In the summer of 1973, ex-Beatle John Lennon embarked on an 18-month relationship with assistant May Pang in a period of his life which he called his “Lost Weekend.” Lennon and Ono were having marital problems and decided to separate, and Ono suggested to Pang that she become Lennon’s companion. In March 1974, Lennon began producing his friend Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats album, after the two were involved in a legendary drinking incident at The Troubadour nightclub in Hollywood. As described in Part I of this article, Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the club after heckling the Smothers Brothers.
“John loved Harry,” May Pang related in her book Lennon Revealed. “He loved his energy; he loved his writing. What he loved in Harry was the beauty of his friendship and relaxed personality. That’s what he saw. Harry drank, a lot. But Harry was the type of guy that if you go out drinking with him, he’d be sure at the end of the night that there would be a big brawl and that you are the one who’s in trouble, even though he started it. Harry would keep feeding John drinks until it was too late.” As she watched Lennon match Nilsson’s intake of brandy and cocaine, Pang felt powerless: “(Nilsson) had charm. We loved him. But he went to extremes.”
In the biography Nilsson, the Smothers Brothers’ manager Ken Fritz said, “I went over and asked Harry to try to shut up Lennon. Harry said, ‘I’m trying-don’t blame me!’ When Lennon continued, I told him to keep quiet. He swung and hit me in the jaw.” And then threw a full drink in Fritz’s direction. Tom Smothers recalled in his book Dangerously Funny. “It was horrendous. They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.’ He didn’t think I had an act. Well, they start heckling, and it was some of the worst language I’ve ever heard-and they had a real buzz on. Cognac and toot, I guess. And it was a mess.”
The Troubadour incident was a wake-up call for Lennon and Nilsson. John announced he would produce Nilsson’s next album, Pussy Cats. They decided that the LP’s musicians should all live together during the sessions. Lennon and Nilsson, along with Ringo Starr and Keith Moon, moved into a Santa Monica beach house. (Think about that last sentence for a second.) The Santa Monica villa had been built for Louis B. Mayer and was later owned by the Rat Pack actor Peter Lawford. It was the same home that Lawford had rented to his brothers-in-law Robert and John F. Kennedy more than a decade earlier — the getaway bungalow to which they had allegedly smuggled Marilyn Monroe for secret trysts. But for Nilsson, it was a bachelor pad and an artist’s sanctuary. Sobriety was definitely not on the schedule for that foursome.
The Who drummer Keith Moon had a worse reputation for riotous behavior than Nilsson. Moon was known for blowing up toilets with cherry bomb firecrackers and imbibing copious amounts of illegal drugs. Once, after accidentally ingesting an elephant tranquilizer, the drummer spent days paralyzed in bed. In 1978, Moon died in Nilsson’s apartment after overdosing on a sedative his doctor had prescribed him to prevent seizures induced by withdrawing from alcohol. Earlier that night, Moon had attended a party at Paul McCartney’s house and when Ringo saw him swallowing handfuls of pills at a time, he warned his friend that if he kept up that pace he was going to kill himself. To which Moon replied “I know.”
Four years earlier around the time of the lost weekend, on July 29, 1974, Mama Cass Elliot, the big and bodacious former member of the Mamas and the Papas, had died in that same apartment. She was crashing there for a two-week run at the Palladium. That night, she went to bed with a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. The rumor has Elliot choking to death on the sandwich. In fact, she died of natural causes, at 32 years old.
After wrapping that first session at the Record Plant on March 28, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney unexpectedly joined Lennon, Nilsson and others for a midnight jam. On the bootleg album of the session, A Toot and a Snore, Lennon is heard asking Wonder, “You wanna snort, Steve? A toot? It’s goin’ round.” This was normal stuff in L.A.’s anarchic ’70s music scene. Rock stars collided like clouds in a rainstorm and impromptu sessions often turned coke binges into creative masterpieces.
Starr by that time had left, so McCartney sat in on drums and sang harmony to Lennon’s lead vocals. Lennon also played guitar with Wonder on electric piano. Despite the star-studded lineup, standards like “Lucille” and “Stand By Me,” marred by technical problems, were disappointing. By evening’s end, Lennon and McCartney agreed to meet up again but it would be the last time the two would ever play together in a studio. The Lost Weekend is perhaps as close as Lennon ever came to reuniting the Beatles, perhaps with Nilsson on board as well. It was also the highlight of Nilsson’s life. It was all downhill from there for Harry.
Nilsson was often described as “the finest white male singer on the planet.” Although an accomplished songwriter, his two biggest hits were songs he did not write: “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Without You.” In the years before the Lost Weekend, Nilsson established himself as a figure who was always either around greatness or creating it on his own. But his habit was to land in good fortune only to squander it over and again.
According to one reviewer: “Harry possessed one of the purest voices of his generation. It’s hard to overstate its dramatic, breathtaking quality. His is a career that feels both forgotten and deeply embedded in modern pop. He sang standards and rock and jazz and winding conceptual songs and tiny little kids’ tunes and commercial jingles. He sang of moonbeams and fire and coconuts and puppies. He lobbied for a songwriter named Randy Newman and is responsible for the career of Three Dog Night. He failed well and succeeded poorly.”
On December 8, 1980, Nilsson was in the studio working on the album Flash Harry containing the song “Old Dirt Road” that he had co-written and performed with John Lennon, when he heard Lennon had been shot. The news brought Harry’s professional life to a complete stop. He would never make another studio album. By the early 1990s, his weight, his drinking, and the years of cocaine intake had taken a serious toll on his health. A failed business venture resulted in bankruptcy, and Ringo had to step in to provide Harry and his family with a house and spending money. In 1992 he made his last concert appearance, joining Ringo Starr‘s All Starr Band onstage in Las Vegas. Nilsson died on January 15, 1994, aged 52.
It had been 14 years since Nilsson had made an album, and 17 since one had been released in the U.S. Nilsson’s obituary summed up his career by two Grammy-winning records followed by a long, sad slide into self-destruction. For his part, Nilsson seemed to agree by saying: “Being relegated to ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ and ‘Without You’ ain’t exactly what I set out to do.” Close friend and legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb said, “When he got to make records with John Lennon and be friends with Ringo Starr, his life was complete. That’s all he ever wanted. He wanted to know those people, to be admired by them. Everything else was the small print.”
It wasn’t the first time that Lennon had raised a ruckus at the Troubadour. According to Rolling Stone magazine, a month earlier, a similarly inebriated Lennon was at the club to see soul singer Ann Peebles. The article relayed how John “made a supreme fuss at the ticket counter and was ultimately granted a free tab for himself and his entourage on Bell Records. He was seated on the dais, a special raised area considered the “best” in the house by spiffy people, and proceeded to order round after round of drinks.”
Somehow, the “Smart Beatle”, had taped a sanitary napkin to his forehead and addressed his waitress rudely. The waitress had been around Hollywood and the Troubadour long enough not to be impressed even by an ex-Beatle. She dutifully brought drink after drink, waiting patiently, at first, for the tip that never came. Finally, when the evening was just about closing, she asked Lennon if he planned to tip her. Lennon sneered and said, “Don’t you know who I am?” In what surely must be one of the greatest replies ever by a “square” to a “rock star”, she shot back “Yeah, you’re some a-hole with a Kotex on your head.” Warts and all folks, you’ve got to love your heroes — warts and all.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
