Nilsson Schmilsson

Or, who is Harry Nilsson, and why isn’t everybody talking about him?

Harry Nilsson: vocals, keys, Mellotron, principle songwriter

Chris Spedding, John Uribe: guitar

Klaus Voorman: guitar, bass

Herbie Flowers: bass

Jim Gordon, Jim Keltner: drums

guests: Gary Wright, piano and organ; Jim Price, trumpet and trombone; Bobby Keys, saxophone; Paul Buckmaster, string/horn arrangements of “Without You”

produced by Richard Perry

cover photographed by Dean Torrance

Time and time again, Harry Nilsson defies categorization. He had a crooner’s voice, but he wasn’t a pop singer. He was a master of the craft, but he was so much more than a pop writer. He flew in the Laurel Canyon crowd, but he didn’t really belong to Laurel Canyon. He was New York, California, and London all at once.

He advocated for gun control just the same as he drunkenly belched on a record, tried to name an album “Strange Pussies,” or made an awful vampire movie with Keith Moon and Ringo Starr. He could write a blues song about his father leaving and covering the Beatles, on the same side of an album. He based an entire project around a pun and grappled with God by writing about a desk. That’s just Harry.

In the form of showy hits he gave to the Monkees, the Turtles, Three Dog Night, and Mary Hopkin, Harry Nilsson was never going to be a typical pop artist. By the end of the '60s he'd made his reputation as the “artists’ favorite artist;” earning the title of John Lennon's "favorite American group." Ironically, the songwriter by trade’s biggest hit to date was a cover. He sang Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack; beating out the likes of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan for that coveted theme song spot.

He made visual album The Point. In lieu of reissuing Pandemonium Shadow Show and Aerial Ballet, he made one of the first-ever remix albums. He had a lot going on at the moment: he was on the hook to film a BBC special (which he’d already deferred twice,) his own production company had gone to shit, and he became a father for the first time. This constant push-and-pull between fatherhood, work, and going out on the town kept him from writing new material...

...except for Coconut. He loved the word coconut so much he wrote a whole story song around it.

All of the above circumstances put Harry in an interesting position heading into Nilsson Schmilsson production. As put by Noel Murray in a review of Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) Harry was “admired for his crazy arrangements and his insistence on satisfying his own muse before making his record label happy.” He sure was satisfying his own muse, all right! This time around, it just so happened to work out for his label. RCA were willing to allow him to traipse out to London to work with Tiny Tim’s producer, Richard Perry. Harry showed up on his doorstep asking for him to produce Schmilsson. He agreed, on one condition: he was to have complete artistic control. Harry agreed...for now.

Going in: man, is it a relief to cover a single-LP pop album after altogether too many double albums or otherwise avant-garde shit!

But again, Harry’s work never going to be just pop. Or just rock-and-roll; despite RCA’s ad campaign declaring, “Harry's got a rock album.”

This was a thought-out operation, brainstormed by Harry...and reigned in by Richard Perry. Without him gripping tightly to the reins, things quickly spiraled into songs like, “I’d rather be dead than wet my bed.”

In Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter, Richard emphasized sequencing. He put a lot of thought into the running order of Nilsson Schmilsson. You don’t get a much more fitting opener than a song about waking up late and rushing out the door in the morning. What’s so brilliant about Harry and Richard’s work together (consisting of just two albums, this and Son of Schmilsson,) is how illustrative it is. Harry can make you feel exactly what he wants you to feel with little more than an inflection. Likewise, Richard used production to drive that feeling. Take Harry’s opening piano chords of Gotta Get Up. He plays it freer on the demo – listen to the first few seconds of the video below.

On the album version, those same chords are rigid, straight, and loud, like an alarm rousing you from a deep sleep. The instrumental slowly comes to around Harry; Chris Spedding’s guitar hits the three, accompanied by rhythmic fills that unspool themselves to take up whole measures. The drums and bass put the livelypunch in. “Gotta Get Up” gradually introduces hokier instruments – we don’t even notice the horn section until the refrain. I bet you didn’t notice the accordion until the verse about the sailor either, it snuck its way in way back on the first verse! It’s rare that I feature a voice able to carry all this instrumental stuff on this series. Harry’s voice could; he had the theatricality and classic crooner’s tone to pull it off.

Why is “Gotta Get Up” such an earworm? There’s a structural fluidity about the lyrics. Every phrase leads right into the next line: “Gotta get home before the morning comes/What if I’m late? Got a big day/Gotta get home before the sun comes up/Up, and away, got a big day, sorry can’t stay…” That’s earworm 101! It allows Harry to play with the rhythm. He can do that goofy hip-swiveling “mooooorning comes” and actually make it work.

Harry’s writing revolved around his world view. He was the kind of guy to pour a drink while the sky was falling, he saw the humor in every situation. Though we’re not quite at the levels of writing a song about washing your dick after spending the night at a brothel (yes, Harry really wrote about that!) “Gotta Get Up”tests the waters with raunchiness: “He’d come to town and he would pound her for a couple of days/And then he’d sail across the bubbly waves…” The final chorus loosens up with tambourine – despite trumpets triumphantly doot-dooting away. His senes of humor spills into the other players, with that zany wind-up-toy outtro. “Gotta Get Up” up is waking up to the post-’60s hangover. The hippies are cutting their hair, settling down in very earth-toned houses, and having to wake up early to get to their big-boy jobs.

Of course, the song about being late for work is followed up by the song about the morning commute. Perky, folksy, and quirky, Driving Along reminds me of something George Harrison would’ve done in the later ’70s. It’s defined by mid-tempo acoustic guitar, and of course, a stalled engine sound effect. Nothing is too on-the-nose for Harry! As far as lyrics go, “Driving Along” is sparse after the first verse. You can tell this was one of the songs Nilsson and Co. slammed together in the studio. Yes, restriction breeds innovation. But as far as the arrangement goes, the only really innovative moments on “Driving Along” are the trippy echo effect on Harry’s voice through the outtro. The verse moves up from C to D major, while the bridge does the opposite; stepping down from C to B flat for a few bars. I wish these attention-grabbers were used to better effect.

It’s unfortunate that so much of known songwriter Harry Nilsson’s best-selling album is so lyrically half-baked. That’s not to say this song is boring at all. I can’t think of a single moment on Nilsson Schmilsson that “bores” me. There are some weird moments lyrically; my ability to gel with a song about having an existential crisis while on your morning was completely thrown off by “Driving along at 57,000 miles an hour/Look at those people standing on the petals of a flower...” Are we sure Harry wasn’t still tripping when he hit the road this morning? But a lyrical clunker gives way to one of the sharpest tools in Harry’s arsenal: his word play. “Look at those petals bumping for a little bit of power.”

“Driving Along” flows right into Harry’s cover of blues tune Early In The Morning. Listen to how Harry’s affinity for Caribbean motifs (looking at you, “Coconut”...) so naturally pays homage to the original by Louis Jordan.

After a couple tracks of early ’70s vocal pop excess, it was a delight to hear just Harry and his organ. Equalparts cheeky and lonesome, Harry’s “Early In The Morning” is a tale of what a guy gets up to after he storms out in a fight with his girl. He’s distraught and running all over town: after he’s turned away by both her friend and her folks, he ends up in the care of his waitress at a diner. This song is captivating in in how un-frilled it is. This is a totally different side to Harry the showman. It’s so quiet, you could hear a pin drop – and you can hear his fingertips on the keys. Listen to how he eeks everything he can out of his falsetto on, “Harry, you suuuuuure loooook beeeeeeat…” He’s on the verge of being out of breath before hitting us with the turnaround. Even in this quaint environment, Harry vamps on “ain’t got nothin but the- ain’t got nothin’ but the- ain’t got nothin but the-”

We go from a lonely night to a romantic one on the schmaltzy Moonbeam Song. Though I don’t know what the hell it’s about – “trash blown by a wind beam who searches for the moonbeam who was last seen looking at the tracks” is some confounding image – it doesn’t really matter what it’s about. Do we really want the lyrics to be sticking out from behind the actors’ dialogue when we’re watching a romance scene in a movie? But really, Harry was one of those writers who indulged in the act of piecing words together because they sounded nice together. He let our brains fill in the pictures. Since Harry is not one shred typical, this writing method produces some truly wild moments. I got a kick out of how committed to the bit he is when he sings, “Or on a fence with a bit of crap around its bottom.”

I’ll admit, knowing the showstopper that’s first up on the next side of this disc is affecting my perception of this side’s closer. While the music has grown on me since I filmed this episode (Schmilsson as a whole has me craving an electric guitar,) Down is unusually lyrically sparse for known songwriter Harry. If anything, it’s a good showcase of the less pristine side of his voice, and a fine culmination of the energy side one has built. We start full blast with “Gotta Get Up,” pull back through “Driving Along” until “Early In The Morning” is completely bare, then bring it up a bit through “Moonbeam” and into “Down.”

A while back I called Black Sabbath’s Paranoid the most frontloaded album of all time. Nilsson Schmilssonmight be a candidate for the most backloaded album of all time.

While all in all side one showcases Harry’s strengths, in comparison to side two it’s shy and bland. Harry’s cover of Without You is anything but bland. There’s a reason it’s his greatest hit; his only number one and his second Grammy winner after “Everybody’s Talkin’.”

Pictured, L-R: Harry Nilsson and "Without You" co-writers Pete Ham and Tom Evans pose with their gold records.

While Harry was remixing his old material and spending half a million dollars of his label’s money on a visual album, an Apple Records act trucked along, despite the truly absurd amount of setbacks. It would be comical if it weren’t so damn sad.

Badfinger were on tour in the States promoting Magic Christian Music, and mostly hit single “Come And Get It.” Six weeks into that tour, they released follow-up No Dice. On that album is a seemingly innocuous collab between Pete Ham and Tom Evans. As the story goes, Pete and his lady Beverly got in a tiff over a party. They were supposed to go out, but Tom wanted Pete to come work on a song with him. Beverly let Pete go work, but she wasn’t happy about it. “Your lips are smiling, but your eyes are not,” he said. Or, “You always smile, but in your eyes, your sorrow shows.” To my knowledge Tom didn’t get in a fight with his lady, he was just in his feelings. He wrote a chorus called “I Can’t Live.” Put that chorus and Pete’s verses together and you get “Without You.”

Badfinger’s recording is more of a power ballad. But according to Pete, they wanted to do it bigger and take it in the straight ballad direction. “...that was the way we wanted to do it, but never had the nerve.”

One night at a party in Laurel Canyon, Harry heard this mystery song and was besotted with it. After a few dead ends – obscure Beatles bootlegs, Grapefruit – Harry struck gold with Badfinger. Upon hearing it sober, he fell in love all over again.

“I called Richard Perry, who was supposed to be producing my album, and I said, ‘Look, I’ve found this song, I think it’s a number one. You’ve got to hear it!’ He came over and heard it and said, ‘God, I think you’re right. It’s a killer.’”

quoted from: Dan Matovina, Without You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger (1997)

Harry’s first crack at “Without You” didn’t work. The original key was way too high for him, RickWakeman’s keys were too much, Harry hated the string arrangement. The more he worked on it, the less he was sure of having it on the album. According to Richard:

“...like two proper gentlemen, we decided to have a meeting over high tea at the Dorchester Hotel to discuss what we were going to do. And I said, ‘Harry, you do remember that when you came to me and asked me to produce you, my only condition was that I have control? Creative control?’ And he looks at me dead in the face and says, ‘Well. I lied!’”

quoted from: Alyn Shipton, Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter (2013)

Typical Harry. He came to a compromise with Richard: the string arrangement stayed, but Rick Wakeman was swapped out for Gary Wright. It took a little more convincing to coax Harry back in front of the mic. But when he was, as the story goes, he slammed out his vocal and harmony in one take each.

Where Badfinger’s “Without You” feels like a tiff with your lover, Harry’s feels like the aftermath of a relationship-ending fight. The drama is THERE. It demands a visceral reaction. Even the piano is moved!Those chords sound like they’re weeping. Harry’s strength as a performer was, obviously, his voice. At his peak, his voice was always right. He’s feather-light on the verses, using inflections instead of volume to emote. It’s because he had to preserve his voice for later in the song. He was a belter too; his gut is behind that first“Can’t live if living is without you,” as if to sing through a grimace. It’s hard to imagine how to pull back from that intensity. Richard’s production does the heavy lifting. It leaves “chorus Harry” alone in the empty theater; his voice reverberating for but a moment, before returning to, “No, I can’t forget this evening or your face as you were leaving.”

In his recent Tate McRae review of all things, Swiftologist identified something I’ve been grasping at for years. It answered my question of, “In our year of the lord 2025, why does the harmony vocal feel special?” It’s because, as Swiftologist so astutely observed, modern pop music is afraid of the harmony vocal. Everything is one track now and it feels blah. Harry’s harmony on “Without You” is jaw-dropping. It sweeps in at, “And now it’s only fair that I should let you know/What you should know...” The two parts dance. Never touching, but always in sync.

Harry’s second strength was that he was a brilliant interpreter; of both his own work and others’. His“Without You” could be about a lost love just as much as it could be for a childhood friend who passed away. He’s a good actor: for a moment, I thought, “Oh, for Harry to have recorded this while his marriage was falling apart…” Then I listened to “You’re Breaking My Heart.” You know. The Fuck You Song.

Oh! So that’s how we feel!

It’s not all on the artist to be a master interpreter. Every actor needs his stage. This is where Paul Buckmaster comes in. Responsible for the Stones’s “Moonlight Mile,” Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” (Three of those were recorded on the same piano!) Even Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” is on his resume. Paul might be rock-and-roll’s greatest composer. He’s not just the master of the heart-rending swell, he knows how to let it happen. Just before “Without You’”s final chorus, everything pulls back so the drum can come running in. The force of impact is Harry tearing himself open on that impossibly high belt. The harmony is even higher, mind you! It’s a completely no-holds-barred performance. Passion like that has rarely been expressed on record, before or since.

And to follow that up with the funny coconut song. That’s it. That’s Harry right there! He undercuts hisvulnerability with the punchline, cracks a joke at a funeral. That’s why I love Harry Nilsson.

“Coconut” was far from the first white guy adopting a dodgy Caribbean accent in a politically-questionablemanner (I think of Steve Lawrence’s recording of “Banana Boat,”) and it was far from the last; see 10cc’s “Dreadlock Holiday” and Tally Hall’s “Banana Man.” The latter is a real shiner: apparently the music video had to be reshot in color because the guys’ face paint looked a little too much like blackface in black-and-white. Moral of the story: quirked-up white boys, leave the “Day-oh!”’s to Belafonte! Somehow, “Coconut” is one of the least offensive in this bunch. Do you have any idea how much inherent charisma it takes to pull a song like this off? It’s all pretty much one chord; there are a few spots where it shifts to a C7 over G. Still, it’s still the catchiest song known to man. You’ll see what I mean: after you’re done reading this, you’ll be moving through your daily life singing, “She put the lime in the coconut, she drank ’em both up/She put the lime in the coconut, she drank ’em both up…” Harry’s voices are utterly ridiculous, getting more hysterical as the song goes on. You have to be comfortable with taking the piss out of yourself to pull that off. I find it funny how Nilsson biographies try so hard to make “Coconut” out to be more than what it is. They say it’sa philosophical statement about “the problem is the solution” or whatever. Fuck no, call it what it is! “Coconut” is a song about drinking to cure a hangover!! Even the music feels drunk. The woozy wooden percussion and dinky triangle say as much.

The master interpreter comes back for Schmilsson’s third cover; of Shirley and Lee’s vaudevillian Let The Good Times Roll. Harry’s version has a bit wider of a step; as if to kick the hems of your bellbottoms out so you don’t trip and fall. I have a confession to make: his voice was so well-suited to this style, I always assumed “Good Times Roll” was his song! Once again, the harmony vocal shines. If his BBC special was any indication, the only thing better than one Harry is three.

I don’t have much more to say about this really. It’s tight, it’s spirited, it’s oodles of fun. All of Schmilsson’s best traits, rolled into one of the master interpretors’ goofy little covers.

If you think we’ve heard it all, how about a seven-minute jam session??

“Good Times Roll” is stopped abruptly by what I thought was a preset on a synth. It turns out to be Herbie Flowers setting the groove for Jump Into The Fire. It busts my expectations of not just the man of the hour, but his normally tight and controlled sidemen. Herbie slowly detuning his bass in the jam was just him goofing around. He had a good laugh and so do we; over both the moment itself and bass player magazines asking him about it for decades to come.

Alyn Shipton described Harry’s heavily-affected voice as a “shattered chandelier of sound, fragments of voice darting in every direction like an aural kaleidoscope.” It’s most fun to listen to “en plain air” (over a stereo system.) It sounds like Harry’s sucked so much helium he’s whizzing around the room!

We’re faced with kind of a bizarre closer with I’ll Never Leave You. Though the arrangement is gorgeous, it might be a bit mismatched to the song. After the emotional roller-coaster this side of Schmilsson has proved to be, I can’t get a read on this song’s intentions. Is it a genuine expression of love? Nods to epic love songs byTina (“This river’s far too deep without you,”) and Marvin and Tammi (“This river’s far too wide without you”) lend themselves to this interpretation. Harry had a penchant for referencing other lyrics in his own songs; see the time he covered seventeen Beatles songs in one song!

Or do we take into account the context of Harry Nilsson, ever the guy to undercut his own sincerity, and take this song as a bitter jab? Who’s to say? Whatever it is that has me so turned around on this song, it’s intriguing.

And that’s Nilsson Shcmilsson. Again, an emotional roller coaster. What have we learned from this seemingly innocuous pop album? That 1. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and 2. If there’s anyone I’d want to invite to my dinner party, living or dead, it’s Harry Nilsson. It’s bittersweet; Schmilsson is both a picture of the potential Harry could never fully realize and an expectation Harry would never totally live up to. What was that expectation exactly? Easy. People wanted Nilsson Schmilsson II. Whether out of spite or the drive to always be doing something different, Harry was never gonna give them Nilsson Schmilsson II!

What endears this album and its leading man to me is that its only thru-line is the man himself. His voice, his versatility, his command of the word, his sense of humor. His ability to cry laughing. It’s all Harry. He beckons with one hand and shoos you away with the other. I happen to feel right at home in that in-between. This album is an unabashedly full expression of both Harry’s personality and incredible musical ability. Pretty ironic, considering it’s one-third other people’s songs.

Oh well. That’s just Harry.

Personal favorites: “Gotta Get Up,” “Without You,” “Coconut,” “Let The Good Times Roll,” “I’ll Never Leave You”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

Matovina, Dan. Without You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger. Frances Glover Books, 1997.

Murray, Noel. “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?)”. AVClub, 9/9/2010. https://www.avclub.com/who-is-harry-nilsson-and-why-is-everybody-talkin-abou-1798165888

Schenfield, John, dir. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?). LSL Productions, Lorber Films, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je8g10Q3-gY&t=3806s

Shipton, Alyn. Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter. Narrated by L.J. Ganser, audiobook. Audible, Audible Studios, 5/6/2014. https://www.audible.com/pd/B00JU5LYVK?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp

“The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” Rolling Stone, 12/31/2023. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-albums-of-all-time-1062063/