Tim Freedman Says There's More To Harry Nilsson Than His Partying Ways

“I was looking for a challenge,” singer-songwriter Tim Freedman of The Whitlams admits of taking on the bittersweet story of American singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. “I’m always looking to give my songs a rest for a little while, keep ‘em fresh, and it was my agent actually, came up with the idea. He’s a huge Nilsson fan and thought I’d suit Harry.

“I’d only really known the hit songs but it was fortunate that that month a great biography came out on him and RCA released his box set. So I devoured them all and very quickly became a fan. So I started to put together a show in various stages and I’m up to stage three now, really. Stage one was just doing a concert of Harry’s songs and pretending he was doing a gig, which I did last year at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and this year was to take it into a theatrical setting, where he just wanders into the den to have his first drink of the day and it’s far more chatty as he reminisces, playing snatches of songs and explaining the context and things. I did that for a week at Hayes Theatre, filmed it and now I’m going to craft that and take it to the next level and try and do it overseas.”

"He was a very mathematical writer, which you don't usually think of him as — you usually think of him as a sloppy drunk." 

Harry Nilsson was just 52 when he died of heart failure in his California home in January 1994. Though a gifted songwriter with an extraordinary vocal range, Nilsson performed barely a handful of concerts in his lifetime— his biggest hits covers of other people’s songs — and was best known for his heavy drinking and partying with celebrity friends, among them John Lennon and Who drummer Keith Moon. Among his peers however, Nilsson is still regarded as perhaps the best songwriter of his generation.

“My sort of template for the show is the BBC special he did in ’73,” Freedman explains, “where he was convinced to go over and film a special without a studio audience, because he didn’t like playing to audiences. I looked at that show closely and then got all the other songs that were seminal in his career and arranged them for piano and vocal as well. They’re good enough songs to exist in that format because they’re very intricate, very well, almost overwritten, beautiful melodies. He was a very mathematical writer, which you don’t usually think of him as — you usually think of him as a sloppy drunk — but in his early days he had an amazing mathematical mind, and the wordplay is very intricate. When you add that to that otherworldly voice you have something very special.”

He won a Grammy for that song from Midnight Cowboy, a cover titled Everybody’s Talkin’, and then topped the charts with another cover, Badfinger’s Without You, but Nilsson’s first big hit was a song he’d written titled Cuddly Toy recorded by The Monkees. But as Freedman will tell you, there’s so much more to Harry Nilsson.