By Edward E. Crouse

ODD CAT, that Nilsson.

A quixotic, often spot-on sensitive composer who slummed in hack's clothing, he was also the best white rock and roll singer of the early '70s. Sweet and often tasteless, this schizophrenic with a four-octave (till a 1974 throat infection) angel voice could also write treacle – for instance, Nora Ephron plopped two of his cutesier paeans, "The Puppy Song" and "Remember (Christmas)," onto her You've Got Mail soundtrack.

Dubbed the Beatles' favorite vocalist (and band) the same year he was penning Monkees tunes, Nilsson seemed to sup with all the right people – in the '60s, anyway. The Liverpudlians were flattered by Harry's overt Beatle-ality, a trait that bobs up on both his Monkees work ("Cuddly Toy") and his first few albums. The Beatles didn't even care that he could sing better. After authoring some songs for the New Christy Minstrels, Phil Spector, and Sonny and Cher, Nilsson's music graced the 1968 soundtrack to Otto Preminger's tackiest epic, Skidoo.

It was a gesture highlighting Nilsson's inside-outside status. He sings all of the end credits and appears as a tower guard in an LSD-induced jailbreak. The title track to this ship of fools is as flip and weird as Jackie Gleason's on-screen remark to a hippie who actually respects his daughter: "What are you, a faggot?" Skidoo is both a lame needling of Hollywood hippie with-it and a genuine psychedelic relic from a movie in which Gleason trips on lysergic envelope glue. "I do believe it really is the thing to do," Carol Channing sings while wearing a pirate costume, sounding like she's attacking Billie Holiday's throat with a carrot peeler. Then Nilsson and Channing dust both Love (the band) and the Goffin-King "Porpoise Song" with one line: "As the color slowly changes from fourteen to twenty-three."

Nilsson's disinterest in boundaries, commercial or otherwise, is well stated in these utopian throwaway lines from the same soundtrack:

And a succotash and piece of hash

can get together and have a bash

well, life is always equal in the can

Bravo! (Did I mention that he also composed the theme for the TV Show The Courtship of Eddie's Father? Or all the songs to Robert Altman's Popeye?)

There are two strikes that blur Nilsson's essential talent into trivia questions:

1. Question: Can you name a hit by Harry Nilsson? Answer: Two cover versions – Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin', "; Badfinger's edge-of-schmaltz "Without You" – and a good-timey prophetic, just-this-side-of-Jimmy Buffet drinking song called "Coconut." Indifferent charters, all.

2. Question: For bonus points, name any element of Nilsson's bad reputation. Answer: all of 1974, brandy alexanders, a dissolute and Yokoless John Lennon, a sanitary napkin, L.A.'s own Troubador club, and the insulted, reunited Smothers Brothers. (All relegated Nilsson to odious proximity-to-a-star celebritydom years before Kato Kaelin.)

Nilsson Schmilsson? Hell no: the best Nilsson albums – aside from Skidoo and 1967's song cycle Aerial Ballet – have recently been reissued on CD. They are, in order, Nilsson Sings Newman (1970), The Point! (1970), and Pussycats (1974), and each one thrives on dichotomies. Nilsson Sings Newman is a duet between Harry and an Americana, sometimes-weird composer; The Point! melds a child's-eye view of stigma with romantic adult grief; and Pussycats goes past a musical and personal breaking point, in tandem with a sinking Lennon.

Nilsson Sings Newman is a fantastic and perverse idea: a tribute to a composer who'd released exactly one album at the time. Randy Newman played piano but allegedly grew fatigued by the endless takes. The album waggles in strange directions, due to not just the sprawl of Newman's visionary songs but also the multiplicative overdubbing that has Nilsson's voice smeared and sometimes compressed everywhere in the mix. Though liner notes mention Newman's novelish imagistic tendencies, it's hard to not see the album as Nilsson making a movie with his voice – he utilizes impersonation (vocalized trombones, Harry as Mahalia Jackson on "I'll Be Home"), characterization, and acting, with blocking lines and extratextual instructions ("put a lot of echo on it") left in for transparency's sake. "Dayton, Ohio 1903" quotes Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" on the second verse; it's a well from which Newman has continually drawn – the same comfort-cuddle-warm ballad – for the last 30 years (cf "That'll Do (Pig)," from the Babe 2: Pig in the City soundtrack).

The Point is probably Harry's finest album, a children's record that can without too much strain impose Bert Brecht's The Roundheads and the Peakheads (or Dr. Seuss's Sneetches, for that matter) onto a musical template not dissimilar to McCartney's Ram or the shards of the Beach Boys' Smile. Through the grate of a tale of a roundheaded boy and his dog in a land of pointyheads, Harry eyedrops curt, creamy two-minute pop songs about drinking, breaking up, and suicidal mood drops. "Somebody please throw down a lifeline!" he rattles, ostensibly speaking through Arrow the dog's voice. Nilsson's decathlete overdubbing sails over a demented, homemade, bleak, and isolated singsong style. "Me and My Arrow" 's pointed "oh, well" bridge is aimed at a man-woman emotional compound fracture.

Having covered breakups for so long from a distanced, snappy pop viewpoint, Pussycats (original title: Strange Pussies) finds Nilsson dazed and bleary and meaning it. Coated in real despair, it's an unintentional concept album, a messy vérité document of Harry's throat infection (he apparently was spitting blood throughout most of the sessions), separation from a girlfriend, and musical dead end. Nothing can really prepare one for the vocal on the first Pussycats track, Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross," nor for the thick, smeary, stringy production, courtesy of a lost John Lennon, nor for the primal scream that scumbles the otherwise neat fade-out. It's perhaps Harry's only punk album; it managed to mine the wilder veins of rock and roll just as nostalgia was ossifying them. Some tracks demand not one but three session drummers (including Keith Moon and Ringo Starr), the effect being that of slick barnyard muck.

Perhaps Nilsson is the rock and roll emblem of that Faulkner line "The past is not dead. It isn't even past." His prettiness has yet to wilt or pass.

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