Harry Nilsson: “He redefined what a song could do”

Originally published in Uncut Take 196 [September 2013], Van Dyke Parks, Peter Frampton, Chris Spedding, Bobby Keys and Herbie Flowers revisit the three brilliant and contrary records Harry Nilsson made in the early ’70s. Success? Schmucksess! “I’d just call him a genius,” says Parks. “And by the way, I haven’t met any others. He redefined what a song could do.”

The Stepney & Pinner Choir Club

While his biggest hit, “Without You”, continues its reign at the top of the British and American charts, Harry Nilsson is attending to the pressing business of bussing in 30 senior citizens from the Stepney & Pinner Choir Club to Trident Studios in London’s Soho.

Having invited the somewhat bewildered OAPs to sing on his protest against the indignities of ageing, “I’d Rather Be Dead” (“than wet my bed”), Nilsson has decorated the studio with balloons, handed out party hats and laid on sherry, whisky and the mellifluous sounds of the Henry Krein Quartet.

Despite the potential awkwardness of asking his ailing guests to sing “If I have to be fed, then I’d rather be dead”, everybody has a fine time. At the end of the session, Nilsson invites Tom, an 84-year-old tenor with a squeaky wooden leg, to play on the next album. “OK,” says Tom. “If I’m alive.”

“We forget that he influenced The Beatles”

Best known for two cover versions – “Without You” and “Everybody’s Talkin’” – a novelty song about a coconut, and getting trashed with John Lennon during his infamous Lost Weekend, Nilsson’s escapades, such as those described in March 1972, have tended to distract from his four-octave voice, brilliant mind and seemingly inexhaustible supply of gorgeous melodies.

“We forget that he influenced The Beatles, for Christ’s sake, with him stacking his vocals and writing these unbelievably great songs,” Peter Frampton tells Uncut. “We knew how talented he was. All the musicians had his records.”

“He was the smartest person I ever met in the music business,” says Van Dyke Parks. “He was operating at the highest creative level imaginable. I wouldn’t call him a musical genius – I’d just call him a genius. And by the way, I haven’t met any others. He redefined what a song could do, with incredible intimacy: beautiful and consoling and illuminating and clear.”

“If he had stuck to one thing he would have been a superstar”

A biography – Nilsson: The Life Of A Singer-Songwriter – and a 17-disc boxset, The RCA Albums Collection, aim to bolster Nilsson’s wider reputation. At its centre are the three records he made at the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s: his two London recordings, Nilsson Schmilsson (1971) and Son Of Schmilsson (1972), and the standards album, A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night (1973).

The first two are a good-cop-bad-cop pairing of perfect piano pop, mock-country weepies, bawdy soft-rock, beautiful ballads, subverted Tin Pan Alley, joke songs and childlike incantations. The third, recorded with a full orchestra and Sinatra’s arranger Gordon Jenkins, was at once behind the times and decades ahead of them, and as such confused everyone. “If he had stuck to one thing he would have been a superstar,” says Frampton. But if he had stuck to one thing he wouldn’t have been Harry Nilsson.

Part of the group of defiantly non-countercultural American songwriters that included his friends Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb and Van Dyke Parks, Nilsson arrived in London in June 1971 on the cusp of 30. A Brooklynite resettled in California, he had signed to RCA in 1967 and quit his job working as a computer operator in a bank.

“That song in the long run annoyed him immensely”

His second album, 1967’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, was fêted by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, partly for its precocious reinterpretation of “You Can’t Do That”, which referenced 23 Beatles songs in 140 seconds. It was a typically Nilssonian creation: a novelty number with substance, lightly wearing its dazzling technical skill. His version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”, recorded the same year, became a hit in 1969 as the theme to Midnight Cowboy.

“That song in the long run annoyed him immensely, because he hadn’t written it, it was unrepresentative, and it was his biggest hit,” explains Van Dyke Parks. “Fred Neil was very bitter about it, too. He told me, ‘You tell Harry to write something for me.’ If he had known how his song had troubled Harry, he might have been less bitter.”

When Nilsson hooked up with producer Richard Perry, whose credits included Captain Beefheart and Tiny Tim, he was looking to streamline his airy baroque-pop into something more robust and commercial. They both wanted to record in London, where the studios were technically superior. “Harry was totally blown away with Trident Studios,” confirms Herbie Flowers. “It was a bit like a dungeon, and he was entranced with this lovely grand piano they had. He was forever tinkling about with it.”

“He didn’t look like any banker I’d ever seen”

The core band for Nilsson Schmilsson constituted Flowers and Klaus Voormann on bass, Jim Keltner and Jim Gordon on drums, Chris Spedding and John Uribe on guitar, Bobby Keys and Jim Price on horns and Spooky Tooth’s Gary Wright on piano. “All I knew was that he was an ex-banker from New York,” says Bobby Keys. “He didn’t look like any banker I’d ever seen, and he didn’t sing like a banker either. He had this beautiful instrument for a voice.”

The preciousness of his voice was lost only on Nilsson himself, who during the sessions sat behind the piano chain smoking, using a saucepan as an ashtray. Perry would ask him repeatedly not to smoke so much, or swap his high-strength fags for low-tar.

Chris Spedding recalls that artist and producer “would go at it half-jokingly, half-seriously” – when their creative differences reached a head, the pair met for tea at the Dorchester to discuss it “like gentlemen”. Perry pointed out that when they had first decided to work together, Nilsson had agreed that the producer would call the shots. “I lied,” Nilsson answered.

“Harry was an intuitive talent”

He knew exactly what he wanted, even if he felt no need to let anyone else in on the secret. Van Dyke Parks: “Harry was an intuitive talent, and serene in his vision, but then he’d have maybe 12 people in a studio, with no music written, having to organise an arranged performance. He mapped that line between the extemporaneous and the written process, and he did it very comfortably.”

For the musicians, it was a labour-intensive way of working. “My abiding memory is having to do lots and lots of takes,” says Chris Spedding. “I think we got to take 50 on ‘Let The Good Times Roll’, and we started flagging towards the end.

“We went home and came in the next day, and I got the impression when we came back, by the amount of cigarette stubs in the ashtray, the fug in the room and the looks on their faces, that they had been there since the previous night, listening to take after take after take. He was very professional, very serious and committed to his music. When we were in the studio, there wasn’t much larking about.”

“I loved the way his mind worked”

“He was a perfectionist,” agrees Bobby Keys. “He would go over and over and over a part until it was exactly the way he wanted it. It could sometimes be a bit tedious, but it worked. I just loved the way his mind worked. He wasn’t limited by anything other than his own imagination.”

Herbie Flowers: “Harry totally trusted people. It was always, ‘Take your time, have a cup of coffee, let’s have another go.’ It was very convivial. We would laugh at his thoroughness, because it seemed like he was being overactive, but you couldn’t knock the results.”

Recorded in two weeks, Nilsson Schmilsson is as straight as Nilsson ever got, but it’s still appealingly crooked. The cover photo of him in a bathrobe, looking both vulnerable and seedy, underlined the idiosyncratic nature of the music, which moved from heartrending ballads (“Without You”, “I’ll Never Leave You”) to mawkish lullabies (“The Moonbeam Song”), jaunty pop (“Gotta Get Up”, “Driving Along”) and loose funk-rock (“Down”, “Jump Into The Fire”). It’s both sublime and silly, often at the same time, and no more so than on “Coconut”, a tropical comedy calypso written on one chord of C, which came together quickly in the studio.

“Harry loved playing with words”

“We had a tea break, came back in and suddenly he was chugging away, and that turned into ‘Coconut’,” says Flowers. “Jim Gordon is going boozo-da, boozo-da, and I’m doing my thing, kind of jazzy. To share all that with Harry was great fun. He went upstairs to listen to it and Richard Perry chopped what was a 10-minute riff into a four-minute song.”

Nilsson and Perry came up with the idea of introducing a narrator, a sick woman and a doctor in the lyrics, each sung as a distinct character. “Harry loved playing with words,” says Van Dyke Parks. “He got married at the Marriott simply because he liked the way it sounded.”

“Jump Into The Fire” was also boiled down from a long studio jam. “It was a bit of buffoonery. It went on and on, because what Jim was doing on drums encouraged us all just to enjoy the groove that was cooking,” says Flowers. “A lot of editing was done to shape it up. It might be better than it should have been!” The song starts like Exile-era Stones meeting 1999 Prince and spends the last three of its seven minutes flirting with Krautrock, with its fiercely regimented drum pattern and Flowers’ detuned bottom-bass string tumbling up and down the fretboard.

“He’d had a miserable life”

The abrupt shifts in style, approach and emotional sincerity in Nilsson’s music were ingrained in his personality. A legendary bon viveur, he also exuded a deep melancholy, which Van Dyke Parks attributes to his father abandoning the family when he was three. “Harry was very private, an amazing man of contradictions,” he says. “He was trying to distract everyone from the raw truth that he’d had a miserable life, which he was still trying to figure out – a miserable childhood, with unspeakable poverty.”

Nilsson had a fourth-floor apartment on Curzon Street in Mayfair, but “he sometimes came and stayed in my house with my family”, reveals Flowers. “I think he was quite homesick. I’d say, ‘Come on, let’s go to mine. We’ll walk over Hyde Park, have some fish and chips.’”

“To me, he was focused on having a good time and enjoying life,” notes Keys. “He was a very bright person, well read; he didn’t just talk to hear his head rattle. After we’d finish we would go out and have a drink and would carry on talking, in a restaurant or a bar, and sometimes they would lead to the next bar! He was so opinionated. We would argue all the time and get really loud with each other, but it was silly stuff, for the sake of entertainment. He was straight on. He was a sociable person, but he had no time for stupid people.”

“Harry wanted to stay hungry”

In the short time between the release of Nilsson Schmilsson in November 1971 and the start of sessions for Son Of Schmilsson in March 1972, Nilsson became a bona fide pop star. The album reached the Top 5 in the US and UK, while “Without You” was a worldwide No 1. Collectively they would go on to earn Nilsson a Grammy and three further nominations.

Nilsson’s response to mass acclaim was to sabotage it with a record that deliberately courted notoriety. “I don’t think there was anything self-destructive about it,” says Van Dyke Parks. “RCA wanted him to repeat himself – that’s the executive trait – and Harry just wanted to stay hungry.”

Working again with Richard Perry at Trident, Son Of Schmilsson had a starrier cast – Ringo Starr played drums, Peter Frampton joined Spedding on guitar, and there were brief cameos from George Harrison and Lowell George – but lacked Perry’s careful touch.

“I sang my balls off for you, baby”

Thirty seconds into Son Of Schmilsson, Nilsson was already roaring “I sang my balls off for you, baby” on “Take 54”, which was swiftly followed by the drunken, drawled faux-country of “Joy” and the geriatric sing-song “I’d Rather Be Dead”. “At My Front Door” opens with Nilsson belching into the microphone. Most confrontational of all was “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” – “so fuck you”.

“It shocked the hell out of me when I first heard that,” recalls Bobby Keys. “I said, ‘Harry, you can’t say ‘fuck’ on a record!’ He said, ‘What do you mean I can’t!’ He didn’t have a problem going against the status quo.” Peter Frampton: “Richard Perry said to him, ‘Is this a good idea?’ and Harry turned around and said, ‘And fuck you.’ He knew what he wanted. It was an anti-success thing: ‘Let’s try and do something completely different and not follow it up like everyone expects me to do.’ That was Harry.”

The album still contains moments of exquisite beauty, not least the minor hit “Remember (Christmas)”, a companion piece to “Without You” sung tenderly to Nicky Hopkins’ piano accompaniment and Paul Buckmaster’s strings. But Son Of Schmilsson was, intentionally or otherwise, a momentum killer. Its fate wasn’t helped by Nilsson’s refusal to perform. He had tried playing live a handful of times in the late ’60s and hated the experience.

“It was unfortunate he never toured”

“He didn’t buy into the idea that you must go out and get clapped at and approved of in public to make a living,” says Van Dyke Parks. “That was a problem – he wasn’t seen. Occasionally he would do a TV performance, a cameo appearance here and there. He wanted to be Hitchcock in his own great movie.”

“He did a couple of TV shows and he looked very uncomfortable,” claims Frampton. “But it was unfortunate he never toured. He had such a great personality; he would have wrapped the audience around his fingers.”

Instead, he executed another swift volte-face with A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night, recording songs from the great American songbook with Gordon Jenkins and an orchestra. Nowadays, everyone from Rod Stewart to Robbie Williams does it. In 1973, it was a radical step. Richard Perry refused to have anything to do with it. “That was just Harry,” says Keys. “He’d want to do something and he would stick with it all the way through. He wasn’t wishy-washy. When he got a purpose in his mind, he damn well did it.”

“It was not a self-inflicted tragedy”

Despite being, as Flowers says, “a beautiful album”, it was met with blank stares and sold poorly. Nilsson’s career never quite recovered, particularly after he ruptured his vocal cords partying with Lennon and Starr in Los Angeles during the making of the unlovely Pussy Cats. His inspiration drifted into wilfully contrary self-indulgence, spoilt with sporadic reminders of his singular gift.

His last album, Flash Harry, was released in 1980, and he died of heart failure in 1994. “It’s a sad story in the end, Harry Nilsson,” concludes Van Dyke Parks. “But it was not a self-inflicted tragedy. It was meted out. He illustrates how America neglects its own. He was too smart for the business at that time, but that’s why his music endures. It has absolute durability and deserves to migrate to new generations.”