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First of all, if it's Thursday November 27th 2024 that you're viewing this, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!! Sorry, did I yell? happy thanksgiving.

I have a couple of great tunes for you this week that can both be traced back to the amazing Harry Nilsson: "Let The Good Times Roll" and "Gotta Get Up". Harry didn't write Good Times Roll (that was Shirley Goodman/Pixley and Leonard Lee) but I was much influenced by Harry's version so mine is effectively a cover of a cover. "Gotta Get Up" is, of course, one of Harry's and a great one at that, opening his Nilsson Schmilsson album which also contains the aforementioned song about good times and how they might, you know, roll.

Though I had to break them up into two separate tracks for release (mechanical licenses) they were performed together as a sort of mini-medley which is how I usually play them. This time I had the help of Frank Sarcia on drums and Ken Shano on guitar and backing vocals when we recorded live at the 2015 No Muse Is Bad News music series. As good as the recordings were however, they were sadly lacking a bass guitar part which, it turns out, was one of the very few blessings of the Covid shit-show. Like many of us, my friend Jim Fabiano was holed up in some type of Covid-lockdown with way too much time on his hands and took up my offer to add some bass guitar parts to some of the recordings from the No Muse series. Since the seal-of-purity had been breached by Jim's awesome bass part, a little-old harmony vocal wouldn't hurt anybody but that was pretty much it for these two great songs.

I submitted these Harry Nilsson-inspired tunes for release weeks ago but happened to be reading about some new (to me) "Harry" exploits in the book "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" by Eric Idle that I'm currently reading that were striking but not too surprising knowing a bit about Harry's history. One of the more unexpected revelations was that Keith Moon, the late drummer for the band The Who, died in Harry Nilsson's apartment in the same bed that Cass Elliot died in! What the what?!! Though John Lennon once described Harry Nilsson as their (the Beatles) favorite "band", he also ended up being someone Lennon liked to drink and party with. His drinking was legendary. Idle described him as "a professional" with regard to alcohol though he sobered up enough to die of a heart condition at 52. Life is just full of surprises, including death. "Nilsson Schmilsson" and "Son of Schmilsson" are two of my all time favorite albums though. Who could forget "You're Breaking My Heart". And don't even get me started on "The Most Beautiful World In The World", "Jump Into The Fire, "Coconut and his Badfinger cover "Without You".

Interesting side note: for reasons unknown, Vol. 8 of the No Muse Is Bad News (the latest) is not appearing in the Apple Music store though it was reported by DistroKid to have been submitted and is appearing in all the other stores. A caching issue was suspected at first but when next week's Vol.9 appeared for pre-order, I knew something was up. I'm still not clear on how to resolve this but in the meantime you'll need to go immediately to Amazon Music or one of the other music stores and get the songs. I recommend purchasing the MP3s so you'll be able to leave them to your grandkids.