max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

#610: ringo starr - back off boogaloo (1972)

today’s news that john lennon’s solo catalog is going to be reissued from his highness’ original masterings is wonderful, especially because his phil spector-debut plastic ono band is one of the universe’s great underrated masterpieces. it’s the only record anyone’s ever heard that’s unbearably crisp and wildly sludgy at the same time, just like it’s both sweet and very terrifying. and go listen to harry nilsson’s cover of isolation, too.

but when will ringo starr get the same ultra royal reissue treatment? the man was a sweet-faced, outer-space, hard core boogie ace. even marge simpson loves him! richard starkey deserves better: that the metropolitan museum of art is displaying his gold-plated snare drum for his 70th birthday is merely a start.

#565: the monkees - cuddly toy (1967)

i hereby request to be the official in-house mix maker for johns hopkins behavioral biologist roland griffiths and his swiss neural imaging research colleagues, who are studying the recuperative powers of psilocybin. the new york times’ john tierney explains today that one subject in their ongoing experiments, who happens to be a retired clinical psychologist, took his hallucinogens, “put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe… he ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life.” nothing against classical music at all—in fact, i bought a lovely pablo casals album yesterday—but if dr. griffiths is out there, i hope he strongly considers mixing in some harry nilsson-written monkees songs, plus a lot of george harrison-written beatles songs, and several serge gainsbourg-written serge gainsbourg songs.

#506: harry nilsson - good old desk, together and skidoo (live on playboy after dark, 1968)

is it better to hear harry nilsson sing a beautiful lullaby about a desk, or to hear him convince young hugh hefner that its title is an anagram referring to “man’s modern concept about the meaning of god”? or is it better to hear him croon a swinging lounge love song about an ocean of sadness? or a song that’s made up of the credits to a druggy otto preminger film starring groucho marx, jackie gleason, slim pickens, peter lawford, frankie avalon and mickey rooney? no one can ever be sure.

#434: harry nilsson - think about your troubles (from the point!) (1971)

september is here, august is gone—but it will forever remain in our hearts as the month nancy sinatra managed to get an op-ed printed in the times. actually her piece made a good argument for why singers like her father deserve radio royalty payments: “when he sings, ‘weatherwise it’s such a lovely day’ in come fly with me, he lingers on the word lovely, and you can actually imagine yourself floating in a blue sky on a lovely day.”

that’s a nice point, and it makes me think about harry nilsson, who was like frank sinatra except he crooned about baths, desks, limes, bad fathers and the circus while wearing bathrobes and binge drinking with john lennon. in think about your troubles—a song about crying into a teacup that’s poured into the ocean, drunk up by fishes who are swallowed by a whale that dies and melts into the water, which is filtered and made into tea—he sings the word decomposed with enough fatal wobble to remind you that everyone is going to die. but then the song’s melody is so splendid that life seems worth living. it’s perfect music for september.

#311: harry nilsson - coconut (1971, bbc’s the music of nilsson)

my pal ted introduced me to the blog for the love of harry, which is, for the love of god, totally heavenly. among other things, you’ll find 1964 harry nilsson singles like baa baa blacksheep, excerpts about harry from albert goldman biographies, insane covers from vintage harry songbooks, and a t-shirt that says harry schmarry, which i aspire to one day wearing.

and then there’s this 1971 bbc show. click here to watch the whole thing, which will literally, well, no, figuratively, make steam burst from your ears. it starts with mr. richland’s favorite song, which is the saddest song a then-young (but future has-been) songwriter ever wrote about a has-been songwriter.

then there are three harrys singing walk right back, cathy’s clown and let the good times roll, followed by life line, which i’d never heard before and am not immediately crazy about. but then, phew, there’s think about your troubles and are you sleeping from the point, his animated film that came about, he said, because, “i was on acid and i looked at the trees and i realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to points. i thought, ‘oh! everything has a point, and if it doesn’t, then there’s a point to it.’”

in between those cartoonish tunes is the very non-cartoonish joy. and then there’s without her, which might be the saddest break-up song in the history of break up songs, even though it doesn’t have the line, “two can be as bad as one/ it’s the loneliest number since the number one,” which is from, of course, harry’s one.

then, shown above, there are monkeys performing coconut, which is too bad because, if you really want to know, i think coconut is a totally serious song, and not monkey business at all, in between dylan’s rainy day women and the beatles’ being for the benefit of mr. kite.

and then lastly, holy heavens, is 1941, which i’m not going to say anything about, except that it’s better than neutral milk hotel’s holland, 1945, which is saying a lot.

#247: ringo starr - only you (1974)

sunday evening nilsson special (pt. 2)! john lennon wasn’t the only member of the beatles who got to sit around and ingest industrial quantities of pharmaceuticals with harry nilsson while wearing spacemen suits and bathrobes in mid-70s los angeles. the real question is: were there any drugs left in california by the time nilsson was done making music videos with his friends?

#241: harry nilsson - pussy cats (advertisement) (1974)

sunday evening nilsson special! in 2006 the walkmen remade 1974’s super-druggy harry nilsson/john lennon album pussy cats (the rug in between the “d” and the “s” on the cover spells something if you think really hard about it), but now it’s 2008 and i promise to remake this 1974 advertisement for nilsson’s album if obama wins.

#226: the monkees - daddy’s song (from head, 1968)

my favorite harry nilsson song sung by the monkees in a jack nicholson-directed movie? with druggy dancing? and frank zappa appears afterwards with a talking donkey to say, “you’ve been working on your dancing, doesn’t leave much time for your music. you should spend some more time on it because the youth of america depends on you to show the way”? it’s like the gods hath bestowed a columbus day music video gift.

update: gods giveth and gods taketh away; the daddy’s song video was taken down, so here’s a commercial for head instead.

#87: harry nilsson - walk right back/cathy’s clown/let the good times roll (1971, bbc)

oh, harry! in 1968, when there was a press conference to announce the start of apple records, john lennon was asked for his favorite u.s. singer. “nilsson,” he said. then paul mccartney was asked for his favorite u.s. group. “nilsson,” he said.

maybe they liked his tipsy psychedelia (pandemonium shadow show), or his morbid acoustic folk (aerial ballet), or his old-school sinatra miming (a little touch of schmilsson in the night) or all that bizarre bathrobe kitch (“you put the lime in the coconut…”).

nilsson’s has a syrupy swagger that makes things interesting even when he’s playing everly brothers tunes (and a 1946 hit) on the piano. there’s something especially nefarious about harry singing such perfectly sweet songs with two other versions of himself. (don’t forget that two years after this show, he accompanied his new pal john lennon on his famous LA drug binge. a year after that, mama cass elliott died in nilsson’s bedroom, and the who’s keith moon happened to do the very same thing in 1978.)

bonus! the creepy cut-off clapping and overall goofiness here is calendar-approriate. happy april fool’s day ‘08. woo.