A study of Harry Nilsson's version of the Fred Niel song. It was on my list of things to look at for my trio and it ended up getting kind of involved....

First of all, I was unable to find anything out on YouTube that seemed faithful to the song. Few people even seem to get the changes right, and almost nobody takes a stab at capturing the cadence of the guitar part. And there is a reason for that.

As nearly as I can figure, you need two guitars to do this right. One guitar is standard tuning with the capo at the second fret using a D grip close to what I was doing, only the thumb is primarily working the D and G strings. The other guitar is standard tuning with the capo at the fourth fret working in a C grip and doing very little - mostly concentrating on the lower strings. At least that is what I *think* is happening.

So what I did in order to flesh it out a bit more for one guitar was to go into Drop-D tuning and hammer away at that low-D in order to kind of simulate the range of the original. I could have done it better by alternating between three strings with my thumb, but so far it has been all I can do to keep that bizarre cadence going ... you notice it is so strange that I am having trouble keeping simple chords going. So yes, mistakes were made. Many of them.

When you think about it, this kind of fingerstyle was extremely innovative - especially for it's time. Notice that the cadence is more on the beat when you're playing a lot of the D structures but goes farther off the beat on the other chords - that is faithful to the song.

As a bonus, I believe I have all of the descending note lines correct to the original, which I haven't seen in other versions yet.

While looking into this song, I read somewhere that Harry didn't enjoy a lot of sustained popularity, and that this was perhaps because of his inability to recreate the sounds he was producing in the studio when performing live. I can believe that: for all of it's wonderfully simple chord structures, this song is a real bitch to play.

Played on a Martin 000-28EC (Eric Clapton Signature) in Drop-D tuning with the capo at the second fret. Recorded using a Blue Yeti USB mic in Cardiod mode and an old analog videocam.

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