creative force behind the music is a guy who gleefully sabotaged himself through self-destructive behavior and a love of bad jokes.
Nilsson had his admirers back then, but record sales and chart action tapered off, and most rock critics , if they covered Nilsson at all, tended to sum up his post-1971 career as a pathetic waste of a once-promising talent. Writing about Son Of Schmillson in 1972, Rolling Stone critic Stephen Holden referred to the lovely "Turn On Your Radio" as a "trifling ballad" and about the raunchy "You're Breakin' My Heart," Holden said, "as obscenity it's insipid and as satire prepubescent." He downgraded Nilsson's "Spaceman" in comparison to Elton John's similarly sci-fi-themed "Rocket Man" ("a record with real passion"), and he dismissed the record as a whole for having "a humor so deadpan, so essentially sarcastic, that it is difficult to relate to it on more than a superficial level," adding, "Life is just a silly, meaningless jumble of dreams and memories, OK—but where is the hurt and disappointment that infuses such a vision?"
I would argue that context is everything, and that if Holden or his critical ilk had considered Nilsson's career as a whole, they would've realized that the hurt and disappointment was always there, but leavened with a certain amount of "ah, what the hell." This was a man who began his career singing the autobiographical song "1941," about how his dad left him as a boy, and how he planned to leave his own son, and that he expected that son to take off one day too. That may be a sentiment that's "difficult to relate to," but it's one that's wholly Nilsson's. And while I wouldn't call Nilsson's outlook on life "harmless," it does have a rakish, seductive charm, luring listeners along with a trail of sugary crumbs.
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