I'd Love to Turn You On #145 - Harry Nilsson - The Point

Harry Nilsson's The Point, released as both an album and full-length animated T.V. special in 1971 succeeds on two different levels. It is another in a string of fantastic Nilsson records which were about to reach their apotheosis with 1972's Nilsson Schmilsson. Because of that album's overwhelming commercial and artistic success, The Point sometimes gets minimized. For me, being 12 years old upon its release, it was actually a far more impactful album at the time. As nearly as I can tell, Nilsson wrote the songs first, pitched the idea for an animated special to an ABC executive, got it green-lighted and the animation got made, then Nilsson himself kind of wrestled it into its final cinematic form. The original television broadcast in February of 1971 was a pretty big prime-time deal, which included Dustin Hoffman narrating the story - appropriate considering Hoffman’s tangential role in Nilsson’s career as the star of Midnight Cowboy, which included Nilsson’s version of the hit song “Everybody's Talkin'.” There are also scenes in The Point that feel oddly similar to Hoffman's breakout role in The Graduate. On the DVD version, the narration is supplied by Ringo Starr, also appropriate due to the ex-Beatle’s longtime friendship with Nilsson. The other voices include Mike Lookinland (Bobby Brady) and the great character actor Paul Frees, whose presence is almost miraculously recognizable and comforting from countless appearances in 1960's children's entertainment. All these points of cultural convergence lend an even greater emotional poignancy and historical weight to the film and album. It is inextricably linked to the decade it followed, and in a way, feels like one of the really clean, unsullied representations of the childlike sweetness of much of the 60’s experience.

The movie itself is an explosion of primary watercolor, with an animation style somewhere between Yellow Submarine and the cartoons found in The New Yorker. It is reminiscent of the best of the 1960's Saturday morning cartoons, but with the lysergic undercurrent of a Fillmore light show. It’s a simple tale of a boy named Oblio who is born different from everybody else in his world, because his head has no point. He has a round head, and everybody in the land of point must have a point. Sadly, Oblio and his faithful dog Arrow are banished to the pointless forest. Here they meet a variety of colorful characters who provide neat metaphors or solutions to the modern dilemmas of growing up and fitting in. During his experiences, we come to recognize Oblio as a classic alienated youth. He confronts and comes to grips with the generation gap, conformity, freedom, independence, identity and, when his parents knuckle under to society's expectations instead of supporting their son, the concept of “never trust anyone over 30,” before triumphantly returning home to show the rest of the world that under the shape of your head, we are all the same - an important lesson for all children (and adults). After more than 30 years of working in record stores, I have come to the conclusion that The Point was an elemental experience for many people who were lucky enough to experience it upon its initial airing. I've had so many conversations about it where people's eyes just glaze over with giddy nostalgia as they quietly breathe "Oh I just LOVED The Point when I first saw it." The film impacted many in a positive way. It was cool and it packed a strong moral wallop -perfect for the post-60's hangover.

Musically, this might be the easiest way “in” to Nilsson’s work. The songs are classic Nilsson - whimsicality with a heightened sense of innocence in consideration of his intended audience. As always his voice is a wonder - silky smooth and soaring. The album version breezes along much more quickly than the movie. Harry Nilsson himself provides an abbreviated, and thus somewhat more coherent narrative. He skips most of the dialogue, and just frames the plot succinctly, lending just the right amount of context to make this feel like a children's fable instead of another Harry Nilsson album. The songs themselves are some of his most touching and memorable. “Everything's Got 'Em,” “Me And My Arrow,” “Down To The Valley,” “Think About Your Troubles” and “Are You Sleeping?” are absolute classics of that most elusive of genres: kid appropriate rock which is as good as adult appropriate rock. The real treasure lies in two ballads: “Life Line” and the beautiful “Think About Your Troubles.”  Any Nilsson fan will love this record, and the record or the film can turn almost anyone into a Nilsson fan. As a separate entity the animated movie The Point is both a classic kid's film and full of psychedelic imagery, but the greatness of it all rests squarely on Harry Nilsson's wonderful songs.

-         Paul Epstein

Fables of the Reconstruction: Low-Hanging Fruit Pt. 2

When I got back into collecting vinyl, my first impulse was to buy back all the stuff I owned before I went digital. The classics. But once I’d collected most of those, I wanted more, more, more. I’m not rich, so this means buying cheap – stuff that’s in abundance in the used bins and in relatively low demand. (And some of which is not even available on CD.) I call this bounty low-hanging fruit. Last week I shared a few of my recent favorite finds. Here are some more:

Nilsson – Pussy Cats

If you believe the documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson?, the late great singer/songwriter peaked with Nilsson Schmilsson and then binged his way through a bunch of mediocre-to-bad albums to oblivion. His tenth album, Pussycats, is singled out as a particularly low moment: party buddy John Lennon pushed him past the edge and blew out his beautiful voice. Which is true, except it leaves out the fact that it’s flat-out gorgeous. I mean, come on. This is rock and roll. Destruction is an essential part of the aesthetic. And what else would you expect from Lennon (the man who took acid everyday for like a year or something as part of a conscious quest to destroy his ego, and who, by his own admission, succeeded) directing Nilsson (the man who’d ask friends out for a drink and they’d come home three days later without a clue of where they’d been or what they’d done). It’s a spectacular mess of an album, and so weird. Yes, his voice cracks. There’s only about three seconds of his unworldly high-pitched smoothness. And at times he actually sounds like Lennon on parts of Imagine and Plastic Ono Band. But he’s raw in the best rock and roll way – like Sam Cooke at the Harlem Club or Joe Strummer or Bruce or any other gravel throat who’s ever ripped the guts right out of your solar plexus. And he’s surrounded with Lennon’s fuzzed-out trippy pop arrangements. Mine cost twelve bucks, which is a little high for a low-fruit designation, but I’d have paid three more for it, even without the double gatefold full of mid-session snapshots of Nilsson and Lennon and everyone else who joined the party.

Grace Slick and Paul Kantner – Sunfighter

When I look at the cover of this album, I wonder what it was like being the daughter of a couple as freaky as Kantner and Slick. Baby China appears on the cover naked and chubby, held up toward the sun on the hands of her mom and dad, which are rising out of the sea. The gatefold opens to a photo collage of cosmic explosions, and the inner sleeve has a picture of Kantner and Slick side by side, both of them young kids -- him standing erect in his military uniform, her at a piano, sitting as straight as an Aryan, in her officer coat and tails. On the other side is a dystopian poem called “Pets.” It’s a very odd artifact in celebration of a newborn child, and it’s made stranger still by the fact that it was mass-produced and sold around the world. I had a huge crush on China when I was in high school and she was an MTV VJ, and now, 41 years later, I own a copy of her baby album that I got for $2.99 from Twist and Shout. It has heavy ring wear and the initials “JB” in the upper left hand corner. As for the music, it’s all eminently listenable, if not consistently memorable: solid, somewhat hard-driving, early 70s rock, with some acoustic strands woven in here and there, and lots of Kantner fantasy/sci-fi lyrics about wizards and lizards and the like. But the album has stellar high points. Side one breaks down halfway through into a wonderful wash of outer space freakiness. And side two features “China,” Slick’s ode to her daughter, which begins, “She’ll suck on anything you give her.” It’s just piano and swells of strings toward the end, and Slick’s voice is magnificent as she sings of her child and the world: “It all comes in, so fast, it all comes in.” Surely China has a fondness for that one.

Steve Hackett – Voyage of the Acolyte and Please Don’t Touch!

Records by ex-Genesis ax man Hackett abound in the used vinyl racks, and they really put the old “don’t judge a book by its cover” credo to the test, because almost all of them have hideously cheesy artwork. But some are full of great music, and are worth much more than their miniscule asking price. Odds are you can get a bunch for less than $20. Voyage of the Acolyte is generally agreed to be his best, and it’s certainly the most psychedelic. One good friend described it to me as “blobular.” Hackett’s main gift, other than his stratospheric guitar playing, is his ability to craft complex and epic arrangements, and Voyage takes your ears around the world forward and backward through time. So does his second solo effort, Please Don’t Touch!, the first to feature his mastery of a Roland GR-500 Guitar Synthesizer. The sounds shift from stuff that would be perfect for a sci-fi movie soundtrack, full of amplified drama and tension and weird sounds, to lovely strains of classical-inspired acoustic guitar, to late-70s guitar-god pop. The vocal tracks, few and far between, are a bit unexpected. They feature guest singers Richie Havens, Steve Walsh of Kansas and R&B siren Randy Crawford, a trio whose voices are so distinct that they would give the record a various-artists feel, were it not for the connective thread of Hackett’s considerable composition talents.

Fables of the Reconstruction: Harry Nilsson

Harry Nilsson made me weird. He got to me at a very young age and scrambled my little brains with his lovely, twisted songs. It started with Nilsson Schmilsson. I was three years old when that record came out, and my parents owned a copy. I loved “Coconut” because it’s so silly. It goes: “She put de lime in de coconut, she drink 'em bot' up” over and over, with an ever widening cast of funny voices chiming in. By the end I’d always be a giggling mess on the floor. The song seemed even funnier knowing that it came from the guy on the cover of the album, dressed in a bathrobe, his bed hair going every which way. I liked the other songs, too; Nilsson’s melodies were irresistible to my kiddie ears, and even then I could appreciate the beauty of his voice, especially on the slower tunes like “Moonbeam Song” and “Without You,” which was constantly on the radio back then. I remember my stepdad singing “Gotta Get Up” to me when I was slow to move in the morning. It’s a record that captures a sweet, happy and innocent moment in my life.

My weirdification came a year or so later, when my parents bought me Nilsson’s follow-up to his blockbuster, Son of Schmilsson, along with my first record player, which was shaped like a ladybug. To this day I have no idea why they got it for me. I’ve even gone so far as to ask my mom, and she can’t recall, can’t even remember the record itself. Whatever the reason, they bought a decidedly adult album and gave it to a four-year-old. Side one begins with an anguished cry to a groupie (“I sang my balls off for you baby!”) and ends with a bitter break-up song (“You’re breaking my heart, you’re tearing it apart, so fuck you!”). In between there’s a visitation by a ghost, a lovely song about memories, a country spoof and a meta love song that implores the person it’s written for to listen to it on the radio, all of which completely fucked with my head. At that age, I had only the simplest, most straightforward understanding of the world. I had no concept of irony or sarcasm or parody. So when I heard Nilsson sing “turn on your record player, listen to my song,” I took it at face value and I felt confused: How can the person turn on the record player if it’s already on? Or if it’s not already on, how would they know to turn it on, since they wouldn’t be able to turn on the song? It sounds simple now, but this was a serious puzzle to me at the time. And that’s a relatively uncomplicated passage on the album. Consider being four and hearing this:

Now, if you haven't got an answer, you'd never have a question
And if you never had a question, then you'd never have a problem
But if you never had a problem, well everyone would be happy
But if everyone was happy, there'd never be a love song

Allmusic calls it “an incredibly schizoid album … just about the weirdest record to reach number 12 and go gold.” Musically, it’s all over the place, from hard-edged rock to the softest love songs to country to a full-orchestra ode to “the most beautiful world in the world” to a choir of old people singing “I’d rather be dead than wet my bed.” Midway through side two, Nilsson sings the beginning of one of the pretty songs from side one and then belches loudly and the band breaks into a hot rock riff and there’s the sound of applause. I had no idea how records were made, so I thought there was an audience that had been quiet through the recording of all the other songs, but when the band started rocking out, they simply couldn’t contain themselves. And at this ignorant, highly impressive age, I listened to the record continuously. I studied it, learned from it, mutated with it. Some of the lessons weren’t contained in the record’s grooves. Like when I was cranking the “you’re breaking my heart so fuck you” song, my stepdad barged into my room and angrily told me to turn it off. Hurt, I said, “But you bought it for me. And you and mom cuss at each other all the time.” - and thus an early introduction to grown-up hypocrisy.

Over the years, I let Son of Schmilsson drift away, and I all but forgot about it as I continued along the weird trajectory it sent me on. But luckily I remembered it when I decided to get a record player, and I resolved to make it the first record in my reconstructed collection. I found a used copy for four bucks. It holds up well after all these years. True, it’s schizoid, but it’s all tied together by Nilsson’s voice, easily one of the best white singers of all time, and by the amazing musicianship and solid production. Some of the best session players in the business helped make the record – Bobby Keys, Nicky Hopkins, Lowell George, Peter Frampton. And Nilsson’s song writing is top-notch, if incredibly odd. I’ve watched the Harry Nilsson documentary and I’ve heard all his friends talk about how Son of Schmilsson was a let-down after Nilsson Schmilsson, which everyone seems to think is his best. Son was the beginning of the end for him, they say, a crazy dive off of the peak of his career. In terms of popularity and Grammies, that’s probably true. But is that really what rock and roll’s about? Not for me. My rock life has been about flipping the bird and belching at normalcy. Nilsson taught me that.