As I ease into my 20s, I’m finding that routine is the enemy of pathos. Things are mostly the same, day-to-day. Get up, go into lab, work, eat lunch, work, come home, cook and listen to music or read or go for a run. This is life, who’s got time for poignancy? Fitting then that I love Nilsson Schmilsson, which begins with our hero singer fretting about getting home, worrying about tomorrow, sure to be a “big day”. He admits with some sadness, that “there was a time when we could dance until a quarter to ten...we never thought it would end”. He runs anyway: after all, he’s GOTTA get up.
This is a record of record, suffused in events and moments universal in late 20th C life: the sort of corny introspection that comes with the morning commute (“Driving Along”), late night fights with your “baby” (“Early in the Morning”), or just looking out the window, held rapt by the still city, the new pastoral (“The Moonbeam Song”). Nilsson focuses on the external, obscuring his inner world, not letting us in on what he’s feeling. The neutral tiredness of routine I suppose. The clearest indication comes in “Early in the Morning”: “Harry, you sure look beat.”
The emotional core of Nilsson Schmilsson is loneliness, but, outside of the (more than a little bit ironic) bombast of “Without You”, it’s a loneliness that can be sat with. There are plenty of moonbeams and coconuts to distract and comfort, for a while at least. But that lyrical loneliness offsets even the most ebullient musical moments. Check out the contrast between the horns and “I’m going down to the bottom of a hole” in “Down”, or how the relentlessly joyous groove of “Jump Into the Fire” is restrained by the knowledge that “you’ll never be free”. But “Jump Into the Fire” offers a saving grace: “We could make each other happy!” Things are alright, but they’d sure be a lot better if we could just get together.
This is all pretty well-worn territory for Harry Nilsson. His musical fable The Point! is all about the pain of loneliness by exclusion, and one of his biggest early hits is a cover of “Everybody’s Talkin’”, a Fred Neil song about retreating from everyone to live alone by the sea. Hell, he chose only the most lonesome Randy Newman songs for “Nilsson Sings Newman”. The lonesomeness is more oblique on Nilsson Schmilsson though. He’s grown-up, too busy to really complain.
And what he’s busy with is crafting some of the most appealing pop arrangements of the 1970s. Most songs feature multiple vocal tracks, though Nilsson is more interested in the raw power of harmony than of counterpoint. Think early rock and roll rather than the jukebox symphonies of Brian Wilson. Harry’s voice was in peak form in 1971, and Nilsson Schmilsson’s strength lies in big vocal performances and escalation. Take Coconut as an example: built on a single C7 chord, the song begins with a simple finger picking pattern before adding some percussion flourishes. The vocals begin, then a second vocal track, lagging the first. The percussion gets more complex, the vocal lines begin to coalesce, the drums break into a straight 4/4 rock beat, and I’m dancing in my chair as Harry belts the final lines: “Put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning!” It’s one of my favorite songs of the 70s, and it’s about one of the dumbest subjects imaginable. The momentum is undeniable.
“Coconut” is as silly as the album gets, but other crooked grins are sprinkled throughout. Whether it’s a poker-faced reference to “bits of crap...blown there by a windbeam” in the “Moonbeam Song”, randy sailors in “Gotta Get Up”, or the absurd 70s rock spoof of “Jump Into the Fire” (complete with a drum solo!), Harry Nilsson nails the middle ground between serious and absurd that the most enduring American pop is known for.
Nilsson Schmilsson might end with “I’ll Never Leave You”, but “Jump Into the Fire” is the real closer. “We could make each other happy”: that sums up Nilsson Schmilsson. A record of half measures, of routine and realism, a shy, inviting smile from the sweetest voice in American pop music.
