Harry Nilsson - Skidoo / The Point
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Free Music Notes for Skidoo / The Point
Free Music Review: The Point is a wondreful story!
Hit: 5 Stars
Back in the old days before there were entire TV networks devoted to cartoons, kids had to occasionally listen to a story, rather than watch the video! The Point was the story I grew up on! I recently re-discovered it and have now bought copies for all of my friends and family members with young children! This is a wonderful story that is entertaining and fun. And Nilsson even sneaks a little moral lesson in about acceptance and difference -- a lesson that is just as relevant today as it was when he created this wonderful story! And, since Nilsson is actually a songwriter, it has some excellent music to back up the whole story! Catchy tunes that you'll find yourself humming along to. If you have kids, do them a favor and get them this CD! They'll remember it 30 years later as a really great childhood memory...like I do!Free Music Review: Right to the point
Hit: 5 Stars
In a perfect world. Love would be like love songs and we could all lay down our arms.Until then, we can listen and dream. I don't have this CD but I know the LP by heart and I do mean heart. The songs for the most part are beautiful and have the twist of humor and phrasing that makes Harry one of my favorites. His theme is evident all through the music and is haunting.
If you are a Nilsson fan at all and especially if you like Schmilsson and Son of... you must have this one.
I have no idea what Skidoo is.
Free Music Review: Childhood Memories
Hit: 5 Stars
This is awesome!! When I was younger (I'm 19), my mother played The Point for my sisters and me all the time. Still to this day we sing the songs to each other. It's excellent that I could find this, as the original and everything....I'm totally impressed and overjoyed...:)Free Music Review: Harry At The Movies
Hit: 4 Stars
An oddball coupling of two of Harry Nilsson's stranger excursions. "Skidoo" is the soundtrack to Otto Preminger's famously misguided attempt at a "psychedelic comedy" - I think I saw it once when I was about 7 but it doesn't seem to exist in any of my local video stores. Much of the soundtrack is fairly straight-ahead soundtrack music - difficult to know how much is Harry's work and how much is arranger George Tipton's. The most famous aspect of the album (and film probably!) is that the credits are sung by Nilsson! This credit track is a brilliant display of Harry's marvellous vocal inventiveness - you often hear people say of a great singer that they could "sing the phone book and make it interesting", well Harry not only makes the credits interesting but amusing too! Also amusing is "Garbage Can Ballet" an entertaining little bagatelle with sweetly silly and inventive lyrics. "I Will Take You There" is a simply exquisite pop ballad, released as a single it inexplicably bombed, both versions are included on this CD and, for the record, I favour the album version. The only other "song" on the album is the silly title song, sung unfortunately by Carol Channing (but then it's unfortunate when Carol Channing sings ANY song). (By the way, Harry's in the film too, he plays a "tower guard", as he is at pains to point out in "The Cast and Crew"!)"The Point" was Harry's animated parable about Oblio, his dog Arrow and the Land of Point. Like "Skidoo", I saw this once when I was about 7, I think it probably made more sense to me than "Skidoo"! The album consists of Harry narrating the story (Dustin Hoffman narrated the film), punctuated by the odd cartoon-like song. At first hearing, the songs seem slight: the lyrics simplistic, the music even simpler but then you realise that this is an album for CHILDREN and that Harry and his arranger George Tipton get it EXACTLY right. Tipton's arrangements are beautiful little miniatures with a twinkly, almost electronic, feel - Brian Wilson claimed that his inspiration for his mostly execrable "fairytale" on the Beach Boys' "Holland" album had been "drinking cider and listening to Randy Newman's "Sail Away"", the cider bit I can believe but don't try to tell me that Brian hadn't been very closely listening to "The Point" and Tipton's arrangements! Nilsson's lyrics have a sing-song nursery rhyme quality in "Everybody's Got 'Em" and "Poli High". If Brian Wilson ripped Harry for "Mt. Vernon and Parkway" then Harry cops a major Beach Boys influence on "Poli High", just listened to that backing vocal of massed Harry's! There are good songs in amongst the fun - "Think About Your Troubles" has a marvellous intricate Zen-like lyric which demonstrates two of Harry's greatest qualities as a songwriter: his intelligence and his lack of pretension. "Lifeline" is a just wonderful ballad - generous of Harry to give this song to a cartoon about a boy and his dog! How often you would want to listen to the narration is debatable but you can certainly spend many hours listening to the songs.
Once again in this excellent series of re-issues from RCA there are good bonus tracks to savour. The single version of "I Will Take You There" I've mentioned but the 1969 single "Down to the Valley" is worthy of further comment. A breezy, brassy foot-stomper of a song, it's interesting in that lyrically and musically it prefigures "The Point!" by about two years - did Harry already have "The Point" under his (pointed) hat in 1969? Anyway, the song fits the concept of the movie much more closely than say the love song "Are You Sleeping?" "Dear Friend" was the theme tune of an American TV show, "Eddie's Father", which I don't recall ever having seen. Being a TV theme tune, it says all it's going to say within the first minute the other minute is largely superfluous.
All in all not the most essential CD in any Harry Nilsson collection - Nilsson nuts like myself will want it and over-worked mums with recalcitrant toddlers might want "The Point" to slip on and calm the little monsters down but the world at large can probably live without this CD, fascinating though it is.
Free Music Review: Buy it for "The Point"
Hit: 4 Stars
"Skidoo" is mostly filler, i.e., instrumental soundtrack music. It's brassy, sort of like the filler music on the "Graduate" soundtrack. But the album does contain one great song ("I Will Take You There") and one good one ("Garbage Can Ballet") plus Nilsson's awe-inspiring rendition of the film credits, which is not something you will want to listen to every day but is an astounding feat of--for lack of a better term--musical athleticism. "The Point" is the real reason to buy this CD. It's a charming, whimsical children's story with several songs that wisely focus more on melody than on plot development. The alternating of narrative passages with songs does take some getting used to, but is worth it. I don't listen to "The Point" as often as my other Nilsson albums, because the story line makes it more like watching a movie or reading a book. Still, it is an impressive album that is historically significant because it closed out the first part of Nilsson's career, just before he moved into the more adult themes of the Schmilsson albums. Nilsson's narration of "The Point" reveals him to be a gifted comedian, and also provides some insight into his personality, particularly his love of the absurd.
Now for the bonus tracks: "I Will Take You There" sounds quite similar to the original. (Unless you are a connoisseur of "alternate" versions of songs, which I am not.) "Girlfriend" is a bouncy, good-natured tune that I am glad to have here. "Down to the Valley" is a very good song that would have fit in well on "The Point." "Buy My Album" is incredibly annoying--a noisy joke that gets old very quickly. Be ready to leap for the controls before it comes on.
The CD booklet, by the way, is thin and contains some brief but memorable liner notes.
To sum up: This disc is a good value as long as it costs less than one-and-a-half of either of the originals. I would not want to waste my money buying "Skidoo" for its own sake, but it makes an interesting add-on to "The Point."
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