It was an indisputable fact that The Beatles helped make the career of Harry Nilsson. The American singer-songwriter managed to make inroads with some notable figures in the pop music business, most infamously Phil Spector, but Nilsson was still mostly working as a behind-the-scenes figure when his 1967 debut LP Pandemonium Shadow Show was released. That album contained the song that would bring him to the public’s attention: a cover of The Beatles’ ‘You Can’t Do That’ that also contained at least 15 other Fab Four tracks squeezed into its arrangement.
“One time I was just toying with my guitar. I struck this chord and it seemed to lend itself to a million different songs,” Nilsson later observed about his mash-up. “I noticed how many Beatles songs could be played on this one chord, so I run down to Wallach’s Music City on Sunset, at about midnight, just before it closed, bought the Beatle songbook, and finished the song that night.”
Nilsson’s version of ‘You Can’t Do That’ wasn’t a major hit in the US, but it did become his first reference point for a number of fans. As it turned out, some of those fans were The Beatles themselves. While giving a press conference to announce the establishment of their Apple Corps business in 1968, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were asked who their favourite contemporary artists were. Without missing a beat, both replied, “Nilsson”.
“I’ve had a lot of publicity out of the fact that the Beatles liked my album and named me as their favourite singer,” Nilsson told Record Mirror in 1968. “But I didn’t really like that. Obviously, I was very pleased and very flattered – and now I’ve got to know John and Paul quite well, and we get on well together. They’re both very gentle people. But I wasn’t keen on getting all that publicity because of them. It made me feel that I was riding on someone else’s back – in other words it was because of them that I was being talked about, and not because of me. But I think the whole thing was blown up a bit out of proportion by the press.”
Nilsson eventually managed to have his cake and eat it too. His hit rendition of Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, later used as the theme to 1969’s Midnight Cowboy, gave Nilsson a level of fame separate from his Beatles association. By the time his cover of Badfinger’s ‘Without You’ hit number one in early 1972, Nilsson was an established music star. His friendships with The Beatles, specifically with John Lennon and Ringo Starr, continued on, but their collective bad behaviour once again put Nilsson in a compromising position.
When Nilsson, Lennon, and Starr were kicked out of The Troubadour Club for heckling The Smothers Brothers in 1973, Nilsson’s public perception took a downturn. “It ruined my reputation for 10 years,” Nilsson later observed. “Get one Beatle drunk and look what happens.” Despite this, Nilsson’s friendship with Lennon remained strong, so much so that Lennon’s death prompted Nilsson to take a break from music and promote gun control on a full-time basis.
