Harry Nilsson Found The Point Tripping on LSD
The post Harry Nilsson Found The Point Tripping on LSD appeared first on Consequence.
Welcome to Consequence‘s series Dusting ‘Em Off, which examines classic albums that have established an enduring place in pop culture. Today, Harry Nilsson shares his LSD epiphany with The Point!
For fans of Harry Nilsson, the origins of his cult classic multi-media project The Point! are as legendary as the dream that brought Keith Richards the riff for “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)” or Paul McCartney pulling “Get Back” out of thin air. Armed with a healthy dose of lysergic acid diethylamide, Nilsson wandered into the woods, took in his surroundings, and had a pointed epiphany that would go on to drive the next phase of his creative life.
“I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the branches came to points, and the houses came to points,” the oft-repeated quote goes. “I thought, ‘Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn’t, then there’s a point to it.'”
It’s a sentiment that sounds like it doesn’t make sense, then, after careful consideration, becomes profound, before going elusive all over again — but that’s its power. The idea only comes into focus when squinting and is lost just as easily as it’s found. That quality, along with the endless amount of wordplay the word “point” allows for (seriously, take a shot every time you hear the 5-letter word and you’ll end up in the hospital), had enough creative steam to sustain an album, an accompanying comic, and an animated feature.
Regardless of the story’s medium, its core revolves around Oblio, a round-headed child in a town where — ahem — everything has a point. After the ill-intentioned Count and his pip-squeak kid convince the otherwise accepting King to banish Oblio and his canine companion Arrow for the seemingly pointless offense (damn, now I’m doing it), the two venture into the Pointless Forrest, encountering zany characters and new truths along the way.
On the surface, it’s a fairly standard children’s tale. It’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Ugly Duckling, or, for younger readers, Spookly the Square Pumpkin (which, come to think about it, also features shape-centered discrimination). And yet, Nilsson’s mature, left-field approach to the material allows for The Point! — both the album and the film — to achieve a surprisingly complex thematic payoff.
But before he could bake acceptance and existential dread into surrealist animation and some of the best pop songs of his career, Nilsson had to sell studio executives on the idea, presumably without the aid of a life-changing acid trip.
Fortunately, Nilsson had previous film experience. He had written the music for Otto Preminger’s 1968 Skidoo and, after originally submitting “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” nabbed a second wind for his now classic rendition of “Everybody’s Talkin'” when Midnight Cowboy used it in its opening scene. But for The Point!, Nilsson wasn’t just helming songwriting duties, he’d be fronting the project from the ground up. He wrote a 22-page treatment, submitted it to ABC, and, with the Oscar-winning animator and director Fred Wolf signed on, secured the green light.
The addition of Wolf would prove to be instrumental to the film’s ultimate charm. Nilsson originally stumbled across the outsider artist after catching a screening of his 1967 short The Box, a fittingly surreal tale that previews The Point!’s hand-drawn, playful visual identity.
Although The Point! would be many times the workload of the 10-minute The Box, Wolf handled animation duties entirely on his own; each colorful, stylized frame is Wolf and Wolf alone. While undoubtedly a grueling process, it’s hard to imagine the film’s aesthetic having the same magic without those efforts. From the character designs to the psychedelic vignettes to the way black colors are never truly filled in, but rather scribbled in a way that leaves gaps between the strokes, Wolf was perhaps more equipped to translate Nilsson’s vision than any other animator at the time.
Other notable faces behind the scenes include Mike Lookinland (later of Brady Bunch fame), who voiced Oblio, and Dustin Hoffman, who took over narration duties. Hoffman’s contract, however, stipulated that his work could only be used for the original 1971 ABC Movie of the Week broadcast. Subsequent reruns would see the role recast with the talents of Alan Barzman and Alan Thicke, with Ringo Starr handling the part for the home video release.
Even beyond Nilsson’s songs, the film excels as a funny, engaging, and unique treat. In addition to the work of Wolf and the cast, Norm Lenzer’s screenplay manages to sneak high-level flourishes into the otherwise family-friendly dialogues. The asides from the townsfolk as they comment on and argue about Oblio’s situation provide a bizarrely grounded mundanity to the otherwise absurd world. “While the farmers kept the villagers’ bodies nourished with pointed crops, the artist colony in the community, as in all communities, did their part to keep minds and souls filled with new points to view,” the narrator explains as mustached artists throw pies at each other, ridicule those drawing circles in a status-quo of triangles, and profess, “To be or not to be, that is the point.”
Ten months after its debut broadcast, Nilsson would release the album version of The Point!, an abridged adaptation of the tale that fully embodies the fable’s storybook qualities. Nilsson voices the narration and each of the characters as if he had tucked in the listeners and was reading them a bedtime story. There are even sound effects of pages turning. Part soundtrack, part concept album, the record stands as one of Nilsson’s most realized projects and proves that, even without Wolf’s visuals or the voice of a Beatle, the tunes stand tall all on their own.
There’s the exposition-heavy, extremely catchy “Everything’s Got ‘Em,” the swirling “Poli High,” and “Are You Sleeping?,” which is the sonic incarnation of a cozy blanket and a glass of warm milk. Chief among The Point!’s songwriting accomplishments are “Think About Your Troubles” and “Me and My Arrow.” The former, paradoxically, is at once existentially intense and as sweet and bubbly as a can of Coke, while “Me and My Arrow,” joyful and jaunting, is so irresistible that it even managed to chart as a single in 1971.
Taken as a whole, the album comes across as remarkably cohesive despite lyrical passages that deviate from poor Oblio’s tribulations. Each track feels bound to each other, as repeated melodies and rhythms call back to previous events or foreshadow those to come. The eighth-note pulse of the piano, breezy harmonies, and dreamy orchestration are sprinkled throughout each cut. And yet, each song has its own unique flavor, providing just enough variety to keep full-listen-throughs interesting.
In a 2020 conversation with NPR, Nilsson’s son Kiefo further dove into the musical tricks of The Point! “[The music] accomplishes what it sets out to do in a very minimalist way. It really is a testament to the power of a great melody and great lyrics,” he explains. “There’s an interesting thing with the tonality, because it’s almost entirely major chords and a couple of dominant chords, and only one minor chord… Despite that, it still creates a lot of emotional depth because the melodies go to so many different places.”
The surprising emotional complexity achieved by relying so heavily on major tonality reflects the dual nature of the story’s ultimate appeal. Much like how the major chords give the songs the feeling of children’s music, the simple plot and moral of acceptance allow The Point! to resonate with younger audiences. At the same time, the depth of Nilsson’s lyrics and melodies, as well as how he employs those major chords, provide endless avenues for more mature listeners and viewers to explore long after Oblio returns to the village.
While the story is shortened for the album, the thematic depth remains intact, asking questions as philosophically nutritious as ‘How does one prescribe meaning to oneself, or anything for that matter?’ or ‘If a law is unjust, what is the responsibility of the governed?’ Even more interesting is the fact that not all of these questions are overtly answered, leaving just enough ambiguity for one to derive their own meaning. This is especially true when it comes to the various figures Oblio encounters during his journey — the Mad Hatter-like Pointed Man, the hippie-coded Rock Man, and the anxious Leafman — who each give conflicting nuggets of hard-to-pin-down advice.
In some ways, the point of The Point! is quite obvious; in others, it’s akin to a Seurat painting, requiring the observer to step back. Really, the point of The Point! is merely that there is a point… somewhere. Maybe that point is undefined or elusive or pointing in every which way, but even when there’s not a point, there’s a point. So, no need to wander into the wood with a few tabs of acid — Harry Nilsson already did it for you. Instead, take a trip to The Land of Point.
Harry Nilsson Found The Point Tripping on LSD
Jonah Krueger
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