I watched a great music documentary on Harry Nilsson the other day. I admit I didn't know much about this guy beyond a small number of soft hits in the late 60's/early 70's. ("Everybody's Talkin'", "Me & My Arrow", "Without You", "Courtship of Eddie's Father Theme", etc.) I also had heard about his infamous L.A. debauchery with John Lennon in the early 70's. But this documentary gave me a new respect for this artist. Without going into any detail about the film, I would just highly recommend it to any of you 60's music lovers out there.
It's called "Who Is Harry Nilsson? (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)".
Here's an interesting take Nilsson does with a Beatles collage-medley. From his 1968 album with the cool album cover, and that caught the attention of The Beatles,
Pandemonium Shadow Show's, "You Can't Do That". Dig it!
download or listen:
5 comments:
Love your blog, have just added it to our blogroll, any chance of you reciprocating. Cheers, thee PVC. http://polyvinylcraftsmen.blogspot.com/
Kismet - I recently got one of his greatest hits compilations (he has several) after seeing Neko Case perform "Don't Forget Me" on Elvis Costello's Spectacle show. It was a great performance and made me want to learn more about the myth. I'll check out that documentary.
Who's Kismet & Neko Case?
From Wikipedia:
In 1985 Nilsson set up a production company, Hawkeye, to oversee the various film, TV and multimedia projects he was involved in. He appointed his friend, satirist and screenwriter Terry Southern as one of the principals, and they collaborated on a number of screenplays including Obits (a Citizen Kane-style story about a journalist investigating an obituary notice) and The Telephone, a one-hander about an unhinged unemployed actor.
The Telephone was virtually the only Hawkeye project that made it to the screen. It had been written with Robin Williams in mind but he turned it down; comedian-actress Whoopi Goldberg then signed on, with Southern's friend Rip Torn directing, but the project was troubled. Torn battled with Goldberg, who interfered in the production and constantly digressed from the script during shooting, and Torn was forced to plead with her to perform takes that stuck to the screenplay. Torn, Southern and Nilsson put together their own version of the film, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival in early 1988, but it was overtaken by the "official" version from the studio, and this version premiered to poor reviews in late January 1988.
In 1990, Hawkeye foundered and Nilsson found himself in a dire financial situation after it was discovered that his financial adviser Cindy Sims had embezzled all the funds he had earned as a recording artist. The Nilssons were left with $300 in the bank and a mountain of debt, while Sims served less than two years and was released from prison in 1994 without making restitution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9KrotLtC-Y
Kismet is fate or destiny...in that we were both discovering nilsson
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