Wednesday 8th June
Harry Nilsson hated playing live, and barely ever performed his songs on stage. Maybe that is one reason he never really made it. After the hit that was “Without You” he quickly released a poor album “Son of Schmilsson” which flopped. He made two albums of old American Songbook classics which while beautifully sung, hardly propelled Harry into the stratosphere, he was becoming more and more eccentric and his records were very much mixed bags; one or two great songs, a couple of stupid comedy numbers and a lot of fillers. Harry was drinking heavily and in the company of Keith Moon, Ringo and John Lennon, who was in the middle of his own ‘lost weekend’, behaved pretty badly and got thrown out of many L. A. nightclubs.
There was one exception. In 1977 he released Knilsson, maybe his finest record. However even this he tried to sabotage with a terrible cover photo. The record is brilliant and harks back to the sound of his earlier records and his voice is deeper and rounded and curls itself round the lyrics like a lazy cat. There is a comedy song ‘Who Coulda Done It?’ a take on Agatha Christies ‘Ten Little Niggers’ and is wonderful as Harry gets hanged in the end. Every song is superb, a real treat – and Harry said that this was his favourite record too. But bad luck seemed to dog his heels. He had moved to London and had a flat in Curzon Street; Cass Elliot was found dead of a drug overdose in one of the rooms and a few years later Keith Moon died in the same room of drugs too. Harry moved back to L. A.
He wrote songs for the film ‘Popeye’ and recorded a couple more nondescript records and he was deeply affected by the death of his friend John Lennon. In 1990 Harry discovered that his manager had embezzled almost all the receipts from his million selling records and he was broke. Harry suffered a heart attack in 1993 and a year later he died while attempting to record a new album.
His records have been re-issued lately on CD and are now collector’s items, sought after by fans old and new. Such a pity he couldn’t hold things together a bit longer.
