Harry Nilsson - Flash Harry
#88
1980 Housekeeping
Harry Nilsson
Flash Harry
Genre: “How did Randy Newman make it big and not me!?!?!?”
2 out of 5
When I was at day camp as a child the older, more mature kids (they were 10) would talk about a show they all loved called “Monty Python”. I would ask them who Monty Python was and they would laugh at me and walk away, never explaining.
Although my entreaties to learn were met with disdain it didn’t take long, though, for me to figure it out. But my education came in the form of the movies. PBS, of all places, would run Holy Grail as part of their fundraising campaigns.
In college, still a novice in the form of Python (although well educated on their import, through my obsessive readings about Saturday Night Live’s beginnings…Lorne was a huge fan) I had still not seen the television show. And my college roommate instead turned me on to Fawlty Towers, turning me into a Basil Fawlty fan.
I did eventually become versed enough that when I was hired to act in a commercial opposite John Cleese and was tasked with playing, off camera, the Argument Sketch game with him, I knew what it was, how to play and also I sucked at it, hard.
But I did get to play the motherfucking Argument Sketch game with John fucking Cleese and that is a life highlight.
Last year my wife and I went to see Eric Idle speak at the local, newly renovated high school amphitheater (it’s like a 20 million dollar renovation) and, for our tickets, we received a copy of his book.
Like his show, I have only read parts of it.
I guess you can say I’m a fair weather fan.
I barely have more than cursory knowledge of Harry Nilsson’s oeuvre, save his soundtrack for Popeye, which I adore and especially loved it’s partial inclusion in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, a movie I saw for the Anderson aspect, not the Sandler inclusion. That’s another story.
What is the point of all this?
Well, Idle is part of this album inasmuch as he co-wrote and performed the opening track and the album closer is by far his most famous song, one that he performed the night Beth and I saw him.
And, like this review, this album is a hodgepodge of moments and relationships, with stuff co-written by Lennon and Van Dyke Parks and Ringo Starr.
And much like this review it will bring you nothing in your life that wasn’t already there.
And, now that you are at the end of it, you can go back about your life as though it never happened.
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