Can't Live: the Tragedy of Harry Nilsson

This is something I'd have to file under "it seemed like a good idea at the time".

When I finally found the song 1941 by Harry Nilsson, it (of course) sent the detective in me on a search for more about Nilsson's life and work. I began to realize how many amazing songs he'd written, and how incredible his voice was, with its pure 3 1/2-octave range vibrating like glass in the heavens. So as I trudged through the archeological dig that is YouTube, I turned up a documentary called Who is Harry Nilsson (and why is everybody talking about him?) The title was based on the song Everybody's Talking from Midnight Cowboy, one of my favorite songs from one of my all-time-favorite movies (which I saw again recently, and which once again knocked me out of my chair with its soul-shattering depiction of life's desperate fringe-dwellers).

I instantly saw the biographical connection with the song 1941 - the only difference being "the circus" meant, presumably, the music industry, money and fame. That last line "but what will happen to the boy when the circus comes to town?" is one of those one-liners that packs a tremendous punch. And it all happened. He was born in 1941, and his father walked right out the door three years later, leaving a scar on his soul that never seems to have healed.

I was hooked immediately because as the doc unfolded, it became apparent that  his destiny and fortunes were intertwined with those of the Beatles, in particular John Lennon who was every bit as adept at monstrous self-destruction as Harry himself. He even famously got drunk and rowdy with Ringo Starr (who seems to have pulled himself out of the fire just in time). Most of the people who contributed to this thing were industry types, who were in accord with the general feeling that Harry Nilsson was hell-bent on destroying himself for reasons that only made sense to him. Though he was described by friends and loved ones as sweet and gentle and lovely and all the rest of it, that is not the way he acted and not the way he treated people who deserved infinitely better than his sometimes monstrous abuse.

It was getting depressing, and I knew how it ended, but I trudged on. When John Lennon was shot, Nilsson became obsessed with gun control laws, though all his crusading appears to have come to naught. After that his career fragmented as he careened from cocaine highs to alcoholic lows, generating enough nicotine fumes to poison a whole community. Before John died, they had a screaming contest which resulted in Nilsson rupturing a vocal cord. His voice never recovered. But he seems to have inexplicably chosen to destroy his instrument in a way that horrified me more than all the rest of it put together.

So when he was 54, his life walked out the door. He ruined his body, and collapsed and died from all his extremes. But I had to ask myself if the San Andreas fault in his personality stemmed from that early parental abandonment.

It must have.

Nothing else could crack a soul clean through, could it? Unless there was some kind of abuse we don't know about, but maybe this was enough. By the time I got to the end of the documentary I had a heavy feeling, but I also felt the familiar anger I experience when I hear of someone pissing away the kind of golden opportunities that less fortunate people would give their right arm for.

Does fame do this? Why do so many famous people self-destruct, usually from drugs and alcohol and the disastrous situations that inevitably result? Was I spared, do you think? I guess I wanted it, but I also didn't. When I get a comment on a YouTube video I posted six years ago, when I receive an email comment on a blog post I did in 2012, it reminds me of something important.  It makes me realize (once again) that the rewards of the creative life are not what you think.

The rewards of the creative life are NOT helling around in bars, snorting cocaine until you hit the ceiling, abandoning a wife and son (yes, folks, he DID abandon a wife and son, just like in the song, before siring another five children with another woman, whom he soon left a widow). The rewards of the creative life are - simply - the creating itself. Or maybe touching just ONE person and hearing about it many years later. And realizing there may have been many others who just never told you about it.

I stepped out of addiction just in time, and like Ringo (and Paul), I'm still here and savoring my life to a degree I never thought possible. I keep it simple now (though it's never easy), and if I think about drinking, I think about where it took me, and I can never go back there again. But when I think of Harry Nilsson, I just get angry. There's something so perverse about the whole thing. He got drunk "at" people, that much is plain, and maybe even "at" himself. But why not use a few particles of that genius brain to figure out just what you have to do to live a peaceful and fulfilling life (and to treat the people you love the way they deserve to be treated?)

It takes no great genius to fuck up, to destroy, to obliterate. No talent at all. And I'm sick of hearing about tortured geniuses and listening to people make endless excuses for them. This song, though - it's just eerie, because the raw need in it, the sense of catastrophic damage, is disturbing to me. Do people need to be so irreparably broken to communicate such grief? What a horrible deal. 

So what's the conclusion? If you're a legendary creator and performer, or just someone who needs to write and perform, and want to live a half-decent life, be careful who you choose as a role model. Shoot for Ringo or Paul, who are still here and still creating - not poor, beleaguered, self-annihilating Harry.