Today’s Daily Song of the Day: Harry Nilsson- “One”

As far as songs named One, are concerned, it’s not quite as good as Metallica’s, but better than the Bee Gees’. Well, no, it’s probably better than Metallica’s, too. I’m talking of course about the classic rock standard that Three Dog Night positively crushed with their rendition. Everyone knows this song, but not everyone knows Harry Nilsson wrote it, and recorded it first.

Nilsson was a strange yet talented dude. He won Grammy Awards and had a handful of hits, yet refused to tour and almost never played live. His singing range is reported at 3 1/2 octaves, though he was just as likely to record weird experiments as he was sentimental ballads (and admitted with complete seriousness that he gave himself hemorrhoids singing “Without You,” his most famous ballad). Perhaps most significantly, Lennon and McCartney both once named him as their favorite American artist.

In fact during the ’70s, he was John Lennon’s favorite drinking buddy. A drunken Lennon and Nilsson were once tossed out of some bar for heckling the band…with tampons taped to their foreheads. One weekend, Lennon, Nilsson, Stevie Wonder and Ringo Starr recorded a bunch of material together, and Yoko Ono is allegedly still sitting on the tapes. Maybe one day we’ll get to hear those.