Tag Archives: Everybody’s Talkin’

Harry Nilsson, The Disciplined Wildman

In the early 1970s, Harry Nilsson’s pure, beautiful voice was everywhere. He had a great way with a popular song and he composed tunes that were alternately heartbreaking (“Without You”),  intense (“Jump Into the Fire“), bubble-gum sweet (“Me and My Arrow,” and the theme to “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father“), tender (“The Moonbeam Song“), silly (“Coconut“) and generally wonderful. One of his biggest hits was a song he didn’t compose but which he turned into an international hit with the plaintive simplicity of his voice: “Everybody’s Talkin‘,”  the theme to the 1969 movie “Midnight Cowboy,” turned him from a composer  into a huge star. Nilsson was a famously rowdy and seemingly totally undisciplined mess, a huge drinker and taker of drugs who stayed up for days on end carousing with friends like John Lennon and Ringo Starr. But then he could stumble into a recording studio after having been up all night shouting and smoking and filling his body with poisons and pour out a pitch-perfect performance of a song like “Without You” in a single take. When you listen to this song, pay attention to his extraordinary phrasing: each line unspools in one long, beautiful phrase without a single breath: “No I can’t forget this evening / or your face as you were leaving / but I guess that’s just the way the story goes” is so heartbreakingly effective when delivered as one single, aching, perfect thought. Nowadays it’s rare to hear even the most athletic 20-year-old having enough breath control to hold a phrase that long without breathing between words, and sometimes even breathing between the syllables of a single word, losing continuity, feeling and the meaning along the way. Nilsson always had a soft spot in his heart for pop standards sung by trained musicians, and while he lived like a rock star, he sang with the warmth, control and sweetness of a midcentury balladeer. His story is beautifully told in the 2006 documentary “Who Is Harry Nilsson . . . And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?