A Conversation with Jimmy Webb about Harry Nilsson – HuffPost 7.31.13

Mike Ragogna: Jimmy, how’ve you been?

Jimmy Webb: Good. I’m on the road, I’m literally on the road but I’m enjoying myself. I’ve had some good gigs…that’s my Summer tour. I’m just staying in the trees and I’ll sit by the pond with my buddy. That’s about it, that’s the outlook. I read a really good review of the Harry Nilsson box set in Rolling Stone. It was a four-star review, it really made me feel good.

MR: And there’s also the new book Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter.

JW: It’s funny because I’ve got Alyn Shipton’s book laying here on the floor of the car and I love the book. It’s really a cool time for Harry, I just feel it.

MR: I wonder what it is about Harry Nilsson that people keep evoking him, using him as a source of inspiration, and citing him as one of their influences though Harry–with the fifteen or so albums that he had–didn’t seem like he was one of those artists that was, at the time, considered as important as he ended up being.

JW: Well, he said to me one time while we were sitting and having a drink a couple of years before he went down, “You know, Jim, the way it’s looking, people are only going to remember me for singing ‘Without You.'” In a way, we’re all victims of our heads. People have a tendency to focus on the chart material and a lot of the other stuff slides by. I wrote a full-on cantata, almost a secular cantata–even though I did deal with Christ to some degree–for Artie Garfunkel and Amy Grant called The Animals’ Christmas. It cost a king’s ransom and was probably two years in the making with a cast of thousands. Geoffrey Emerick was on the board and we put the thing out, and they had no idea what to do with it, CBS and Sony. It just went under the radar. I think that a lot of Harry’s albums came out, some of them very good. He doesn’t get a lot of credit for A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, but that was the first standards album. Everybody’s gone hog-wild cutting American Songbook records, but Harry was the first one. That was an original thought, that was a real thing.

MR: Plus there was Nilsson Schmilsson, an enormously successful and popular LP.

JW: Nilsson Schmilsson, of course, was the great, I think, seminal record of Harry’s career that Richard Perry produced. I was there for a while at the recording.

MR: You were there? What were the sessions like?

JW: They were very orderly. Richard Perry was a very organized producer who brought in top-quality sidemen, he was a good casting director, he knew who he wanted for certain things. He wanted Jim Keltner on the drums, he wanted this, he wanted that, or he wanted Nicky Hopkins; he had ideas about who he was using. Other people were using the guys out of Elton’s band, like Dee Murray, the bass player, the guy they called “The Badge,” who was an acoustic player. London was full of hot players and Richard liked to use that as a kind of artistic palate. Harry was more off in the direction of anarchistic art.

MR: [laughs] That’s perfect.

JW: I remember one time walking into a session over at RCA in a big studio and he had actually just cut this magnificent record called “Salmon Falls.”

MR: Oh yeah, what an awesome production!

JW: I was really stunned by this thing. I thought, “This is as important as any record I’ve ever heard.” Beautiful Paul Buckmaster strings, yet still raw and raucous and rock ‘n’ roll and rebellious and also wise and instructive at the same time. It was a lot of things. It was symphonic but at the same time, it was still in the pocket. So I got over to hear this thing and he played it for me but what was going on out in the studio was pretty much a shambles. Brian Wilson was playing “Da Doo Ron Ron” on a B3 organ; he was singing that, and Danny Hutton and Micky Dolenz were doing vocals on something else, I don’t know what. I couldn’t honestly tell you what except that there was a horn section in there and Van Dyke (Parks) was humming the parts. I sat there for about twenty to thirty minutes and it was just a cacophony. I have to be honest with you, I was thinking to myself, “Jeez, I wonder if some of the executives from RCA walked in here right now, what they would think of this?” but some great things came out of it.

MR: Which recording session was that one?

JW: It was on the same slate with “Salmon Falls,” but they had already done “Salmon Falls” by the time I got there, and they were working with steel drums and horns and all kinds of stuff. He was already way off into the third world thing. He was kind of like a pioneer; he’s been undersold in a lot of areas.

MR: It seems that Pandemonium Shadow Show and Aerial Ballet are the pair of albums that were the gateway into Harry Nilsson’s works if future fans didn’t come in on a hit.

JW: Yeah, I would put my hand up and say, “Yeah, I knew about those records.” What about them?”

MR: I’m just curious, how did they affect you when they came out?

JW: I’m going to be very candid with you…I was horrifically, irreparably envious.

MR: [laughs] Nice.

JW: I could not stand it that he was that good. I could not stand it. It was at least another brace of years before he and I got together and actually realized that we had a relationship in the offing and that we were going to be friends. I don’t think that either one of us knew that we would come to rely on each other as much as we did.

MR: Jimmy, what was your relationship with him over the years? How did it progress?

JW: Well, he didn’t involve me a lot in his recording. Like I said, I’ll go back to Richard Perry. I played the piano on “Jump Into The Fire”; you can hear that, I’m credited on the album. It was just me sitting there pounding, [hums tune], so literally there was like blood on the keyboard. It was my sole contribution to Harry’s records. But we were seriously like party mates to begin with, and I mean some hard partying. I was just talking to another one of my buds, Danny Ferguson, and I was saying the thing about Harry was you could never say that he threw in the towel. When you left the house with him, your wife would be saying, “When are you coming back?” Danny Hutton said, “Harry was a ride.” That’s the best quote that I could give you; that’s the way the early days were. I think that, unfortunately, to kind of loop back to what I think your original question about his relative obscurity is, a lot of attention was paid to Harry’s shenanigans and that has a way of distracting people. It’s a shame, really, because he was doing some great things like “Salmon Falls.” I defy anybody to listen to that and say that isn’t seminal. That should have been Number One; that should have been like a Beatles record. But the party became a thing and a kind of code of honor went along with it.

MR: Yeah, as is evidenced on the album Pussy Cats with John Lennon.

JW: Yeah. I’m actually not making this up, but he came into my house one night coughing up blood. I said, “Holy s**t, I didn’t know things had gotten so bad!” He said, “No, no, no. My lungs are fine, man. I left them on the mic.

MR: [laughs]

JW: He was proud of that. There was a lot of testosterone floating through the air, and John, in a way… Well, there are a lot of Lennon fans out there, God forbid I should say anything about John, but he kind of brought out the worst in Harry. I think they would have probably both been better off if they had been somewhere else, doing something else. But I understood. I understood. I had been there, I had done it, but I had reached the point where–even though I never stopped loving him like a brother, and I think Ringo’s right when he says, “Harry was my best friend,” I think they were best friends, I was somewhere a little bit outside of the bullseye on that but we were close–I got to the point where I wasn’t as much fun as I had been to start out. I started backing off of some of the really self-destructive behavior and I was getting a family going at home and rather liked that. I had a young wife, I had some things to deal with before I croaked off and went to the happy hunting grounds. I actually began to feel such a responsibility, which was kind of a miracle.

MR: But considering how so many artists, etc., partied hard like that, it was also a part of that era, wasn’t it?

JW: Listen, all around us, it was part of us. You didn’t go anywhere without your bottle of cocaine. Come on, I’m up front about it. Everybody had cocaine on them. Anybody could have been stopped at any time and arrested. Everybody was carrying, and if you weren’t carrying, then you weren’t hip. Some people, I guess they had their fill. Paul McCartney says that he stopped doing it, he might have been the only guy who stopped doing it, but everybody was into it, I would say, pretty strongly. I first started trying to put it behind me around 1979, 1980. I started tapering off and I remember that I got concerned about my children because they were getting old enough to know what drugs were. I got concerned about them seeing drug use or seeing material lying around the house. I became concerned that they would begin to take that as an ordinary part of life. By 1985, 1986, I was out of it completely, probably before that. I put that one behind me, though I still had a couple of hurdles to get over. I’ve been sober about fourteen years, fifteen years, I stopped smoking before that. It’s been a gradual process for me, self-preservation. But at the time, everybody was doing it. People were hauling out their stash in a restaurant and knocking lines down on the table. Rolling up a hundred dollar bill right there.

MR: Can I ask you, just personally, when you realized and you stopped because of your family and all that, did you notice that your creativity changed at all?

JW: I have a good friend named Bill Whelan who’s Irish and he wrote the music to Riverdance and when I told him I was going to stop drinking, he said, “You’ll be surprised how lucky you get.”

MR: Really?

JW: Yeah, all of the sudden your luck comes back. Amazing things happen on the spiritual level with your mate, your children, with your friendships, and I think somewhere deep within you, you find a kind of spark in every day that makes it worth living.

MR: Nice, that’s beautifully said. Jimmy, there was, Nilsson Sings Newman. It seems that as Randy Newman’s popularity was steadily growing from word of mouth, as more people covered his material, and since he had his own critically acclaimed Warners albums…

JW: Oh, yeah, all of the albums were masterpieces in my book. My favorite is Good Old Boys.

MR: Mine too. I think that’s one of the best albums ever recorded.

JW: Yeah, it was a widely misunderstood album, by the way. I also loved Little Criminals. I loved them all but I have my favorites. I think, in a way, it was inevitable that Randy and Harry were going to bump heads and I really feel like they did bump heads. I never really heard Harry say, “Oh, yeah, Randy, what a great guy,” and I never really heard Randy say, “Yeah, Harry, what a great guy.” But they had a similarity in their obliqueness to the mainstream. It was a definite similarity. Randy basically sings a character. That’s his voice. It’s kind of a bluesy, almost, dare I say, African-American… It’s a kind of black sound.

MR: He would probably love that description.

JW: Well I hope so, I hope he would… But Harry, on the other hand, had this operatic tenor. He was the best singer around, man. When Lennon said, “He’s my favorite group,” that wasn’t just a clever line. Anyone who sat and heard the two albums we talked about,Pandemonium… and Aerial Ballet, both of those albums were full of vocal gymnastics that were absolutely awe-inspiring, and if you thought you were a singer, you had to go back and look in the mirror! Here was a guy who could go from a baritone… He could probably go down to the E natural easily, E natural below middle C, probably D, and then he could go all the way up to damn near a high C in his chest voice. He was a freak. And forget about his falsetto, he’s up there playing around and doing those yodeling things and playing games, making tricks happen with his voice. Guys are looking at him saying, “Yo, Harry, where’d you learn that one?” He must have spent a lot of time in the bathroom, listening to the echo. He loved echo, by the way, and he used echo as an instrument. He could overdub himself better than anybody I’ve ever heard. He’s definitely in the same class with McCartney, and McCartney is no shabby singer by any means. But I think that Harry put himself in the first ring and I think that even people like Glen Campbell were a little bit stunned by the athleticism of this guy. He just kind of looked like a guy. He was a tall, imposing figure; he would grin at you and he could’ve been a truck driver. He was a real man of the people. He was the proletariat, but when he opened his mouth, look out! That’s why some of those performances caught him and overshadow his records–they were such great performances that they were mountainous. They were pinnacles. I think now is a great time to go back and take another look at Harry, in light of what we know about all the drug use and all the crazy stuff that we were all into and that he seemed to gravitate towards. He reveled in offending people, to be honest with you. It didn’t bother him too much.

MR: Pushing boundaries, just like his vocal gymnastics.

JW: Yeah. Absolutely.

MR: Jimmy, if Harry had lived to these days, what do you think he would be doing right now?

JW: He was a big family man. It’s hard for people to sort of get that one down. It gets stuck in your throat, like when you choke on a soda pop and it goes halfway across the table. “He was a what?” He was a family man. Loved his family, loved his kids. He would call me every time they had a baby and told me, “We’re gonna name this baby Bo,” and tell me why they were naming him Bo. There was such tenderness there, that you rarely see in these teutonic American fathers with their chins jutting out, raising their children in manly, masculine ways. But Harry wasn’t like that. He was gentle and playful with his kids. Walk into his house, and he’d be in a velvet bathrobe, probably gold-colored, laying in front of the fire with about three or four kids crawling around on top of him. He was a big bear, just as happy as a man could possibly be. I think that today, he would be loving his kids, helping them cope with life, appreciate it for the farce that it is and try to have a laugh. I think that he would be reveling in the idea of grandchildren, I think he would’ve loved a whole pile of them, that much, I’m absolutely certain of. In my view, he had made a heroic effort to clean up his act and he actually put together enough money to get his family out of bankruptcy, and he had a million dollars in the bank when he died. It was like somebody making an absolutely heroic, last pitch in the ninth inning of the World Series with two out and the whole world listening. His family, he loved even more than he loved drugs and partying and being friends with John. So to me, the one thing that I would like to get out there is he died like a man, he died heroically, he died with his head above water and he could look you straight in the eye and laugh about some pretty crazy goings-on, but he actually did pull it out of the fire. He has that song, “You can climb the mountain, you can swim the sea, you can jump into the fire but you’ll never be free.” That’s actually the song that I played piano on, but in the final moments of his life, he did jump out of the fire and take care of what needed to be taken care of.

MR: So you think that’s how we should remember Harry?

JW: I really do. I think we should remember him as a loving father, as someone who absolutely adored his wife on the level of obsession, was as good a friend as you could ever hope to be, and was a musical genius. The thing that tripped him up, if anything tripped him up… I remember one time he said to me, “Do you realize we’re the only people in history to ever get to do this?”

MR: [laughs] That’s so true, isn’t it?

JW: I think if anything tripped him up, it was the notion that this was an opportunity that was not to be missed.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne