Harry Poster

bp: 126/82

Universal Music recently launched Hip-O Select, which is its own version of Warner Brothers’ boutique label Rhino Handmade. I’d been wracking my brain for weeks to come up with something I would want them to release (my first and only impulse for weeks was the second half of the Squeeze catalogue to correspond with the Six of One box). I finally came up with Harry Nilsson’s recordings for Mercury: Flash Harry, Harry’s vocal demos for the Popeye soundtrack, his Yoko Ono cover album Harry Does Yoko, most of which has never been released, and his last LP Papa’s Got a Brown New Robe, said to have been completed just before his death, but never issued. (The latter was most likely not owed to Mercury, but they could probably lease it from his family in order to get all of his post-RCA recordings in one package.) I’m sure they could get Nilsson expert Curtis Armstrong to help bring it together.