Harry Nilsson

Biography:

Harry Edward Nilsson III (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994), usually credited as Nilsson, was an American singer-songwriter who achieved the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s. His work is characterized by pioneering overdub experiments, returns to the Great American Songbook, and fusions of Caribbean sounds. A tenor with a three-and-a-half octave range, Nilsson was one of the few major pop-rock recording artists of his era to achieve significant commercial success without ever performing major public concerts or undertaking regular tours.

Born in Brooklyn, Nilsson fled to Los Angeles as a teenager and landed a job as a computer programmer at a bank. It was there that he cultivated an interest in musical composition and close-harmony singing, and was successful in having some of his songs recorded by various artists such as the Monkees, and later, Three Dog Night, who had a No. 5 hit with his song “One”. In 1967, he debuted on RCA Victor with the LP Pandemonium Shadow Show, followed with a variety of releases that include a collaboration with Randy Newman (Nilsson Sings Newman, 1970) and the original children’s story The Point! (1971). After a brief period of widely publicized, alcohol-fueled antics with John Lennon—the two collaborating in 1974 for the album Pussy Cats—Nilsson left RCA, and his record output subsequently diminished. In response to Lennon’s 1980 death by shooting, he took a hiatus from the music industry to campaign for gun control. For the rest of his life, he recorded only on sporadic occasions. In 1994, Nilsson died of a heart attack while in the midst of recording new material for a since-unreleased comeback album.