Dreams Are Nothing More Than Wishes: Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?

There couldn't be a more apt title for John Scheinfeld’s engaging documentary on the late singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson than Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? Despite the fact that Nilsson was both a prolific pop songwriter and a gifted tenor, perhaps what made Nilsson less than a household name was that he didn't comfortably fit into the niche of a traditional pop crooner. It also took Scheinfeld almost four years to get a distributor for his movie about him. But it’s definitely worth the wait.

Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? examines with both insight and empathy the life of a pop artist whose pining voice cast a larger shadow on a tragic life. While he wrote songs that became hits for The Monkees (“Cuddly Toy”), Three Dog Night (“One”) and Blood, Sweat and Tears (“Without Her”), his only chart successes were other people’s tunes. “Everybody’s Talkin’” (made famous in Midnight Cowboy) was written by Fred Neil, while the Grammy-winning “Without You” was originally a track by the British rock group Badfinger. Nilsson never performed concert tours to promote his albums and his studio work itself became unique in that he did all his own overdubbed harmony vocals. With the help of top-notch players (from Little Feat’s Lowell George to keyboardist Nicky Hopkins), Nilsson became an insulated pop force, someone hidden away in the imagined world of a recording studio. From there, his lovely and quirky ballads and anthems could bring a youthful longing to unrequited wishes.

Singing for the Love of Singing: Harry Dean Stanton's Partly Fiction

Director David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton.

Harry Dean Stanton? He’s that actor right? (Yes, over 200 movies.) And now they’ve made a documentary about him. It’s called Partly Fiction because Kris Kristofferson wrote this lyric, and maybe it’s about Stanton. It certainly seems to describe him:

He's a poet, he's a picker
He's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

I watched the trailer for the film, and when asked by David Lynch how he would describe himself, Stanton replies, “As nothing. There is no self.” Lynch presses, “How would you like to be remembered?” and Stanton says, “Doesn’t matter.” Throughout the trailer, and I assume the rest of the film, Harry Dean Stanton maintains the same attitude. He does the least possible in his films and perhaps in his life. I saw him on a TV special one time, I think it might have been a tribute to Jack Nicholson, and he sang with Art Garfunkel. I remember the event, vaguely, but I recall no specifics. Just that I watched it. I remembered it, but not well. I think Stanton would be pleased.

Shell Shocked: A Tortoise and Hare Story

A turtle. It was the most harmless pet you could get, and your mother would probably fall for it… once. It didn’t do much, snapped at some lettuce, rolled over a bit, maybe, sunned itself on a rock. Kinda boring. So why would a cool bunch of rock’n’rollers name themselves after these dull critters? Maybe because The Turtles weren’t that exciting either. They had a fat guy with crazy curly hair and glasses who, together with a slightly slimmer guy sang all the songs, and some other guys whose names I never really knew. And I had a whole pile of their records. 

The Turtles

One of them was even produced by Ray Davies of The Kinks. That was cool… but it didn’t make The Turtles cool for some reason. Maybe they sang too pretty. “Elenore, gee I think you’re swell!” Goofy, but gorgeous. “Happy Together!” Instantly memorable. They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and a whole lot of other TV shows like The Smothers Brothers, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, these adult-oriented talk shows were the only place a teenager could get a glimpse of rock’n’roll back in the day. You’d watch dancing bears, jugglers, maybe an interview with Talullah Bankhead or a song by Sophie Tucker and then The Turtles would sing “She’d Rather Be With Me”. Still, these guys didn’t look very cool… they looked more like… ME!

Their songs were written, at the beginning at least, by the songwriting partnership of Alan Gordon and Garry Bonner. “Happy Together “ knocked The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” out of the #1 slot on Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart and was named one of the Top 50 songs of the 20th Century by BMI after generating over 5,000,000 performances on American radio. And still The Turtles were not cool. They had more hits, some written by Kaylan and Volman, some by other writers. Then The Turtles broke up, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (the two hefty singers) were on their own. They were forbidden from using The Turtles as a group name, and in fact they couldn’t even use their own legal names due to a law suit. They chose the nicknames The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie and sang backup for any number of top recording stars. Frank Zappa invited them to add vocals in The Mothers. All of a sudden they were cool. 

Bad Timing & Bad Business: Big Star and Badfinger

Big Star

Last night, I was watching the riveting and touching documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (which Phil Dyess-Nugent reviewed in Critics at Large last summer) about the Memphis band from the Seventies that eluded commercial success for any number of reasons that you can easily classify as bad timing. While they vanished after three superb albums, they ultimately reached an adoring audience a decade later as various independent bands took up their torch. The film is a fascinating study of love and dedication that doesn't elude the self-destructive drives that come out of artistic obsession. Director Drew DiNicola paints a fascinating portrait of the group with very few colours in his palette to work with. As Stephanie Zacharek wrote in the Village Voice, Big Star: Nobody Can Hurt Me "honors that sense of mystery, telling the band's story as if whispering it through the cracks in a wall. There's very little footage of the band themselves – their elusive magic found its truest expression in the studio rather than before a live audience." Co-founders Chris Bell and Alex Chilton are now gone, but the remaining witnesses fill in a story of artistic achievement that found a pulse in the shadows. Those shadows became a subterranean force for groups like R.E.M., The Flaming Lips and (especially) The Replacements (who wrote a song called "Alex Chilton"). As Robyn Hitchcock says in the picture, "They were like a letter that got lost in the mail." But Hitchcock also reminds us that the letter finally found its destination in the Eighties. (For me, it took my friend, Adam Nayman, to deliver the mail a few years ago. He wasn't around when the band first released #1 Record in 1972. What was my excuse?)

Badfinger

While I happily mulled over the movie, I was reminded of another Seventies band who had a case of bad timing, but with nowhere near the impact of Big Star – and this band had the benefit of being tutored by The Beatles. When The Beatles departed the stage in 1970, there was no shortage of others who tried to fill the gap they were leaving behind. One tragic case, however, turned out to be a band signed to their Apple label. Badfinger were poised through the early Seventies as the new heir to The Beatles, but their legacy ended in bad business, despair and death. Originally a Swansea, Wales group called The Iveys, they first came to the attention of Beatle roadie Mal Evans who was friends with their manager Bill Collins. Since The Beatles were just signing acts to Apple, Mal convinced the Fab Four that The Iveys were worth the bother. Lead guitarist Pete Ham and rhythm guitarist Tom Evans sang with ringing harmonies that strongly evoked Lennon and McCartney, and when Evans played them an Iveys’ demo tape, the whole studio took notice.“It was their uncanny resemblance to the young Beatles that had made everyone sit up and listen,” recalled Apple employee Richard DiLello. “But it was no conscious aping of their benefactors that had produced that similarity of sound.” The Iveys had inherited the yearning spirit of The Beatles rather than being a facsimile of the band. Their first single was the Beatlesque “Maybe Tomorrow,” which made the Top Ten in Europe and Japan in 1968. Due to its success, The Beatles were interested in grooming the band, but weren’t impressed by their name. Apple associate Neil Aspinall thought of Bad Penny, after Humphrey Lyttleton’s “Bad Penny Blues” which had inspired “Lady Madonna.” Ultimately, Badfinger was taken from “Bad Finger Boogie,” the original title of “With a Little Help From My Friends” (because John Lennon had composed the melody using his middle finger when he had hurt his forefinger).

Salty Dogs: Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd's Handsome Cabin Boy

I’ve always loved sea shanties (much to the amusement of my friend David Churchill). Maybe this odd affection dates back to my childhood because the first record I ever owned was “Blow the Man Down.” But I’ve always been taken by their mournful melodies, the unusual tales they told (sometimes ghostly, often times weird) and the singers sounding like long, lost adventurers dead drunk on the sea.

Sea shanties would appear in odd places, too, like The Byrds doing “Jack Tarr the Sailor” on The Ballad of Easy Rider (1969), or Harry Nilsson performing the mock shanty “Black Sails” on Pussy Cats (1974). But my favourite sea shanty album is Blow Boys Blow (1960) by Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd. This collection of classic tunes has a number of uproarious salty stories ("Do Me Anna"), sea adventures ("Banks of Newfoundland") and character portraits ("Old Billy Riley"). The most memorable song, though, is "Handsome Cabin Boy." The story in this tune falls into the category of strangely funny. A young girl finds her way onto a ship by disguising herself as a boy. The disguise works fine until, one day, she becomes pregnant. So...who impregnated the Handsome Cabin Boy? MacColl and Lloyd explore the dilemma with self-conscious bemusement and a crooked smile.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Part III

The Rolling Stones often had great B-sides on their singles ("Sad Day," "Long Long While," "Who's Driving Your Plane?"). "Child of the Moon," which backed "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is a particular favourite. It was their last bit of psychedelia before heading into the harder rock and country blues of Beggars Banquet. A contemporary band, Radon Daughters, have done the song justice by turning its acid tinged balladry into a tough piece of baroque pop.

A Musician Revitalized: Ron Sexsmith at the River Run Centre, Guelph (Oct. 21, 2011)

Singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith

Let’s get something out in the open right away, I’m a big fan of Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith. I’ve seen him live a dozen times, bought all his CDs, including various artist collections on which he only has one tune. I was also privileged to be invited to the taping of his episode of Beautiful Noise (a made-for-cable music show).

Friday night in Guelph we were in the presence of a different Ron Sexsmith. I last saw him in Hamilton’s Studio Theatre, an intimate venue with table seating. He was just starting to get the reviews for his new album Long Player, Late Bloomer, and the documentary, Love Shines, was just starting to be shown at festivals. It was April. Sexsmith had added a pianist to his band, and was playing Hamilton, then being feted at Massey Hall, before leaving for a European tour. He seemed tentative. He had a cold and it marked some of his vocals. The news had come out that Sexsmith had been considering getting out of the business. Although he bravely soldiered on, and gave us a fine show, his confidence was shaky. You can hear this show on CBC’s web site.

Last weekend in Guelph, however, he was a changed man.

Cracked Mirrors, Part Two: The Minstrel’s Dilemma

Don van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. (Photo: Andy Freeberg)

Part One of Cracked Mirrors was published on this site on October 27, 2021.

There should be a kind of periodic table for singer-songwriters, the way there is one for the elements and their interactive relationships. Maybe there is one, and we just haven’t noticed what it looks like. Does the table of their relative values and sonic weights as elements resemble the Grammy Awards? No, it couldn’t be, otherwise Don van Vliet would have won a Grammy years ago for his wonderful portrayal of Captain Beefheart before retiring to return to his first love of painting. If so, he would be Helium.

 

Making the Myth True: The Fisher King on Criterion

Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King.

Around the turn of the millennium, the director Terry Gilliam struggled to bring an updated Don Quixote to the screen; the documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002) chronicles the breakdown of the project after bad weather and the illness of his Quixote, the French actor Jean Rochefort, threw it into financing hell. When he finally released a version of it called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2018, he’d lost the momentum. Really, though, he’d already made his Don Quixote, back in 1991. In his best movie, The Fisher King, written by Richard LaGravenese, two men strangely bonded by a tragedy heal each other through a crackpot mission to locate the Holy Grail, devised by one of them, a schizophrenic (Robin Williams) who used to be a Hunter College English professor named Henry Sagan, and carried through by the other, a one-time radio talk host named Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) whose life has become meaningless. The tragedy is a mass shooting at a popular bar called Babbitt’s perpetrated by a lunatic who has received encouragement for his paranoia by Jack, whose favorite targets is the yuppies who frequent Babbitt’s. Jack’s spleen isn’t real; his diatribes are cynical inventions to entertain his listeners and fuel his career. Until the killer strikes, it never occurs to him that there might be consequences to his habit of revving them up. Afterwards, shattered by what he’s brought into being, Jack goes into retreat, drinking and hiding from the world while his girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) shelters him and lets him help her manage the video shop below her apartment.

On Our Minds and Playlists: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

The Beatles are a big part of why I listen to music at all. Twist & Shout (a compilation Capitol Records in Canada made out of their official UK releases) was the first album I ever owned. I was going to write, ‘the first album I ever bought,’ but of course my Mom and Dad bought it, and my brother Al and I shared it until the grooves were worn down. In fact, we didn’t even have a record player that would play 33 1/3 vinyl albums when it came along. We had to sit and stare at the sleeve for a week while my Dad took the old 78 rpm turntable into the local radio shop and had a new multi-speed turntable dropped in. The excitement was palpable as we came home from school that afternoon and counted the minutes ‘til Dad walked in with the new and improved record player! It was soon after hearing The Beatles that I asked for (and received) my first guitar. It was a Sunburst with a neck that was already warped, which made it very difficult to play. Lessons were frustrating, focusing on songs like “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along” instead of the really important tunes like “Anna” or “Boys,” “Please Please Me” or “Love Me Do.” Soon enough though I was able to strum along. That first Beatles’ album gave clues to the later development of the Four Mop Tops. Here we are nearly fifty years later … and in one week we’ve seen the release of new albums from Ringo and Paul.

John Lennon was gunned down in the street outside his apartment in New York over thirty years ago, but his son Julian just issued his fifth album. And George, who was claimed by cancer in 2001, was recently celebrated in a long-form documentary by Martin Scorsese. Paul and George featured on two Mojo magazine covers in 2011, and Rolling Stone issued two different special editions devoted to the band. The Beatles continue to be on our minds … and on our playlists. So let’s look at these two new releases.

Like A Midnight Cowboy: Glen Campbell, 1936-2017

Glen Campbell performing on the BBC in 1970. (Photo: Michael Putland/Getty/Hulton Archive)

It wasn’t shocking to hear, two days ago, that Glen Campbell had died: for nearly a decade, he had been making highly public acknowledgements of his affliction with Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than lachrymose interviews or TV appearances, these mostly took the form of actual work. A worldwide concert tour spanned August 2011 to November 2012; referred to variously as “Good Times – The Final Farewell Tour” and “The Goodbye Tour,” it couldn’t have been more upfront about its theme and raison d'être. I’ll Be Me, a documentary about the tour and about the disease, premiered on CNN in 2014. Campbell’s last three studio albums – 2011’s Ghost on the Canvas, 2013’s See You There, and this year’s Adiós – were concerned entirely or partially with the singer’s contemplation of his own looming mortality. These years and works amount to a concerted resistance against dissolution and death, and they comprise, whatever their artistic results, an exemplary final act.

Taking Chances: The Red Bird Label Story

Record labels used to have a certain cache in the days before corporate takeovers and media-mergers began to happen in the eighties. To put it in contemporary marketing lingo, the labels once “branded” their music. Consider Motown: a distinct sound and style that stood for high quality performance and catchy pop R&B. Another might be Elektra records, the West Coast label featuring folkie Judy Collins and The Doors. Sun Records had Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. What would jazz be without Blue Note, Impulse and ECM, each featuring their own distinctive styles? Labels meant something in the middle of the last century before larger companies scooped them all up. Their interest was more in profiting from sales rather than promoting the art form. But there was one label, Red Bird Records, that understood the relationship between good music and the profit motive.

In 1962, American songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, authors of hits for Elvis Presley ("Jailhouse Rock") and The Coasters ("Searchin'"), were ambitious businessmen eager to earn more money for their work. At the time, they were songwriters for Atlantic records earning 2 cents for every single sold of one of their songs. By forming their own company, they would earn 21 cents a record. So they decided it was in their best economic interests to form Red Bird records. Having their own company allowed them to take more risks with their music.

Allegories and Prophesies in Song: "The Beehive State" and "The Devil Came From Kansas"

Singer/Songwriter Randy Newman, in 1971 (Photo by Charles Seton)

Historian Constance Rourke once observed that Americans are "a people unacquainted with themselves, strange to the land, unshaped as a nation." That particular kind of estrangement is rarely taken up in song, but listening the other day to Randy Newman's deceptively obscure "The Beehive State," from his 1968 debut album Something New Under the Sun, I caught some of the intriguing aloofness in the mystery she poses of what it means to actually be an American. "The Beehive State" begins with a delegate from Kansas taking the Senate floor, where he is asked to describe what his state is all about. But we don't find out very much from him. First, we discover that Kansas is for the farmer and "the little man." The representative then, with a persistence that suggests a declaration of war, tells the senators gathered that they all they need is a firehouse in Topeka. Hardly worth the trouble. Next, the senate calls to the floor a delegate from Utah. He steps forward with a desperate plea that is also rather opaque: he insists Utah needs water to irrigate their desert, but mostly he just urges everyone to tell this country about his state. Why? "'Cause nobody seems to know." But how much do we really know when the song – which is barely two minutes in length – is over? With a relentless staccato rhythm that he builds on the piano, Newman tells this story so swiftly that he barely gives you time to absorb what the song is actually saying (which could be nothing so urgent as a laundry list). But he gives the song all the immediacy of prophesied fact and portentous calamity. "It should be longer," Newman once told an interviewer. "But I couldn't think of more to say." So is less truly more?

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XV

In the recent issue of Pitchfork, Dhani Harrison describes a conversation he had with his late father about his guitar playing. “My father once said to me, ‘I play the notes you never hear,’” he remembers. “He focused on touch and control partly because he never thought he was any good, really. He knew he was good at smaller things: not hitting any off notes, not making strings buzz, not playing anything that would jar you. ‘Everyone else has played all the other bullshit,’ he would say. ‘I just play what's left.’”

I started to think about what song might illustrate best for me the notion of playing 'what's left.' On Beatles for Sale (or Beatles VI – if you grew up like me in North America), "What You're Doing" has a solo that's quite economical in that George Harrison style. The notes he plays (over-top George Martin's rumbling piano) are picked at with a brightness that gives the song some of its shimmering texture. Yet it still harmonizes with the song's melodic line even when it briefly breaks free from it. Heard here best in mono, rather than stereo, the pieces are always designed to fit the whole.

Artificial Paradise: How the End of the Beginning Sounded

The lads, from The Beatles’ last photo session, in August 1969. (Photo: Ethan Russell)

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

– Lennon/McCartney, “The End” (1969)

“Making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind
Like a leper messiah. When the kids had killed the man
I had to break up the band.”

– David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust (1972)

When The Beatles released the last great pop masterpiece of the 1960’s, they were bringing to a close a remarkable collective waking dream. If only they had allowed their Abbey Road album, possibly one of their three best recordings, to be the band’s final release instead of returning to an earlier fraught effort and letting it out of the studio vault. The self-produced and then Phil Spector-mutilated Let It Be was a mess mostly due to the absence of George Martin, their brilliant guiding light for eight astonishing years together, while Abbey Road had glistened due to his return to the fold as their producer. It also signaled the arrival of a new kind of recording technology, with EMI’s advanced solid-state transistor mixing desk, which would usher in a kind of immediacy the following musical decade would eventually take for granted.