Guest post by Nathan Arizona
At the start of the movie “Midnight Cowboy,” the slightly urgent, slightly melancholy song “Everybody’s Talkin’” plays while Joe Buck heads for the bus station to begin his escape from the dusty Texas town that has stifled him. He imagines “sailin’ on a summer breeze,” as Harry Nilsson sings it, toward a place “where the sun keeps shinin’ and people won’t be “talkin’ at me” all the time.
Unfortunately, that’s not where the bus will take him. It’s rolling earthbound towards the crowded underbelly of New York City, where the sun did not keep shinin’ and the breezes didn’t smell so good. The bus he wants is the one to Florida. He finally catches it in New York at the end of the movie, but in his circumstances it won’t be the paradise he imagined.
The audience apparently wasn’t bothered by the incongruity, probably didn’t even notice. The song “felt” right. If Nilsson or the songwriter, Fred Neil, had problems with it they would have disappeared after the movie’s success. It has served them well.
After the film came out in 1969, Nilsson’s recording of “Everybody’s Talkin’” jump-started a decent career into the upper ranks of the business. The song had gone relatively unnoticed when it was released a year earlier. It has since become a pop standard. The version in the movie was very slightly different; the post-movie release was the original version. Folk singer Fred Neil had written the song in 1966. He was highly respected in folk music, but the cash didn’t exactly flow in that world. The royalties from “Everybody’s Talkin’” let him soon retire to Florida, presumably after boarding the right bus.
Nilsson had wanted a different song for the movie, one of his own called “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.” But director John Schlesinger overruled him. It’s a nice song and it actually gets Joe Buck’s itenery straight. But it probably wouldn’t have become the pop classic “Everybody’s Talkin’” is.
Here’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” as it plays under the movie’s opening scene, with Jon Voight as Joe Buck. It’s probably best not to think about Voight’s latter-day right-wing politics but to focus on a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor. (The movie took home the best picture Oscar.) “Everybody’s Talkin’” reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
It’s hard to say Neil’s version is either better or worse. It’s just different — slower, folkier, darker.
This is the song Nilsson wanted for the movie. Somebody has matched it to that opening scene of “Midnight Cowboy.”
Even George Costanza sang the tune, at least a snippet of it, on “Seinfeld.” He’s thrilled after being told the used car he just bought once belonged to Voight.
