This Day in Pop Music History (Harry Nilsson, Golden Voice of ‘Without You,’ Dies)

Jan. 15, 1994— Harry Nilsson, a singer-songwriter of rare versatility and virtuosity, died at age 52 in his sleep at his Agoura Hills, Calif., home, two decades after his manic lifestyle ruined his voice, shortened his career and wrecked his health.

I first became aware of this musician’s work through watching TV as a child around 1970. An ABC animated “Movie of the Week” called The Point, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, featured stories and music created by Nilsson, with the musician singing his own songs. Moreover, the theme of the Bill Bixby sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, “Best Friend,” was an adaptation of a song from Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet LP, “Girlfriend.” 

A self-taught musician who learned piano chords from rock ‘n’ rollers who performed at L.A.’s Paramount Theater, where he worked as assistant manager, Nilsson was soon building a solid catalog of his own work (enough to eventually lead him to being recognized as one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s “100 Greatest Songwriters”), notably “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” “Jump Into the Fire,” “Gotta Get Up,” “You’re Breakin’ My Heart,” and “One” (soon covered by Three Dog Night). 

Ironically, though, Nilsson achieved his greatest commercial success as an interpreter of other’s songs, especially with Fred Neal’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” (featured in the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy) and Badfinger’s “Without You.”

Even now, it is only dimly appreciated how innovative Nilsson could be. More than a decade before Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, entering their “legacy years” as performers, tried out the Great American Songbook, Nilsson was experimenting with this rich (and, by now, neglected) mine of music with A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. Furthermore, he compensated for his stage anxiety by taping a forerunner of MTV with his tune “Coconuts.”

John Lennon may have helped make Nilsson’s career with an enthusiastic endorsement of his talent (“Nilsson for President!”), but also helped ruin it with shared drug-and-alcohol-fueled hijinx several years later. 

When the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono had a trial separation in the mod-1970s, Lennon entered a period often referred to as his “lost weekend.” The phrase only began to capture the intense, incomprehensible benders on which Lennon took his friend Nilsson —misadventures that led another Nilsson friend, songwriter Jimmy Webb, to describe their “mutually destructive aerial ballet” in his memoir, The Cake and the Rain.

Even more insane than their night-owl antics (Lennon narrowly escaped charges of assaulting a female photographer) were their studio sessions for Nilsson’s Pussycats LP, produced by Lennon. 

At one point, Webb, alarmed to hear Nilsson croak out a greeting and to see him vomiting blood into Webb’s kitchen sink, asked what had happened to his vocal chords. The laughing response: “I left it on the microphone.” Nilsson’s magnificent singing voice was never the same again.

Nilsson’s career was shorter than it should have been, but he made the most of his short window of time. I love this quotation from songwriter and admirer Randy Newman on this talent: “He had a gift for melody. Which is a rare, inexplicable talent to have. People like McCartney have it, Schubert, Elton John has it. Harry had that gift."

This Day in Pop Music History (“Mama Cass” Elliott Dies, Urban Legend is Born)

July 29, 1974—Her plus-size figure inspired considerable jokes at her expense, not to mention loneliness. 

But the London death at age 32 of singer Cass Elliott—better known as “Mama Cass”—only multiplied the stories in the cruelest—and most inaccurate—manner possible: by inspiring the persistent, and dead wrong, urban legend that she choked to death on a ham sandwich.

As a youngster, I recall vividly, a skit on The Carol Burnett Show had Elliott, a sometime guest, being complimented on her healthy, cavity-free teeth. How did she manage this? “I brush 16 times a day,” she answered. “Once after every meal.”

I can’t tell you why I remember that bit of comedy so well after all these years but forget the songs she sang that hour—the reason why Burnett had her appear in the first place. 

Elliott’s marvelous contralto, I'm sure, was in evidence that night, just as it had been when she formed not just an indelible, but a central, part of The Mamas and the Papas.

I was only well into my thirties before I became aware that the group that performed “California Dreamin’,” “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “I Saw Her Again Last Night,” and other hits was a kind of forerunner of Fleetwood Mac, another group that spun irresistible pop gold with a heady mix of deft studio work and expertly arranged vocals before coming undone (or, in the case of the Seventies supergroup, nearly so) by rampaging egos, a manic principal male songwriter, intragroup romantic entanglements, and enough drugs to service a nationwide pharmacy chain.

Instead, what stuck with me immediately as a preteen about the Sixties group were their gorgeous harmonies, pouring out of transistor radios, inspiring some of the earliest joyful memories in the soundtrack of my life. 

Among their hits: “Creeque Alley,” a witty account of how they coalesced in the folk-rock scene of the time, featuring a refrain that must have been hard for Elliott to listen to: “And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass.”

She may have been a good sport about such jokes at her expense, but it all had to hurt. Elliott was certainly desperate to lose weight: She would go as high as 294 before starting crash diets. One weekend of diuretic treatment in a hospital would result in a fast loss of 20 pounds.

But it was never enough. She wanted one of the “Papas” in the group, Denny Doherty, but—much to his late-in-life regret—the weight of his dear friend put him off.

His choice for a lover ended up being far more conventional, if understandable: picture-perfect fellow group member Michelle Phillips. “You can have any man in the world,” Elliott told the blonde beauty. “Why take the man I love?”

Elliott could wisecrack with the best of them about her romantic life: “It’s easy to find boyfriends. I buy them a motorcycle, a leather suit, and put them in acting school.” The truth was nastier: she did have lovers, remembered musician Denny Bruce, but they were “basically there for her drugs.”

After “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” her big solo hit, Elliott’s career advanced only fitfully. Her death occurred as it was on the upswing again, two nights after the conclusion of a two-week, sold-out engagement at London’s Palladium.

The manner of Elliott’s death was not the only urban legend that the rock era has given rise to (Ricky Nelson’s death in a plane crash, allegedly caused by the singer’s freebasing of cocaine, is particularly notorious). 

Nor was the ham sandwich the only surmised cause of death (this being the era of counterculture paranoia, assassination by the CIA was sometimes mentioned, along with rumors of drugs and a pregnancy courtesy of John Lennon).

But the ham sandwich rumor was the hardest to dislodge because of Elliott’s struggles with the weight scale, and because it sprang to life through premature speculation by her own doctor. (He told the press that he had seen a sandwich by her bedside.)

But guess what? Not only were no traces of a sandwich ever found in her throat when the coroner examined the body, but the sandwich lay untouched. 

Elliott had died of a heart attack, with her circulatory system undoubtedly strained to the breaking point not just by her size but by her back-and-forth weight shifts. But she was not the active participant in her own death that the rumor implied.

All of this obscures a fact associated with her death that is demonstrably true: it occurred in the same Mayfair flat of singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson where The Who’s drummer Keith Moon died four years later.

Nilsson, who had been in the habit of renting the apartment out to friends during the six months of the year when he couldn’t be in town, was understandably shaken by the second death in four years there. Moon’s bandmate Pete Townshend bought it so Nilsson wouldn’t have to step foot in it again. 

A quarter century later, asked what he would say to Moon if he ever encountered him in the afterlife, Townsend responded: “You owe me five thousand pounds back rent.”