Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the infamous 1974 album Pussy Cats, produced by John Lennon, the moment a would-be titan consigned himself to a tragic cult figure.
If people know of Pussy Cats, they know at least two things: That Harry Nilsson shouted his voice so hoarse that blood hit the microphone, effectively destroying his golden, three-and-a-half octave range forever. And that it was produced by John Lennon during his so-called “Lost Weekend,” the 18-month stretch from 1973 to 1975 in which Lennon and Yoko Ono briefly separated and he disappeared into drugs and drink.
To listen to Pussy Cats, it’s long been assumed, is to get a peek into the broader Lost Weekend of the early ’70s—how it felt, how it sounded. This was the blowsy era, immediately post-Beatles, when rock stars could get away with recruiting four or five of the usual suspects (here, it was Keith Moon, Ringo Starr, and session guys like Jim Keltner and Klaus Voormann), bang out a few Bob Dylan covers, and call it an album. It was an era when all the hippie icons were lousing around the Playboy Mansion, when the euphoria of the late ’60s had petered out but all the main players were still onstage. This was the time in which Lennon allegedly punched a waitress while being ejected from a Smothers Brothers gig, his famous spectacles tossed aside in the scuffle.
Reading about this era is funny until it’s depressing. Hearing Lennon talk about the beach house where he, Nilsson, Ringo, and others partied until they were sick every night instead of making Pussy Cats is deflating, as is Lennon’s revelation that “One day I realize, Jesus, I’m the producer, one day they’re going to be asking me where the tapes are.” Stories like these, lapped up by periodicals and repeated in interviews, defined and calcified what “rock star excess” looked like, and Nilsson was there for nearly all of it.
If any one person could embody the notion of late-’60s rock stars going to seed, that person would undoubtedly be Harry Nilsson—one of the most talented songwriters of his generation, feted by all four Beatles, bedecked with Grammys, scoring hits while seemingly not even trying, squandering studio budgets and burning bridges while carousing with anyone who would join him. Nilsson was present for the only known post-Beatles reunion of Lennon and Paul McCartney—Stevie Wonder was also there. Mythical, and yet the result was atrocious. The name of the bootleg (“A Toot and a Snore in ’74”) came from cocaine, and it sounds that way. Wherever a famous ’60s icon was debasing themselves, Nilsson was there, supplying the drinks and collecting the stories.
In 1974, the golden aura from 1971’s triumphant Nilsson Schmilsson had dimmed, but not yet faded away—he was known as a troubled, troublesome guy, but generally worth the effort, a risky investment that could still pay dividends. Pussy Cats is considered the moment he leaped over the brink, a sort of album-length Leaving Las Vegas in which a would-be titan consigned himself to a tragic cult figure. For many Nilsson fans, it is too painful and disheartening to listen to.
But this strange and seemingly radioactive album has persisted in the cultural imagination as more than just a cautionary tale. Nilsson himself denigrated the original material he brought to the Pussy Cats sessions—“Most of those songs will be originals, even though I don’t like my songs very much right now,” he told NME in 1973. “Still, we’ll do them anyway because I haven’t got anything else to record.” He was a little too hard on his own work, because there are at least three classic Nilsson songs to be found on Pussy Cats: “Don’t Forget Me,” “All My Life,” and “Old Forgotten Soldier.” “Don’t Forget Me,” in particular, is one of those moonlit reveries that Nilsson picked like bits of food from his scraggly beard; it’s a wry, pickled, devastatingly sad song that many artists have reached for in the ensuing decades, from Macy Gray to Neko Case to Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold to Marianne Faithfull to Joe Cocker. It’s part of the American songbook now, and it slunk into the world on the flea-bitten back of Pussy Cats.
The most infamous song on the album is the first one—a cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross.” In popular Nilsson lore, this was the song, the one that did it, the moment when Nilsson, aware that he was developing a node on his throat, simply screamed through it. It’s accumulated a reputation as a sort of aural suicide note, an act of self-immolation—but it’s also a tremendously powerful performance, and one of the most indelible tracks Lennon ever worked on as a producer.
The arrangement for “Many Rivers to Cross” is so slow that the song seems on the verge of simply stalling out, the drummer wandering away or the guitarist setting down his instrument to get a glass of water. It’s unnervingly slow, and heard today, it reminds me faintly of the codeine-glazed gravitational pull of screw music. At the time, it recalled the hymn-like feel of Lennon’s recent solo work, particularly Mind Games, released the previous year. Apart from the tabloid exploits and benders, this was also a particularly introspective moment in Lennon’s life, one in which he reconnected with his son Julian, reconciled with the other Beatles, and formally dissolved the group. He might have been flailing, but he was also searching. In his music at the time, it sometimes seemed like he was slowing down his songs until he could unearth the secret message his subconscious had buried there.
This was the same stately pace of “Many Rivers to Cross,” and Nilsson’s vocal take is so evocative of Lennon that Nilsson-heads still bicker over whether and where Lennon is singing backup. But Nilsson wasn’t channeling the bright, boyish tenor of “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “A Hard Day’s Night.” This was therapy Lennon, primal-scream Lennon, the one you can watch cowing an audience into frightened silence performing “Mother” and screaming all the way inside himself. On “Many Rivers,” Nilsson puts himself inside the space, and in his guttural screams, you can hear, among other things, the sound of one man trying to inhabit the voice and cultural footprint of his idol.
The relationship between Nilsson and Lennon is one of the many sad subtexts of Pussy Cats—it was Lennon who uttered the famous “Nilsson is my favorite group” line in a 1968 press conference, and Nilsson waited years for the opportunity to work with him. Where some chalk up Nilsson’s hemorrhaging vocal cords on Pussy Cats—and his failure to halt the sessions and deal with this problem—to self-destructiveness, Nilsson confessed to something more tender and timid: “I was afraid that if he stopped it, we wouldn’t do it again, we wouldn’t finish it. So I just said nothing.” Viewed this way, his screaming isn’t an act of self-destruction; he is giving everything he has to impress his hero.
Lennon, for his part, had just walked away from a warlike session with Phil Spector trying to record his oldies album Rock ’N’ Roll—pistols were pulled, and things had gotten dicey and unstable in the particular way of Spector recording sessions. It was in the midst of this hellish scene that Lennon announced his intention to walk away and produce Nilsson. The sound that Lennon sought on “Many Rivers” was oddly similar to Spector’s Wall of Sound, but through Lennon’s ear, the Wall of Sound was crumbling—the drum hits felt like debris hitting the floor.
Their cover of the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me” carries the same solemnity. Reverb and echo soak into every crack, making the song feel inescapable, pressing down like a heavy blanket or ambient anxiety. The pace was, again, glacial; the mood, again, devotional. Nilsson’s voice may have been disappearing as the tape rolled, but his tenderness wasn’t—he leans into every note, drawing it out as if the session’s end would take all life’s happiness with it. When you’re at last call, every song feels like a hymn.
It’s impossible to discuss Pussy Cats without circling around the ruination of those vocal cords. Whatever others hear in these performances—poignance, pathos, or even evidence of a certain personal failing—I hear a peculiar bravery. Yes, Nilsson was in the process of losing his most prized possession, but he did nothing to hide or disguise the wreckage. His voice, in all its degradation, is as closely mic’d as it was on A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, his album of songbook standards from just a year earlier when his voice was in its prime. His vocals on “Old Forgotten Soldier” are hollowed-out, whispery, and you can hear air whistle out of his throat without producing so much as a squeak. But Nilsson leans forward, steps into the light. He lets you see and hear all of him. He was a studio musician, after all, so petrified of performing that he gave no concerts. Whatever secrets he divulged about his soul he left on tape.
The low points on Pussy Cats are harder to dignify. Nilsson’s cover of Johnny Thunder’s “Loop De Loop” is about as appealing as a smoker’s cough, transparently awful and without purpose. It reminds me of an A-student filling in one straight column of bubbles on a test and turning it in with a shit-eating grin. The “Rock Around the Clock” cover is another embarrassment, an all-star band featuring Ringo Starr and Keith Moon unable to keep it together and reverting to middle-school levels of competency. It’s the sort of misfire that has earned Pussy Cats its lamentable reputation, and the reason it can never entirely transcend it.
But everything that makes it seem lamentable is also the source of its power. The cover of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” conversely, is loud and clattering. You can picture the blood draining from the face of the label exec listening to it on playback, calculating royalty payments and revenue loss, just as you can imagine Lennon and Nilsson sniggering to each other over the mixing board. But there is also a deranged urgency to the playing; it catches an edge. Listen to the drums; that’s Ringo Starr playing alongside Jim Keltner. Has Ringo Starr ever drummed so hard? Whatever was driving him—creative urgency, cocaine, a simple panicked desire to not lose the beat—the result is a moment of delirium captured at the back of the song. It’s good chaos, a productive mess.
After Pussy Cats, Nilsson’s life and career slid into denouement. He was finished as a recording artist by 1980 and entered a quieter phase of life, marked by relative sobriety and stability. He made music for movies and more or less disappeared from the public until his death in 1994. In some ways, Pussy Cats was the final statement from Nilsson when he was still in the thick of it, still the amiable-genius drinking buddy of every rock star. Picture-book drunkards like Nilsson live their lives in cheerful, elegant gestures of failure and small, pained declarations of success. Pussy Cats contained a little of both.
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