{"id":591,"date":"2014-10-21T01:02:24","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T08:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lauragrey.com\/?p=591"},"modified":"2014-11-20T01:26:37","modified_gmt":"2014-11-20T09:26:37","slug":"harry-nilsson-the-disciplined-wildman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/?p=591","title":{"rendered":"Harry Nilsson, The Disciplined Wildman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"474\" height=\"356\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vAX1rkdzUH4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In the early 1970s, Harry Nilsson&#8217;s pure, beautiful voice was everywhere. He had a great way with a popular song and he composed tunes that were alternately heartbreaking (&#8220;Without You&#8221;),\u00a0 intense (&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8QghwNqlCRE\">Jump Into the Fire<\/a>&#8220;), bubble-gum sweet (&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gJ2kug89fAQ\">Me and My Arrow<\/a>,&#8221; and the theme to &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rCF7Dnov8vA\">The Courtship of Eddie&#8217;s Father<\/a>&#8220;), tender (&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=btyelrNYCtU\">The Moonbeam Song<\/a>&#8220;), silly (&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Tbgv8PkO9eo\">Coconut<\/a>&#8220;) and generally wonderful. One of his biggest hits was a song he didn&#8217;t compose but which he turned into an international hit with the plaintive simplicity of his voice: &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2AzEY6ZqkuE\">Everybody&#8217;s Talkin<\/a>&#8216;,&#8221;\u00a0 the theme to the 1969 movie &#8220;Midnight Cowboy,&#8221; turned him from a composer\u00a0 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 &#8220;Without You&#8221; 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: &#8220;No I can&#8217;t forget this evening \/ or your face as you were leaving \/ but I guess that&#8217;s just the way the story goes&#8221; is so heartbreakingly effective when delivered as one single, aching, perfect thought. Nowadays it&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LIeLeIwwpHc\">sweetness<\/a> of a midcentury balladeer. His story is beautifully told in the 2006 documentary &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rottentomatoes.com\/m\/who_is_harry_nilsson\/\">Who Is Harry Nilsson . . . And Why Is Everybody Talkin&#8217; About Him?<\/a>&#8220;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the early 1970s, Harry Nilsson&#8217;s pure, beautiful voice was everywhere. He had a great way with a popular song and he composed tunes that were alternately heartbreaking (&#8220;Without You&#8221;),\u00a0 intense (&#8220;Jump Into the Fire&#8220;), bubble-gum sweet (&#8220;Me and My Arrow,&#8221; and the theme to &#8220;The Courtship of Eddie&#8217;s Father&#8220;), tender (&#8220;The Moonbeam Song&#8220;), silly &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/?p=591\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Harry Nilsson, The Disciplined Wildman<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[107,339,341,336,340,338,318,337],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660,"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions\/660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lauragrey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}