Page from a book on fish from the rare book section of the Japanese National Library, c. 1880
Harry Nilsson is best known for his cover of Badfinger's "Without You", which still gets played on the radio a lot, evoking the common response, "Whoa, who did this awful cover of that one Mariah Carey song?" But the songwriter is also known for his Grammy-winning cover of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" and for his palship with John Lennon.
Yeah, "palship" is a real word - look it up.
But before he was a friend of former Beatles, Nilsson was a HUGE Beatles fan. You don't have to look any further than Pandemonium Shadow Show, his 1967 debut album (not counting an earlier singles compilation). The album contains a cover of "She's Leaving Home" from Sgt. Pepper's, an album that had only been out for a couple months at the time. The album also has a "cover" of the Beatles' "You Can't Do That", but the track is actually a medley of all the Beatles' best hooks smooshed into two-minute pop songs. It's a fun but headache-inducing listen.
Nilsson's Beatles love continued with 1968's Aerial Ballet, which has some very Beatles-esque songs like "Good Old Desk". That album also featured the single "One" (later a hit for the excellent bands Three Dog Night and Filter), and "Sister Marie" was the single's non-album b-side. "Sister Marie" is another excellent Beatles pastiche, an attempt at "Lucy in the Sky"-style hazy psychedelia. It also sounds a lot like "I am a Tangerine" by Tommy James and the Shondells, but this is We Love the Beatles, not We Love Tommy James and the Shondells.
And I was totally kidding about Filter, by the way. Those guys were terrible and I hope the soundtrack to X-Files: Fight the Future goes straight to hell for featuring their cover of "One". Execrable.
"Sister Marie" by Harry Nilsson
2 comments:
This is a lovely song; it's included in the new box set "Where The Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-68." It's preceded by a very similar-sounding and similar-themed song, "She Sang Hymns Out Of Tune" by Jesse Lee Kincaid; so similar in fact that at first I didn't notice that one song had turned into the other.
That's interesting that those two songs are back to back on the new Nuggets set - Nilsson actually covered Kincaid's "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune" on his Pandemonium Shadow Show album - that's the only version of that song I've heard. There must have been some kinship and similarity of style between the two artists.
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