Does the voice on the airport PA in this song sound like somebody to you? It sure does to me. When this song came out, in 1967, he was about a year away from being hired as one of the writers on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
And here he is, on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
The image that’s borrowed the most from this site is of my dear friend, lovely Prue Bury sitting between John Lennon and Pattie Boyd. My second most popular pictures are of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, immediately after they’d been shown the door at the Troubadour nightclub, for abusively heckling the Smothers Brothers.
So in 1974, when Tom and Dick decided to revive their stage act, they booked their first shows at…the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Nilsson, being a good friend, decided to surprise Tom again, and this time bring along a friend who was in town having a very long “lost weekend”: John Lennon.
“It was horrendous,” Tom recalls, laughing at the memory. “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.'”
Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, David Bianculli, 2009, p.333
This is where I originally posted the pictures, and here is a higher-res scan of the page they came from. Click to enlarge.
They’re in a magazine called John Lennon: A Man Who Cared, published by Paradise Press shortly after Lennon was murdered in December, 1980. The credits are: Editorial Consultant Jeremy Pascall with material compiled by Robert Burt.
Circa 1974, John Lennon went on a year-long bender with Harry Nilsson that Lennon later called his “Lost Weekend,” a reference to the 1945 movie. Most famously the two were thrown out of The Troubadour nightclub, but there was also an altercation outside of Ciro’s, as seen in these photos. Is that David Geffen with them?
[Note: The photo was mislabeled in the source material I used as having been taken outside of Ciro’s. Nicola Brown clarifies: Just wanted to clarify that in the photo of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson outside the Troubadour, the third person in it isn’t David Geffin, it is my ex-husband Louis Maiello aka James Oliver. He just happened to be there and he actually convinced John to go back to his house that night to chill out. Harry had been kicked out of the Troubadour for heckling the Smothers Brothers who where on stage that night.]
Harry wasn’t a nice guy when he was drunk, and he was often drunk. But he had his good side. Here’s an example, taken from an aged and well-worn piece of vinyl.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/SEP07/WithoutYou.mp3]Thanks to the blog called AM, Then FM that I just found tonight, I know there’s a documentary called Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? that hasn’t yet made it to DVD. Despite the difficulty of being a friend of Harry’s, Harry had a lot of friends, and seeing their famous faces in this trailer for the documentary has me looking forward to seeing it.
It’s interesting seeing the Smothers Brothers among the people interviewed about Harry, because Lennon and Harry were thrown out of the Troubadour for heckling the brothers.
