Even if he'd largely retired from music after 1977, Harry Nilsson still maintained the rock and roll lifestyle and a lifetime of hard living caught up to him in 1993 when the fifty-one-year-old suffered a severe heart attack on Valentine's Day. Knowing his time wouldn't be long (the doctors gave him a year), Nilsson persuaded RCA, the label that had issued sixteen of his albums between 1967 and 1977, to issue a career-spanning boxed set retrospective to be dubbed Personal Best, going so far as to ready a track listing to be spread over three discs sequenced for feel rather than by chronology. As if he were still on the label, the squabbling that had plagued the latter part of his tenure on RCA returned full force, the label preferring a two-disc distillation to be titled God's Greatest Hits (the original title of 1975's Duit On Mon Dei). The fighting continued into 1994 with an agreement between the label and their former artist only being reached in what turned out to be the last days of Harry Nilsson's life.

Harry Nilsson was just fifty-two when he succumbed to heart failure in his sleep on January 15, 1994.

Nilsson's funeral took place two days after his death, incidentally the very day that the Northridge earthquake hit Los Angeles. If the earthquake were an act of God Himself, perhaps the aftershocks that followed were Schmilssonian acts, the effects of Harry reaching Heaven and discovering that there weren't any bars. That was the joke, anyway, and who's to say that it wasn't true. RCA's two-disc set, given Harry's title and chronological transitions, came out in February 1995.

There has yet to be the full length retrospective that Nilsson both desired and deserved. Now would be as good of a time as ever to issue a three-, four- or even a five-disc set, perhaps with a voucher for the brilliant documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talking About Him?) inside. He would have been seventy today... I could post any Nilsson song, I guess, but here's one that I find most appropriate for the occasion, a song that should be a highlight of a boxed set of Schmilssonian delights.