Illustration by Mike Renaud
Underscore surveys undervalued artists, scenes, and eras of the musical past. Listen to an "L.A. Weirdos" playlist compiled by writer Mike Powell on Spotify.
The first thing you should know about Harry Nilsson is that he won a Grammy for covering a schmaltzy Badfinger ballad called "Without You" in 1971. The second thing you should know is that I once read an interview with Nilsson where he claimed to have recorded "Without You" after having taken what he described as "a little mescaline." The third thing is that "Without You" is on an album called Nilsson Schmilsson, a title basically designed to make fun of Nilsson's name, and that the cover of Nilsson Schmilsson is a picture of Harry Nilsson, unshaven, wearing a bathrobe.
By the time he recorded "Without You", Nilsson was already famous. He'd sung "Everybody's Talkin'" for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack and wrote "One" (as in "one is the loneliest number," popularized by Three Dog Night), and when a reporter at a press conference once asked John Lennon what music really turned him on, he said "Nilsson's my favorite group."
Where to go from there, I'm not sure, but only because there are so many possibilities. I could tell you that Nilsson never played live concerts because he didn't feel like it. Or that the first single from his album Son of Schmilsson contains a chorus featuring the words "fuck you," or that the last song on that record compares experiencing the cosmic beauty of the world to feeling someone up. I could tell you that after Son of Schmilsson, he insisted on recording an entire album of music from the 1930s and 40s with the guy who wrote arrangements for Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, or that a little later on he stood behind John Lennon in the offices of RCA Victor while Lennon shouted at an executive to expand Nilsson's contract.
Or, unbelievably, that RCA Victor actually did expand his contract, and Nilsson proceeded to make a bad album he'd originally wanted to call God's Greatest Hits, and on the cover of that album there were two pictures of Nilsson: one in sunglasses and an RCA baseball hat, and the other in, well, a bathrobe.
I could tell you these things because I think they're funny in a bratty, hard-headed way, but also because they illustrate a dynamic that marked Nilsson's career from the mid-60s until his death in 1994: An uneasy relationship with the commercial life of his art.
Nilsson had a virtuosic voice, a Mariah Carey kind of voice, the kind of voice I find almost disturbing to watch in action because it seems miraculous that a sound so confident could come out of a guy who's barely opening his mouth. In all likelihood, he could've coasted on variations of "Without You" for years, but in retrospect, there's a sense that "Without You" existed primarily as a concession to the marketplace-- that, in the course of making art, one has to make sure the pantry stays stocked.
In short, Nilsson existed both within the so-called system and outside it. And he wasn't alone: In the late 60s and early 70s, artists like Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, and Ry Cooder were essentially hired hands retained to write, arrange, and play studio dates, but they were also given some creative room to make their own idiosyncratic, defiant records.
I get the sense that the labels' attitude toward these guys wasn't altogether different from a parent's attitude toward gifted children: Get them through the system, but make sure to give them a clean little corner to doodle in and pat them on the head when they show you what they've done, whether you understand it or not. Not long after Warner Bros. released Parks' 1967 LP Song Cycle, for example, a good-natured copywriter drafted an ad for it with a headline that read, "How we lost $39,509.50 on 'The Album of the Year' (Dammit)."
Randy Newman is, in a lot of ways, a very different case from Nilsson. You might know him as the curly-haired guy with glasses who writes dopey, sweet songs for Pixar movies, or the guy who sings "Short People" and "I Love L.A."-- a song that's much more misanthropic than anyone at Nike probably realized before putting it in an ad during the 1984 Olympics.
If Nilsson was the whimsical, troubled soul who would get lost in brandy for days at a time, Newman was a kind of nebbish sociologist-- the tight-shouldered guy smirking in the corner of the room while the party goes on without him. His albums from the late 60s and early 70s are a little like Albert Brooks' collection of blades in Drive: delicate, perfect, mortally sharp. But they're also exercises in both sympathy and tolerance: In a shitty, corrupted world, the greatest challenge is to find sentiment where you can.
That, and to laugh. Responding to a question about how he felt about being parodied on "Family Guy" on "The Late Late Show", Newman said, "The only thing that bothers me is that more people know me from that than..." at which point the crowd bursts into laughter and Newman, stunned, peters out into a mumble. It's a moment so Newman it couldn't have been scripted better: Not only is he being self-deprecating, but the crowd doesn't even have the decency to wait until he finished his joke.
On a press junket between albums in the 70s, Newman once told reporters he was preparing "a larger insult." The cover of the resulting record, Born Again, is a drawing of him, sitting at a very nice-looking desk, wearing a suit, tie, and dollar-signed Kiss makeup. Newman brings to mind a defense I remember hearing about "South Park" when the show first started: The mean sense of humor is only OK because nobody is spared.
What initially drew me so close to Nilsson and Newman was the humor, but it was also how willfully out of touch they were. Like any good student of punk and independent music, by my mid-adolescence I started to look for square pegs and round holes, regardless of style-- wherever there's a bad fit, there's probably some good art. Newman toyed with forms of early American popular ballads and Dixieland Jazz; Nilsson indulged his love for romantic orchestral ballads that, by the time rock music was invented, were primarily popular with geriatrics. For them, music was showbiz: storytelling, performing, comedy-- roles that often took a cultural backseat once more high-minded ideas about Art entered the conversation.
Newman and Nilsson also had a natural gift for contrasting sentimentality with cynicism. Newman's "Love Story (You And Me)", for example, is a sweet piano ballad about a couple meeting, getting married, growing up, and growing old. On the last few lines, though, Newman changes keys abruptly and sings about how the couple's kids will eventually move them into an old-folks home in Florida, where they'll play checkers, quietly, until they die.
Hearing this contrast at 16-- between the light fantasy of the music and the stark reality of the story in front of it-- was a revelation. It signified a balance between the brain and the heart-- that you didn't have to sacrifice one to have the other. It's a quality that still appeals to me in music, something I still hear in some of my favorite artists today, like Lambchop, Frank Ocean, tUnE-yArDs, LCD Soundsystem (who used to cover Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire"). What lies between that brain and that heart is a very human kind of struggle between skepticism, which is easy to develop as we get older, and acceptance, which only becomes harder to hold on to.
Which brings things back to the idea of a major label and the commercial venue. Nilsson and Newman took their predicament in the world as a given: To get their music out there, they had to eventually sing "Without You" or write for Toy Story. Their careers represent a workmanlike acceptance, a frustrated kind of idealism, a very un-artistic attitude that reflects how they think the world is instead of what they think it should or could be. This isn't a bad or ignoble thing, but part of me yearns for structure, for limitations. It took Nilsson about five years to unravel into total creative excess-- I can only imagine how much faster it would've happened if he didn't have anyone hounding him about the bottom line.
I'm 29 years old. My sense is that Newman and Nilsson are overlooked by my generation not just because they seem like our parents' music, but because they seem to be part of some big, vague Hollywood system of entertainment. By the time I hit 13, I imagined just about everything that came out on a major label was recorded in a windowless building in California-- an image, essentially, of commerce over art.
Of course, those distinctions don't matter like they used to, but something I'm realizing as I get older is that it's always been grayer than that. If anything, Nilsson, Newman and their associates' interest in old-fashioned forms of music and entertainment represent a pushback against the trends of their time, and their gruff senses of humor represent a pushback against the comforts promised by all that old-timey stuff.
(It's worth mentioning that music wasn't the only medium that developed a kind of "alternative mainstream" in the 70s: Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski and a handful of other directors walked a similar line. Altman's MASH*, for example, was a radical effort of filmmaking that won Cannes' Palme d'Or but was also nominated for five Academy Awards-- and ended up losing Best Picture to the more straightforward war story Patton.)
All this boils down to the idea of contradiction, which is still the root of all great art and entertainment. If Nilsson had worn a tux on the cover of Nilsson Schmilsson, "Without You" would make more sense-- it would've been the sound of another slick crooner taking his spotlight. And if the old people actually lived at the end of the Randy Newman's "Love Story", well, how would that be any different than all those other stories we're too smart-- or at least too alive-- to believe?
There's this great story at the end of Richard Henderson's 33 1/3 book about Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle. When Henderson visited Parks, he noticed a framed photo of a greyhound with a plaque that had the name "Van Dyke Parks" embossed on it. When asked about it, Parks said that there was a Floridian businessman with a real affection for California pop music and greyhound racing. He owned three dogs, all fearsome on the track. Their names? Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, and Harry Nilsson. Parks asked the owner which dog was fastest. It was Newman. When Nilsson found out, he demanded a canine drug test.
Here are some full-length highlights from the catalogues of Newman, Nilsson, and Parks.
Randy Newman: Good Old Boys (1974)
Most of Newman's songs are written from the perspective of what some might call an "unreliable narrator," or, in less delicate terms, an "asshole." Good Old Boys is full of assholes big and small. They're racists and provincial creeps. They have big dogs in their yard, and they're happy to sic them on you. And Newman's grace as a writer is that he puts you in a position to care about these jerks.
The narrator on "Rednecks", for example, throws the word "nigger" around like it's a frisbee, but he's also ashamed at seeing his beloved Lester Maddox-- a segregationist Georgia governor-- get laughed at on national TV. "If they think they're better than him, they're wrong," he says. And in some fundamental, humanist way, Newman is right.
Toward the end of the song, he sings, "Down here we're too ignorant to realize the Northerner set the nigger free," before going on to list all the places black Americans are now free to be arrested in-- a little joke about the South followed by a devastating acknowledgement of the ways in which America's institutional racism ultimately gave way to a more insidious and elusive kind of prejudice that's just as powerful but even less restricted.
I wouldn't say Newman has a wicked or nasty sense of humor so much as he has a plain good one. His jokes are born of a deep kind of pain: the pain of being from a place the "smart-ass New York Jews" think is a joke; the pain of having your city wiped out by a flood then having some government worker shake his head at the damage and say, "Isn't it a shame, what the river has done to this poor cracker's land?" Or, in the case of "A Wedding In Cherokee County", the universal pain of having your new wife chuckle when she sees your penis, which Newman, in his plaintive, limited voice, refers to as "my mighty sword."
The music on Good Old Boys is shot through with nostalgic flourishes: ragtime piano, twirls of clarinet, big strings, and pedal-steel guitar. Newman's effort to contrast an old-fashioned sound with a contemporary spirit is essential to the portrait: It's the South, trying to get rid of the bad while still hanging on to the beautiful.
Randy Newman: Sail Away (1972)
Though the writing on his second album, 12 Songs, might be sharper and more consistent, Sail Away is the first album that sounds like Randy Newman.
Here, he isn't just a pianist with occasional string accompaniment. He's an orchestra leader, a showman, an old-fashioned entertainer. Sometimes I forget how willfully uncool this all must've sounded between the Doors and Pink Floyd-- this cranky man playing ragtime songs about beggars, or these early-American-style portraits of small-town life in Ohio. Listening to Newman-- and Nilsson sometimes, too-- I sometimes get the feeling that psychedelia and the Beatles and the development of Western rock music was some colossally dumb idea fueled primarily by an interest in trends, not quality of art. I know it's not true, but that's the world Newman creates on Sail Away: not a suggestion that the old ways were best as much as that they were plenty complicated already if you were patient and honest enough to look at them.
What I'm incapable of getting over is the album's sequencing. Its first song is narrated from the perspective of a slave advertising America's greatness; the second is about how miserable it is to be rich. The third, "He Gives Us All His Love", is a simple hymn; no jokes, no sarcasm, no apparent sense of self-awareness. Part of what makes Newman such a breathtaking writer is the same thing that makes a breathtaking boxer or a breathtaking military offensive: He draws out your armor and defenses with his irony, then levels a suckerpunch to the place you're least capable of defending with the weapon you're least expecting: sentimentality.
Randy Newman: 12 Songs (1970)
12 Songs is a jewel box: A half-hour long, with only two songs clocking in over three minutes-- and even then, they're clocking in at less than 3:10. Newman's economy can't be overstated. Not only does it reinforce my idea that his goal was to entertain and then politely get the hell off the stage, but it gives a musically varied album like 12 Songs an almost prismatic quality: with the slightest turn, a different color of light shines through.
He's more rock here than he is on Sail Away or Good Old Boys, which is another way of saying that he just hadn't gotten his hands on the orchestra baton yet. But even "rock" for Newman is a sound that stops with the Beatles instead of starting with them. Instead, it's Fats Domino, who cross-pollinated blues and jazz over simple, danceable rhythms; or Western Swing artists like Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, who experimented with ways to give rural country-folk a backbeat. In short, rock music before we had a name for it.
This is also probably as sexy as Newman ever sounded, which, if you listen to Randy Newman-- well, let's just say that sex rarely enters the picture unless it's being used to expose someone's hypocrisy. About half of these songs take place at night, that magical phase of the earth's rotation when what was once visible turns into shadow, when bogeymen come out from the closet, when people climb hungrily into bed with each other. I mention it only because so much of what draws me to Newman is the cerebral quality of his writing, but here there are slinky, fucked-up fantasies about burning down a cornfield, slow walks around the grass at midnight, oil burning out-- images that come out in the ebb and flow of his croaking voice, of Ry Cooder's slide guitar, and the ominous heft of the arrangements. His writing got sharper after 12 Songs, but for the most complete marriage of music and lyric in Newman's catalog, this is it.
Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Schmilsson (1971)
Nilsson Schmilsson is, by certain rubrics, a perfect pop record. It's varied in attitude and sound, but not so varied that it comes apart. You can hear Nilsson's flair for the old-timey in "The Moonbeam Song" and his concessions to the contemporary in "Without You" or the seven-minute "Jump Into the Fire", which is, as far as I can tell, Nilsson's answer to the Who: brawny, locomotive, and locker-room-ready.
Nilsson was born into a functionally fatherless household in Brooklyn. His mother, so goes the lore, was an alcoholic-- not a vicious one, but maybe a little disorganized. Nilsson ran away at 15 and supported himself, but if you listen to testimony from his friends and family (particularly in the documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson?), you get the sense that Nilsson had an incredibly gruff side of him that studiously avoided talking about his own issues-- a side you can hear on Nilsson Schmilsson in barroom blues songs like "Down" or "Let the Good Times Roll".
But Nilsson also had a kind of innocence and creative flexibility found primarily in children. Take songs like "Early in the Morning" or "Coconut" (as in "you put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both up," which no doubt hundreds of readers have sung at summer camp or some similar situation without ever knowing that anyone actually wrote it)-- these are Nilsson at his most whimsical, turning his voice into a more cartoonish, playful instrument.
The album also demonstrates his intelligence as a writer. "Gotta Get Up", for example, is a song detailing the merciless transition from carefree youth to adult responsibility: "Down by the sea she knew a sailor who had been to war, she never even knew a sailor before, she never even knew his name/ He'd come to town and he would pound her for a couple of days, and then he'd sail across the bubbly waves-- and those were happier days." The Nilsson-ness is in the phrase pound her-- a contrast between sweet nostalgia and unsentimental truth.
Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Sings Newman (1970)
Maybe the weirdest thing about Nilsson Sings Newman is that, when it came out, Randy Newman really hadn't been around all that long. There's something wonderfully old-fashioned about the premise here: a singer interpreting the work of a composer. (And once you're familiar with the originals, you can have good clean fun listening to the funny little ways Nilsson tinkered with arrangement.)
Of historical import: Innovations in multi-track recording enabled Nilsson to layer his own vocals in ways he was never able to before. The result is a choir of Nilssons: of one Nilsson safe in the control room giving instructions to another Nilsson about how to sing; of Nilsson the crooner meeting Nilsson the wiseass on the sonic playing field; of Nilsson having open arguments with himself. On hearing the album, some record-company employee said that it was very nice, but Nilsson should have given more credit to the backing singers.
Harry Nilsson: A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night (1973) and Pussy Cats (1974)
Touch is a record of Nilsson recording 30s and 40s standards accompanied by the London Philharmonic; Pussy Cats, recorded with John Lennon, is a record of lead-footed rock covers and a lot of screaming-- the closest approximation I've ever heard to the scrambled, bullheaded feeling you get when you drink so much your eyes ache.
One of the reasons why I love Touch is hearing the ways in which all these old songs-- in their sweetness and double-entendre-- influenced Nilsson's own writing. Repression and good manners make for better jokes: Before you could just say it, you had to write around it. The record is, in a way, a formality, but it's also Nilsson's most unapologetically romantic. It's evidence of his stubbornness, too. Putting out Touch two years after Nilsson Schmilsson was suicidally uncool, not to mention a bad career move.
But it's partially Nilsson's stubbornness and defiance that makes the apparently uncool Touch become, through some strange and labored passage, cool once again. In a Pitchfork 5-10-15-20 interview last April, Van Dyke Parks singled out Touch, saying: "[Nilsson] turned my head around because he could be retro without shame. He followed his own nose without any sense of apology, reserving even the right to be wrong because he knew that it was necessary to keep that right to reach any height."
Pussy Cats is Touch's genetic opposite: Loose, rough, and unfocused. It's certainly not a mean record, but there's a desperation in it that, in retrospect, is heartbreaking: Nilsson screamed so hard during the recordings that his voice was never the same. One session supposedly ended with the microphone covered in blood. I hesitate to romanticize this kind of self-destruction-- after all, I feel like one of the things I learned from Nilsson and Newman is how to laugh at the melodrama of youth. Still, there's a kind of Icarian beauty here-- bright, but too hot; the sound of the sun finally burning him up.
Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle (1967) and Discover America (1972)
Parks was primarily known for his arrangements, and his work on the Beach Boys' SMiLE in particular. His own records, though, are of a piece with Nilsson and Newman's: backward-looking, a little goofy, and restlessly clever. (If you're looking for a nice point of connection, the first song on Song Cycle, "Vine Street", was written by Newman and later covered by Nilsson.)
The first word I think of when I think of Song Cycle is fussy. Not a second on the record goes by without musical bauble, trill, doodad, and decoration. Parks' musical touchstones on Song Cycle are defiantly pre-rock: 40s lounge, big-budget film scores, early American folksong, music for bright drinks with umbrellas in them.
Parks was quintessentially foppish: crossed legs and paisley shirts, a flair for old Hollywood glitz, a Mississipi-born choirboy with Mensa heft. The muscle in his music is in its puns, jokes, and sonic juxtapositions. More than Nilsson or Newman, Parks feels like a historian and student of music as much as a composer of it.
And, of the three artists covered here, Parks was the only one with any evident interest in music from other countries. A lot of Discover America is dedicated to explorations of Trinidadian calypso, including covers of calypso legends Roaring Lion, Lord Kitchener, and Mighty Sparrow. Of the two, Song Cycle is the canonized one, but Discover America is definitely more to my taste: loose, randy, a little haphazard, all the charm of Song Cycle without the constriction.
