Harry Nilsson :: “A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night” - RCA Victor
The fifth Beatle? The songbook sorcerer? The shapeshifting insect of imagination? Sure, or maybe he was just a talented man occupying a metamorphic suit of flesh, and fashion within a flourishing realm of trailblazing geniuses alongside some of his poetic peers of the 20th century. Harry Nilsson is perhaps one of the most fascinating and intriguing icons in both contemporary music and the historical boom of the 1960s and 1970s revolution in sight, sound and sonic sophistication. His atmospheric ability to hazardously harmonize with the basic emotions of humanity, while simultaneously articulating the infrastructure of influence, is yet to be duplicated, or paralleled to this day. Working on bank computers during the night and gaining praise during the day from the likes of Little Richard, Scott Turner, John Marascalco, the great Phil Spector and countless other colleagues and biblical business partners, Nilsson was dormant in the early 1960s, allowing others to gleam in the gainful employment of creative catharsis and sonic success, before breaking out into the eternal elementariness of pop-culture with his 1967 debut “Pandemonium Shadow Show” on RCA Victor, a label that would virtually serve him the entirety of his cultural phenomenon of a career until his devastating and untimely passing New Years of 1994. You can still hear him hum his humanness harmony if you just press your ear close enough to the sidewalk, while a nearby train, running on time, blazes through the city in a departure of duality and dissonance caused by the echoing vibrations of past, present and future on-lookers.
“...Hell, I’m a baritone now. I was hoping to get hoarse like Ray Charles, because that choir-boy thing is gone. I knew it then. I told both Derek and Gordon, this is the last of it. That incredible, flexible, rubber-band-like voice - I just barely snuck in that album under the gun.”
While the 1960s served Nilsson with a poetic platform with plenty of potential to launch what would become a career for the age, it wasn’t until after the success of his cultural introduction of the great Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” single and the simultaneous appearance and impact of the song in John Schlesinger’s movie adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s classic novel “Midnight Cowboy” that Nilsson would sincerely tap into something both sonically sophisticated and stupendous as a new decade approached. Leading up to 1973’s “A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night”, the master of melody and romantic radiance released a remarkable body of work at the beginning of the decade with trepidatious titles such as “Aerial Pandemonium Ballet”, a sistering album to his 1967 debut and its follow up “Aerial Ballet”, the impeccable iconism of 1971’s masterpiece “The Point!” and the commercially captivating “Nilsson Schmilsson”, something took place in 1973 that Nilsson found to be not only fascinating to him, but to his listeners as well if they were so brave and bewildered enough to follow him into the cool crooner corners of contemplation and championed choruses like that of some the greats before him that had been forgotten, or simply faded into the unforgiving dimensions of space time.
“...God-like, the best album I’ve ever been associated with.”
“A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night” is simply stellar and, amidst its doubt from Nillson’s previous producer, Richard Perry, who would go on record stating that: "the timing couldn't have been worse for him to do a god-damned standards album... it was career suicide. He had the rest of his life to do an album like that, when it would have been more meaningful." We disagree, as Nilsson’s music belonged to him first and foremost and that anyone involved in the process of bringing any sort of order, proper packaging or business concentration to the album’s conception, has nothing to do with the message or its content whatsoever. The album’s overall origins came about from a playful game where Nilsson and notorious producer Derek Wyn Taylor would entertain each other by challenging the identifying of numerous composers, their more obscure numbers and therefore translating the tonality and truth into a more contemporary and cultural continuation for a whole new generation to atmospherically access and adapt into everyday life.
Sporting a title based on Shakespeare’s “Henry V”, more specifically, Act 4, Nilsson not only dedicated the entirety of the album to Frank Wills, who was a security guard that discovered the infamous Watergate break-in in the summer of 1972, but strategically expressed and explored the endless efforts of romanticism, life under a night sky and the fundamentals of the ‘old-fashioned’. With numbers like “It Had to Be You”, the illustrious “Lullaby in Ragtime”, “Nevertheless (I’m In Love with You)” and the album’s operatic opener “Lazy Moon”, Nilsson painted an almost Van Gough like landscape of sound and tonal texture to help encapsulate the midnight music of one of his most calming and constructive albums, no matter what the critics, or producers may have said about it so many years ago.
