He awoke on the morning of April 2, 1974, in a rented Santa Monica villa that 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 frat pad and an artist's sanctuary. Sleeping beside him among the empty bottles of brandy and a cocaine-streaked coffee table was John Lennon, his friend and the producer of Nilsson's in-progress album, Pussy Cats. The two spent the morning as they had several others during their time in L.A.: hungover, laughing, trying desperately to remember who said what to whom the night before.
The pair returned to the studio that afternoon, but a new song wasn't coming together as they'd hoped. According to the new biography Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter, distractions and disruptions were common during these sessions. It had already been quite a week. The pair of friends had begun production on Pussy Cats, then known as Strange Pussies, in late March, and the drinks were flowing from the first afternoon. Five days in, they sat zonked out in front of a mixing board. Nilsson, once a pudgy-faced Brooklyn kid with a choirboy voice, had grown out his blond hair and mangy beard. As was typical when he gained weight, he'd begun to bloat. Earlier in the week, they were visited by Lennon's former bandmate Paul McCartney, who was accompanied by Stevie Wonder, when a recording session broke out.1 This was normal stuff in L.A.'s anarchic '70s music scene. Luminaries colliding, impromptu sessions turned coke binges turned creative confabs. Just a week earlier, the whole gang collaborated on Mick Jagger's solo song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)." Though that song wasn't released for 12 years, its creation was offhanded and easy. But on this day in early April, it wasn't so easy for Nilsson.
Finally free of the crowd for a spell, Nilsson sat down on a Tuesday afternoon to record the vocals for a new original called "The Flying Saucer Song." But he found that he couldn't crack the upper reaches of his register. "The Flying Saucer Song" is a typically Nilssonian composition in that it's completely atypical of anything he'd recorded before it — it concerns three drunk men (all voiced by Nilsson) in a bar recounting the spotting of an unidentified flying object. The song was supposed to feature the playful, boyish tone that Nilsson had put to effect on so many songs before. Only he sounded like a chain-smoking coyote. After several takes, with the band waiting patiently, he gave up on the song. It didn't make the cut on Pussy Cats.2 Nilsson's vocal cords, his currency and his identity, were hemorrhaging. Bleeding, from their base. He'd been singing through the pain for a week in an effort to impress Lennon, his hero and friend. In the process, he nearly lost everything.
In the weeks leading up to that moment, Nilsson and Lennon had made a mess of Los Angeles. This was during the period known as Lennon's Lost Weekend, the 18 months he spent apart from Yoko Ono, when he decamped to L.A. with her former personal assistant May Pang. In March '74, Nilsson and Lennon were tossed from a Smothers Brothers3performance at the Troubadour after Lennon, smashed on a conveyor belt of Brandy Alexanders, grew unruly. When they were ejected onto Santa Monica Boulevard, Lennon reportedly punched a photographer named Brenda Mary Perkins as she attempted to snap a Polaroid of the inebriated singer. On another night, well past 3 a.m., Lennon reportedly told Nilsson, "I'd love to get some girls and some acid and fuck 'em." Nilsson called a female friend straightaway, who just happened to have a fresh batch of acid and a girlfriend on the way over. The two met up with the women and drank and dropped LSD and screwed for two days straight. Nearing the end of their gluttonous tear, Nilsson shouted, "I can't take any more pleasure, John! … It's gotta stop!" He later called it Lennon's real "lost weekend."
by Sean Fennessy, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Michael Putland, Getty Images
