Harry Nilsson - The American Beatle

He was the smartest person I ever met in the music business. I wouldn't call him a musical genius, I'd simply call him a genius, period. And, by the way, I haven't met any others

(Van Dyke Parks on Nilsson, Uncut, 2013)

"Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?" That's the title of the documentary released in 2006 which tried to shed light on one of pop music's most multifaceted singer-songwriters. Years later, these are still questions that are hard to answer: because Harry, in Pirandellian terms, was one, no one and a hundred thousand.

In 1941 a happy father had a son

Let's start from the beginning. Harry Edward Nilsson III was born in Brooklyn in 1941 into a family with circus roots, but moved early to Los Angeles to escape a financial situation that "critical" would be an understatement to describe. His father, in fact, abandoned the family when Harry was only three years old, leaving his wife Bette to raise the children alone. Lost amid failed relationships and mounting debts, the young woman began to seek refuge in alcohol, perpetually skirting the edge of poverty. According to the memories of a cousin, it's said that, at one point, the children were even given dog food because it was cheaper.

But food on the table wasn't the only thing missing; the absence of a father figure left a hole that was hard to fill, so their mother, pressed by her children's constant questions, decided to tell a series of fanciful lies, including that their father had died a war hero. For a while no one asked about their glorious dad, believing him dead for a very long time, until, at 27, Harry discovered the truth and decided to see him again. It would be a traumatic meeting, even though in the surviving photos no emotion seems to show on the singer-songwriter's face. The wound of the absent father, however, would always remain visible, impossible to heal, becoming the leit-motif of countless songs, including "Daddy's Song" (written for the Monkees) and the ballad autobiographical "1941" ("Well in 1941 a happy father had a son/ and by 1944 the father walked right out the door"). Paradoxically, in that song the author wonders how a mother and child could survive such abandonment, not knowing that the same thing would happen to his own firstborn son, Zak: as if by some dark omen, the pattern was fated to repeat itself, although Harry would later find his own way to make amends.

Given these circumstances, it's easy to understand why Harry's personality couldn't help but be reflected in a musical vision that was refined, deep and never banal. His second wife, Diane, remembers him as a man who was "a lot of fun, but very insecure," and his songs don't fall far from that simple description. Nilsson's music reflects a phantasmagoria of instincts and emotions: there are the dreams of the grown man, but also the hidden sufferings of the abandoned child. As shy with audiences and reluctant to take the stage as he was (his live performances can be counted on one hand), he was just as much the life of the party among friends, and with his generous, singular personality, Harry managed to touch everyone who crossed his path.

But let's jump back in time. Nilsson's first musical ambitions arose in a highly atypical way. He was musically indoctrinated in his teens by his paternal grandparents – two circus performers – and by his mechanic uncle: hardly the artistic input anyone would expect. Encouraged from the sidelines, he also formed an Everly Brothers-style group, with which he had fun in his spare time mangling songs that, in effect, ended up becoming new compositions. Harry, however, had no time to waste loafing around and soon had to find a job to help cover the family's debts. So, after working for three years at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles, he landed a good position at a bank by lying on his resume. The deception was soon uncovered, but he was so good that management decided to keep him on anyway. For a few years he got by this way, striking a winning compromise: working nights as a computer supervisor, writing songs by day.

His talent soon came to light and caught the attentive ear of Phil Spector, with whom he ended up writing songs for the Ronettes and the Modern Folk Quartet. He also released singles for a local label under the pseudonym Bo Pete – "Do You Wanna (Have Some Fun)" and "Baa Baa Blacksheep" – and for Mercury under the name Johnny Niles ("Donna, I Understand/ Wig Job").

His official debut came quietly in 1966 with Spotlight On Nilsson, although in reality most of these tracks were his 1964 singles recorded for Tower (an offshoot of Capitol). At the time, Nilsson was still writing material to sell to other artists, and the record captures the singer-songwriter in his formative years: it's therefore hard to pass judgment on ten tracks that are very different from one another, spread across barely twenty minutes of music.

Among them are protest songs ("The Path That Leads To Trouble"), rockabilly ("Sixteen Tons"), r&b ("So You Think You've Got Troubles", "You Can't Take Your Love Away"), soul-pop ("Do You Believe") and surf-rock anthems ("I'm Gonna Lose My Mind"). There's also room, however, for the kind of typically Nilsson-esque ballads yet to come, such as "Growin' Up" (which tells of his first time) and "She's Yours", but the standout track remains "Good Times" with the New Salvation Singers, which would later be covered by the Monkees in 2016, keeping one of Harry's own vocal parts.

Nilsson's official christening is an album that's almost too eclectic, at times confused, not yet able to compete against the British Invasion. His gifts as a performer, however, are already plain for all to see.

Nilsson is my favorite group

By 1967 Harry's reputation as a songwriter was on a steep rise, to the point that he was finally able to land a contract with RCA and leave his bank job behind.

Strongly inspired by the work of the Beatles, he rolled up his sleeves and delivered the rock-solid Pandemonium Shadow Show (1967). The album is a powerful mix of original material and covers (seven of the twelve tracks were written by Nilsson himself). The title comes from that of a circus show featured in Ray Bradbury's novella "Something Wicked This Way Comes", and although it isn't a concept album, that image acts as a kind of glue, setting the tone and mood of the record.

The sonic palette Nilsson draws from is very broad, and the cover image perfectly captures this shift, showing the singer-songwriter caught holding a doll in a setting full of hazards and musical instruments.

The album opens with the bravura air of "Ten Little Indians", in which master of ceremonies Nilsson sardonically recites the tale of the "Ten Little Indians", each struck down in turn as they break one of the commandments. But it's an ominous, deceptive introduction, a veil of illusion ready to be torn away. The American singer-songwriter immediately bares himself with "1941", a semi-autobiographical account of his father's abandonment. As a brass orchestra weaves its web in the background, Nilsson's phrasing makes it immediately clear what a formidable one-man band he can be, leading the listener through the pages of his life. It's obvious that, as mentioned elsewhere, several different personalities coexist within Harry: and here he returns to a playful mood with the childlike nursery rhyme of "Cuddly Toy", probably better known in the Monkees' version, since it's one of the songs Nilsson sold to the band in his early days, when he was looking to place material.

There's also room for the richly layered bluegrass work of "She Sang Hymns Out Of Tune", with a full orchestral crescendo driving its jovial melody, while the Beatles are invoked directly on "You Can't Do That", a cover taken from "A Hard Day's Night". It's the album's most ambitious performance, packing lyrical and melodic references to some twenty Beatles songs into barely two minutes, a kind of mash-up avant la lettre.

Harry's great sophistication as a composer is confirmed by the odd-time soft-jazz of "There Will Never Be" and by the abyssal vocal harmonies of "Without Her", where he casts a melancholy eye over his separation from his first wife Sandi, in a track that's very McCartney-esque in its fusion of pop and classical music. Among the covers, special mention goes to "Freckles", which resurrects the tale of a scoundrel written in 1920, and above all "River Deep, Mountain High", where Nilsson builds his extraordinary wall of sound on a cover of the Tina Turner classic, foreshadowing the albums still to come.

Pandemonium Shadow Show is a record that has held up surprisingly well over time, revealing a peerless talent for reinterpreting, and even surpassing, the material of his contemporaries. The album is the emblem of Nilsson's career under the banner of unpredictability, with entire albums arranged so that at least a couple of songs break away completely from the rest. Much of the work is clearly indebted to the Beatles of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", but Harry is a fantasist who plays a game all his own: the reviews that follow are enthusiastic, and one journalist even writes that Nilsson should perhaps have credited the backing vocalists, not realizing that they are in fact all him.

That year, the number of Harry's admirers begins to grow dizzyingly, to the point that his work ends up in the Midas-touch hands of Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer. He falls so much in love with Pandemonium Shadow Show that he orders 25 copies to give away to his circle of friends and acquaintances. At first everyone turns their nose up the moment they see the cover: who is this Nilsson? The mystery around who the guy actually is is fueled further by the fact that he has never performed live and that his first name isn't even printed on the sleeve. After receiving his copy, John Lennon listens to it for 36 hours straight, sets out to find a direct contact, and calls Nilsson at 5 in the morning. A few days later Harry also gets a call at dawn from Paul McCartney. Of that anecdote, with his usual humorous flair, Harry would later say that he woke up early the next day too, expecting a call from Ringo (but the phone never rang).

The seed has been planted. The Beatles are so taken with him that they invite Nilsson to join them in the studio during the recording of the "White Album", and it's said they even considered adding him as a fifth member of the group. During a 1968 press conference, when asked which American band was the Beatles' favorite, Lennon names Nilsson, to the general astonishment of those present. Because Nilsson wasn't a band, and it wasn't even the name anyone expected from the Fab Four. His legend begins right here, with that "Nilsson is my favorite group".

One is the loneliest number

With Aerial Ballet (1968) Nilsson is definitively consecrated to fame, taking flight like the helicopter on the cover, which bears the album's title (again, a circus reference to his grandparents).

Among the tracks here there's only one cover, and it's the one that brings Harry to the big screen: his personal take on Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'", adopted as the soundtrack to the film "Midnight Cowboy", which gives Nilsson his first Top 10 hit. The single "One" would later carry the singer-songwriter to his first million copies sold.

On Aerial Ballet Harry pours out all his eccentricity. "Good Old Desk", for instance, seems to catch the artist in his nonconformist streak, tackling a thorny subject like God (the title is in fact an acronym for "God"). The song's backstory, however, remains shrouded in ambiguity: Harry told Hugh Hefner that "the meaning of the song was in its initials", but shortly before his death he would confess that he'd only been pulling his leg, and that he'd only noticed the coincidence once the song was already finished.

Mysteries aside, what's certain is that, whereas the earlier albums bear witness to Nilsson's multifaceted nature as a singer and songwriter while still leaving room for detours along the way, this new record is a one-off, unequivocal proof of his unified musical vision, where his extraordinary three-and-a-half-octave vocal range reigns unchallenged over the whole affair. Nilsson comes out of his shell, proving himself to be a true Fab One: irrefutable evidence of this comes in the two songs that stand as manifestos of human incommunicability. The first, "Daddy's Song", written for the Monkees, in stark contrast to its delightful rhythm and playful phrasing, deals with the thorny subject of abandonment and the impossibility of understanding other people's feelings. The second, the record's true crown jewel, is of course "One", a song that opens with the acoustic signal of a phone ringing out unanswered, the perfect sonic metaphor for failing to connect with someone; that there really was genius in Nilsson is plain to see in this subtle rhythmic device. Right from the opening bars, then, it's clear just how all-encompassing his musical vision is, a Wort-Ton-Drama in which the artist remains omnipresent amid the ghosts of his own polyphonies.

The Beatles are evoked directly in "Mr. Tinker", in effect Nilsson's own "Eleanor Rigby", which tells the bleak story of a widowed man living alone in the back room of his shop. The songwriter's storytelling is sharp and versatile, and if any doubts remained, "Mr Richland's Favorite Song" shows once again just how much Nilsson was on the same wavelength as Lennon & co. at that particular moment. It is in fact the story of a singer who was once a star, though there are plenty of literary nods to "Alice in Wonderland" as well.

Among the most distinctive tracks are the dense bossa nova of "The Wailing Of The Willow" and the old-style ballad "Don't Leave Me", while special mention should go to "Bath", an account of a night of revelry, and to the two sunshine-pop rides "Together" and "I Said Goodbye To Me", which tackle the theme of a couple's breakup from some rather singular vantage points ("Ending the game is like changing the name of your favorite song").

The success of Aerial Ballet, driven by the Grammy won for "Everybody's Talking", lifts Nilsson onto the musical Olympus. That's when restlessness sets in: at a moment when every door is wide open for him, the first signs of insubordination start to surface. If we want to risk a comparison, he behaves a bit like the resident Kevin Ayers of the moment: he begins sabotaging his own success, doing the things least convenient to him from a commercial standpoint. When the record label asks him for another killer album, he's busy focusing on film scores instead. In 1968 he composes the soundtrack for "Skidoo", a comedy directed by Otto Preminger starring Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing, in which the singer-songwriter makes a cameo as a guard. Among the most notable passages is especially the gentle "I Will Take You There", a track with a typically Nilsson-esque structure that wouldn't have been out of place on his earlier work. The following year he decides to try his hand at television too, writing "Best Friend" for the TV series "The Courtship Of Eddie's Father". Today only an alternate version of this track survives, with different lyrics and title ("Girlfriend"), released on various posthumous compilations.

Nilsson's third album, Harry (1969), reveals an artist more absorbed in his ballads and withdrawn into himself. There are no wild swerves here, it's a masterfully performed record, where the sonic microcosm is understated and elegant. Among the tracks worth noting are "The Puppy Song" (later turned into a hit by David Cassidy), "Maybe" and the little gem "I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City", which revives the smoky atmospheres of Fifties films.

Midway through the recording sessions, Nilsson fires his longtime producer Rick Jarrard by telegram and starts doing things his own way. As a prelude to what's about to happen, the closing track is a cover of Randy Newman's "Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear", which marks the beginning of a friendship between the two colleagues.

The following year, in fact, the label asks Nilsson for an album of new material, but his response is something nobody expects: he decides instead to champion Randy Newman with Nilsson Sings Newman (1970). Aside from the occasional, barely perceptible percussion and keyboards (played by Newman), Nilsson is the album's sole protagonist, with his own layered harmonies. Tracks like "Dayton, Ohio–1903", "Living Without You", "Vine Street" and "So Long, Dad" bear witness to a naïve, nostalgic aesthetic and, above all, to the singer-songwriter's great empathy in reinterpreting and understanding his colleague's songwriting.

Newman would later have beautiful words for the record, noting with a hint of pride: "It was as if the Rolling Stones had never existed. We thought rock and roll would go in a completely different direction, like a branch of Homo Sapiens that never became Homo Sapiens".

At this point Nilsson is now a loose cannon. Spurred on by Lsd, he writes the screenplay and composes the soundtrack for The Point! (1971), an animated TV movie. Several versions of the film would later be produced, including one narrated by Dustin Hoffman and another by Ringo Starr. The tale is told by a parent to his son (strikingly similar to Nilsson himself!) to lull him to sleep. It's a small fantasy set in a village reminiscent of Gong, recounting the misadventures of Oblio, a boy born with a round head in a kingdom where everything and everyone has a point, even people's heads. Accompanied by his faithful dog Arrow, he is temporarily banished from the land and forced to venture into the Pointless Forest, where he has to deal with a series of allegorical characters. It's here that a string of encounters make Oblio realize that difference is merely the product of prejudice, and the hero returns home triumphant, bringing this new awareness to the townsfolk and ushering in a new era.

As one might easily guess, this isn't just a fairy tale, but a story full of sharp reflections and philosophical gems (some have even, not unreasonably, invoked Baruch Spinoza). Among the tracks making up the soundtrack, special mention goes to the flute-driven nursery rhyme "Think About Your Troubles" and to the hit "Me And My Arrow".

By 1971 the time is ripe for the first compilation album, though still done Harry's way. Thus comes Aerial Pandemonium Ballet, whose cover art revives an rèclame advertisement from 1863. Rather than simply reissuing his first two records, Nilsson undertakes a major re-editing operation, creating what is probably the first remix album in history, pushing the songs to align with the songwriter's love of Broadway shows. The quintessential example is "Sleep Late, My Lady Friend", where the mood turns more smoky and funereal, while "Without Her" is given a fresh polish, enriched with horns and new shades of texture.

You can jump into the fire but you’ll never be free

In November 1971, Nilsson releases Nilsson Schmilsson, the album that would finally bring his music back to the top of the charts. It's the first of two records Nilsson would make in London with producer Richard Perry, who provides him with a thoroughly respectable rock ensemble, including drummer Jim Gordon, guitarist Chris Spedding and bassist Klaus Voormann. The cover's lettering recalls that of "Pet Sounds", and, just as in the Beach Boys' masterpiece, here too the music is woven together with elements foreign to the standard sonic pattern: think of the car struggling to start in "Driving Along", the rhythmic swarm of "Jump Into The Fire", or the primal percussion of "Coconut" (sung, incidentally, by Nilsson in three different voices portraying as many characters).

While the standout is the Badfinger cover "Without You", which Paul Buckmaster's arrangement turns almost operatic, catapulting it to the top of the charts, elsewhere the album is firmly rooted in classic rock. The record kicks off with the untamed "Gotta Get Up", and it's immediately clear that this time the stage will largely belong to a series of power ballads (the soft rock of "Driving Along", the gentle arpeggios of "The Moonbeam Song"), albeit with flashes of madness and eccentricity, like the already-mentioned "Coconut" and "Jump Into The Fire", which nicely introduce the character of Nilsson "Schmilsson", the songwriter's brash alter ego. The gamble pays off: Schmilsson puts Nilsson back on the map, and the album proves to be nothing short of a triumph.

This persona is cultivated across two more albums, Son Of Schmilsson (1972) and A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night (1973). But Nilsson is a changed man, and no one knows the cause of this drastic transformation. Son Of Schmilsson, in particular, feels like a kind of public atonement for the commercial success of its predecessor, as if the artist felt a sort of impostor syndrome stirring inside him.

Ringo Starr and George Harrison appear in the liner notes under pseudonyms, and right from the cover – a black-and-white photo of Nilsson as a "vampire", taken by Michael Putland at Harrison's house – something seems to have changed. While some songs, like the nostalgic "Remember (Christmas)" and the versatile "The Lottery Song", nod to the breezy sounds of his earlier albums, proving to be red herrings, the record's overall mood is decidedly less affable. Indeed, right from the opener "Take 54", Nilsson sets the tone immediately ("I sang my balls off for you baby/ I almost broke the microphone!"), before raising the bar even further with the guttural chants of "Spaceman" and, above all, in "You're Breakin' My Heart", with its none-too-subtle refrain ("You're breaking my heart/ you're tearing it apart/ so fuck you!").

For fans of the artist, whose name was by then tied to the romantic, ethereal moods of "Without You", the album feels like a moral betrayal.

In those years Nilsson is a man in search of himself. In 1973 he parts ways with producer Richard Perry and puts himself in the hands of Derek Taylor for A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night, an album of covers of classic American ballads. The record throws audiences for another loop: just as fans start accepting his transformation into a rocker, Nilsson turns into a top-flight crooner. It's worth noting that the album captures Harry at a moment when his voice is at its peak, aided by the Philharmonic Orchestra backing him, conducted by Frank Sinatra's former musical director, Gordon Jenkins. The album, however, goes largely misunderstood, even though it's the artist's own favourite, which he loved more than any other work for the emotional value of its songs.

Meanwhile, his bond with John Lennon and Ringo Starr grows ever stronger: while the former indulges Harry's wild streak, the latter seems to accompany his brighter side. Torn between two guiding spirits – the Apollonian and the Dionysian – he spends the following years in a state of unprecedented artistic ferment. Ringo is his co-star in the rock movie "Son Of Dracula" (1974), and Keith Moon also joins their circle on drums for "Jump Into The Fire", while Peter Frampton and John Bonham appear on "At My Front Door". The film takes two years to find proper backing, and when it finally hits theatres it's a commercial flop regardless. The only thing to emerge unscathed is "Daybreak", the song that would turn out to be Nilsson's last hit single, cracking the top 40. Ringo would remember the film fondly, commenting: "It's not the best film ever made, but I've seen worse".

Harry Nilsson has a song, his voice breaks at 2:05

With John Lennon things take a macabre turn, to the point of becoming the stuff of urban legend and even inspiring a song by Lana Del Rey. During one of their notorious lost weekends, John produces Pussy Cats (1974). The ex-Beatle had just come out of Phil Spector's studio following the disastrous birth of "Rock 'N' Roll" when he decided to rush to his friend's aid. The band assembled for the project includes a cast of guests of international stature, among them bassist Klaus Voormann, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, and Keith Moon and Ringo Starr on drums.

Even the cover art, with the musicians depicted as two little dolls, hints at just how little seriously they took the record, which would indeed be remembered chiefly for the bizarre goings-on in the studio. Both men were wrestling with their own demons at the time, and during the sessions they egged each other on in eccentric contests, fuelled by drink and drugs. At the peak of the madness, the two placed a bet on who could scream the loudest. Nilsson wins, but pays a very steep price: he tears a vocal cord, spits blood onto the microphone, and has to be rushed to hospital. Unfazed by what's happening, he asks for and gets some brandy, and walks out of the hospital bottle in hand, discharging himself against medical advice. Some wonder whether it was some strange act of self-destruction, but Harry won't have it: he proudly flaunts the wreckage of his voice throughout the record, most notably on the powerful ballad "Don't Forget Me", where far from hiding the damage, he puts it on full display in the high notes with a searing scream that makes the song pulse with even more life.

Among the covers, worth noting are Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers To Cross", given Lennon's own distinctive wall of sound, devised in response to his recent falling-out with Phil Spector.

In those years Nilsson also became known, against his will, as a figure in rock's darker chronicles. His London flat became the scene of two deaths: in 1974, while staying in the home Nilsson had rented, Cass Elliot (singer of the Mamas & The Papas) died in her sleep there. Four years later, in that same cursed Curzon Square apartment, Keith Moon would also pass away.

For the blond songwriter, the first half of the Seventies is a dark period, and everything seems to be going wrong. But right when he seems to have hit rock bottom, wandering the streets alone late at night, he walks into an ice-cream shop and meets Una, an Irish Catholic-school student working the counter to pay for her studies. It's love at first sight, straight out of a fairy tale: from then on the two become inseparable. Just a few months later, Ringo serves as best man at their wedding – Harry's third marriage, and the one in which he finally found his soulmate. Anyone who saw them together could sense just how much the girl had changed Nilsson, who had finally found peace, at least in matters of the heart.

Having (partly) cleaned themselves up after their wild period, the two men go back on the attack: Lennon pushes Rca for Nilsson to record a new album, and Harry shows up for the sessions with a sheet of paper and fifteen musicians. Thus is born Duit On Mon Dei (1975), a pun on “Do It On Monday” also used by Ringo on the cover of his self-titled album as a mangled take on the French motto of the British monarchy (“Dieu et mon droit“). Besides Ringo, the album features a series of artists who flocked to Harry's ramshackle court (including Van Dyke Parks and Dr. John), but in the end they all walk away disappointed with the result, the fruit of inconclusive recording sessions awash in rivers of alcohol. Rca also rejects the initial title chosen by Harry, namely “God’s Greatest Hits”, and irreverence itself seems to be the guiding thread of an inconclusive record, though not without some pleasant sketches (“Jesus Christ You’re Tall”, “Kojak Columbo”, “Down By The Sea”), wittily delivered in a Tin Pan Alley vein. Among the more unusual moments are the gloomy orchestration of “Easier For Me” and the carnival-like “Home”, dominated by the steel drum.

With Sandman (1976), Nilsson hits rock bottom on his downward spiral, drifting ever further from the mainstream that Rca craves. The studio cast is the same as on the previous album, with the addition of Joe Cocker on “The Flying Saucer Song”. Beyond the swinging madness of “(Thursday) Here’s Why I Did Not Go To Work Today”, standout moments include the daring “Pretty Soon There’ll Be Nothing Left For Everybody” and the sinuous violins of “Will She Miss Me”. But it's not enough: after the poor sales of Duit On Mon Dei and Sandman, Rca starts pressuring Harry, who finds himself forced to bow to commercial logic. He then releases a covers album – …That’s The Way It Is (1976) – featuring only two original tracks (one of them co-written with Dr. John, “Daylight Has Caught Me”). However, Trevor Lawrence's production flattens the record and fails to fully showcase Harry's voice.

Surprisingly, after swallowing the flop of this latest album too, the label is forced to put itself back in Harry's hands, and this time he takes the challenge seriously. The result is the excellent Knnillssonn (1977), an extraordinary collection of performances that rivals the best work of his past, cast in a refined baroque-pop mold in territory close to Scott Walker (“I Never Thought I’d Get This Lonely”, “Sweet Surrender”, “Lean On Me”). The album catches him in a state of grace, but by this point his music seems out of step with the times, and almost no one is listening to him anymore. Rca also struggles to promote it, pouring all its energy during that period into maximizing the profits generated by Elvis's death.

The label then decides to drop him, and Harry shows up at the door of Van Dyke Parks for the soundtrack to “Popeye”, Robin Williams's first film as a leading man (1980). He remains active in the film world, even co-founding a film distribution company (Hawkeye Entertainment), notable for the Whoopi Goldberg film “The Telephone” (1988). In the meantime, he also enjoys dabbling in other people's projects, such as Ringo Starr's album “Stop And Smell The Roses” (1981) and Allan Katz's musical “Zapata” (1980).

Now, the dream is over

In 1979, Nilsson returns to the studio to record what will be his final album, Flash Harry, released by Mercury the following year and, curiously, distributed only in a handful of countries. Among the tracks is a cover of “Old Dirt Road”, a song written by Nilsson and Lennon in 1974 for “Walls And Bridges”. As fate would have it, it was a farewell song, and in 1980 the most unthinkable of tragedies strikes: John Lennon dies. When his close friend is killed, Harry is a devastated man. His ghost will never leave him: in his mind, the murder must be avenged at all costs, and he does everything he can to see justice done. Always a very private person, this time Harry becomes active: he launches an energetic campaign against the use of firearms and starts appearing more and more in public and on television. In 1982, during a Beatlefest, he even auctions off his talent, promising to write a personalized song for anyone who donates 500 dollars to the National Coalition To Ban Handguns. In the end, a woman named Judy wins, and the B-side of the single “With A Bullet” is dedicated to her. Nilsson, who never used to go on stage, is now on the national news discussing politics and guns, putting his career on hold. He doesn't get what he's hoping for, but he finally finds meaning in his existence: having lost his father at a young age, he understands just how short life is and devotes himself more and more to his seven children, striving to become the model parent he never had.

In 1988, Rca goes back on the attack and releases A Touch More Schmilsson In The Night, drawn from the sessions of its predecessor and dusted off ad hoc with a cover paying tribute to Frank Sinatra. The same atmosphere can be felt in the posthumous Losst And Founnd, which collects some late tracks left in the drawer of a planned album for Warner.

His interest in songwriting resurfaces at the end of the decade, driven above all by the bankruptcy and financial losses he suffers because of an untrustworthy assistant, who improperly takes advantage of his savings. The culprit is later convicted, but Harry and his family are left destitute. His health also begins to decline seriously in the early Nineties.

On January 15, 1994, Harry Nilsson, who had suffered a serious heart attack the year before, dies of a heart attack and complications from diabetes. A few days later, a devastating earthquake shakes the ground, putting the funeral at risk, but no catastrophe can stop his friends from saying goodbye to the blond-haired singer-songwriter. Shortly after the ceremony, everyone gathers, moved, in front of his grave. Amid the general astonishment and silence, George Harrison comes out with a laconic “fuck you”. Those present assume it's an outburst of anger, but the most taciturn of the Beatles immediately clarifies, smiling through tears: “It was my favorite song: ‘You’re breaking my heart, so fuck you'”. And those words mark a perfect epilogue to Harry Nilsson's great human and musical journey.

(Special thanks to Monica Mazzoli) 

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