From Barnet to Laurel Canyon: Chasing the roots of the most cursed song in history
Some of history’s greatest songs carry fairly unremarkable backstories, with everything seemingly linking up in the perfect way, at the perfect time, with the right people. Others, on the other hand, seem doomed from the start, or worse: they end up sparking a dark knock-on effect that nobody could have predicted.
Although no doubt harrowing for their subjects, these stories are undeniably some of the most interesting, especially those that blend the personal perils and hardships of creating art with unprecedented or unavoidable scenarios, whether for simple logistical reasons or for factors beyond our simple control or comprehension.
For the most part, the contexts of these stories often serve to enhance the emotional experience of listening to the music, making you feel immersed in a world you were never really a part of to begin with. Other times, however, they’re enough to make your hair stand on end, making something that was already an interesting body of work feel even more intriguing, though not always for the right reasons.
For instance, there’s a reason why Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors is often labelled as one of the most cursed album sleeves in history, for all the same reasons why it’s eerie to look back at something that somehow prophesied a pivotal moment in a band’s career or trajectory. Another is Harry Nilsson’s ‘Without You’, which undeniably claims the crown for songs with such a harrowing domino effect that some of it feels like pure fiction.
The first time Nilsson ever heard the song, he thought it was by The Beatles. It’s an easy mistake to make, considering that the original Badfinger version incorporated all the same pop-rock melodies, but this was also likely a reason why he was reluctant to cover it at first, and Badfinger, whose members Pete Ham and Tom Evans shared a place in Golders Green, Barnet, when they recorded it, also didn’t feel it had much potential at the time, though they included it as part of their 1970 album No Dice anyway.
Nilsson, whose style was often hard to define because of its unique blend of various influences, didn’t really know what to do when faced with covering a straight-up love ballad, so he vowed to change it to suit his own sound. At first, he wanted the song to incorporate “a stark, heavy solo-piano”, but it eventually morphed into a “crashing, theatrical monster-ballad” at the request of producer Richard Perry.
A risqué decision due to Nilsson’s position as an eccentric figure in Laurel Canyon, ‘Without You’ became a massive hit, surprising everybody by turning a lesser-known track into an explosive mainstream hit, sung by someone who famously opposed mainstream spaces. That aside, however, it also came with a certain darkness attached to it, leaving those involved in both versions in several dire situations.
Disagreements between Nilsson and Perry aside, Ham and Evans eventually suffered a series of major financial losses following the collapse of Apple Records in 1973. As a result of these personal and professional challenges, Ham hanged himself in 1975. Evans followed in the same footsteps a handful of years later, hanging himself following an argument with the band’s guitarist, Joey Molland, about the royalties for the song.
Despite being Nilsson’s most commercial hit, he also suffered diminishing returns, the stress and pressure exacerbating his unrelenting alcohol addiction before he died of heart failure in 1994. He’d already had health problems, but the implications many face at the hands of such a brutal industry often speak for themselves. Maybe it wasn’t entirely the song’s fault; after all, can a song truly be cursed? Either way, there’s something especially haunting about how almost everybody involved suffered a downfall they couldn’t recover from.
