Good Old Desk

If blogs could have a theme song then mine would be Harry Nilsson's song "Good Old Desk".

Everyone knows the "coconut song". Even if you don't know the title, which is simply "Coconut", you know what to do when presented with the terms "lime", "coconut", and "doctor" in any sing-along or karaoke scenario. It's a shame that people may know "Coconut" but not know or remember Harry Nilsson.

I'd first heard of the man through one of my CD clubs (yes, Timmy, there used to be more than one major CD club once) when they were really pushing me to buy whatever albums of his they stocked in the time shortly after he died in 1994. I was a sophomore in college. And I felt weird about it.

That a person dies shouldn't make his work any more appealing than it would the day before, should it? It bothers me to this day as I see other artists of my time and the times before pass away. On the other hand, though, wouldn't you want that artist's heirs to be taken care off as a result of those sales? At the very least, couldn't the heightened awareness of their work after their death be a better fate than the irreversible obscurity reserved for the exponentially greater number of artists who die with their work never recognized for what it was? Maybe it all depends on who's getting paid what.

In any case, I stayed away from Nilsson's work (or what parts of it I had seen) because the budgetary constraints of college life and the post-college work experience only allowed for spending on works I was more familiar with.

I finally bought "Nilsson Schmilsson" a little over a year ago after learning that he'd performed the songs "Without You", which I remembered from my FM-gold childhood, and "Jump Into the Fire", which was used in the helicopter scene in Goodfellas. By then a remastered version of the album was available with some bonus tracks, so it was all good. As soon as I began listening to the album I wanted to kick myself for not buying it 10 years ago. I'm talking real regret here, folks, like the kind that makes you wonder what kind of man you could have been having been affected by this art way back then.

The next CD I got by Harry Nilsson was was a collection of his greatest hits (pictured above). Many have been released before and since, but "All Time Greatest Hits" presents a good starting point for new audiences by presenting works from the entire spectrum of Nilsson's career with the critically acclaimed material presented comfortably alongside those hits from the radio and initially lesser known works that later gained exposure for their use in movies, like the song "Everybody's Talkin'", which has been used in Midnight Cowboy as well as the recent Crank, for example.

Recently, in an attempt to find the album that "Good Old Desk" originally appeared on, I came across his first 9 or 10 albums as UK reissues available only as high-priced imports in the US. Remastered and repackaged to combine more than one album on a single CD, some of these were remastered by Nilsson himself, and I feel cheated that they never found their way to American shores with the same popularity that his last few albums have. Still, better late than never I say, and they're on my Wish List should some spare cash find its way to me.

Nilsson's appeal as a recording artist is three-fold, combining a superior vocal range, gifted lyricism, whimsical musicality, and - FOUR! There are four reasons why I like Nilsson's work:

1. Superior vocal range
   
2. Gifted lyricism
   
3. Whimsical musicality, and
   
4. Diverse and unpredictable topicality

Pythonian digressions aside, it's the musicality, provided in many instances by assorted members of the Beatles, who were contemporaries and huge fans of his, that helps the listener appreciate the diverse concepts Nilsson presents us with along his career. In addition to the love/hate songs are the concept children's record (induced by an LSD trip, allegedly), an album of musical standards, an album about vampirism, and of course, songs about arrows and desks.

For me, it's the simple things he sings about that endear me to his work and I look forward to listening to more of it.