Arts: Harry Nilsson: The nearly-man of pop
Isuppose this qualifies as some sort of Proustian moment - finally getting hold of some albums I didn't quite get round to buying in 1972, despite much prevarication around the record racks in Golders Green Woolworths. Five re-releases of old Harry Nilsson records - what could be more marginal than that? In fact, you have to marvel at just how marginal Nilsson managed to make himself, despite recording one of the best-selling cover versions of its day.
One thing I remember fondly about him is that his 1971 LP Nilsson Schmilsson had an unbelievably boring sleeve, which I can only interpret as an act of provocation on his part, considering what a brazen, lush record it was. On the front was a muddy grey photo of the artist in an old bathrobe clutching a pipe, looking unlikely to sing a note before his hangover cleared; the back featured his fridge. I also remember a strange BBC2 solo show in which multiple Nilssons sang barbershop harmonies, juggled, shared the screen with performing gorillas, and bored a studio audience to sleep.
Nilsson has gone down in history as a nearly-was: an accomplished, much-covered songwriter who had his own biggest hits with other people's material. He was on the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy singing the Fred Neil song Everybody's Talking; his own I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City was turned down. His biggest hit, the Wagnerian angst-storm Without You, was originally by Beatles acolytes Badfinger.
Nilsson also had a self-destructive streak: just when Without You and Nilsson Schmilsson had made him a favourite with impressionable teens and sentimental parents alike, he alienated them all with a facetious follow-up, Son of Schmilsson, on which he roped in a chorus of senior citizens from Stepney and Pinner to sing a questionable ditty about ageing ("I'd rather be dead/Than wet my bed"). He went downhill from there, partly as a result of Famous Friends Syndrome (too much joking around with Ringo Starr, too many benders with John Lennon). The story ends in 1994 with his death after diabetes and heart problems. There was a brief, last-minute injection of hipness: his cod-Caribbean ramble Coconut featured incongruously in Reservoir Dogs.
Nilsson's output zigzagged every which way, from glutinous schmaltz to vituperatively aggressive brilliance, via excruciating lapses into whimsy. Some of the great stuff is on his 1967 debut Pandemonium Shadow Show. It is patchy and larded with the baroque production excesses of the time, but it does contain several extraordinary songs, including Without Her, one of the most depressive lost-love ballads in the book. There's the deceptively bouncy circular narrative: boy is born, father walks out, boy grows up to join circus, it all goes wrong, he settles down, has a son, then he walks out, leading to the punchline, "But what will happen to the boy when circus comes to town?"
You might be inclined to write off Nilsson Schmilsson if you've seen it filed alongside your auntie's Mantovani. However, not only does it have Without You but Nilsson's bizarrely elastic voice does unnerving things with seemingly incompatible genres, from studiedly soporific blues to the frenzied hard-rock mantra of Jump Into the Fire. There's passion, humour and a hint of personality breakdown, the sense of a larynx raging after years of soft-pop frustration. It is a great vocal showcase and a marvel of incongruity - a commercial album that refuses to limit itself to any one market.
It's astonishing Nilsson was ever able to put these records out at all. There's no sense of any coherent career plan - one minute he's a family entertainer, the next seedy farceur or lugubrious balladeer. It could only have happened when it was possible for an artist to play one genre against another, sneaking under the wire from cosy MOR entertainment to rock and back again. Nilsson's records are anachronisms from a brief time when genre distinctions were strangely fluid. It could not happen now - unless, say, Beck sat down at the candelabra-topped grand to record recorded a Barry Manilow tribute album.
Five Harry Nilsson CD re-releases are available on Camden Deluxe.