One of my favorite pebbles of pop-culture minutiae is that Curtis Armstrong, the actor who played Herbert Viola for three seasons on Moonlighting and “Booger” in four Revenge of the Nerds movies, knows everything there is to know about Harry Nilsson. (He discussed his love of the late singer-songwriter’s music in an interview with the Onion AV Club in 2006.)
Moonlighting enjoyed breaking the fourth wall, but so did The Monkees 20 years earlier. Nilsson’s song “Cuddly Toy” was performed by the made-for-TV band, which had a talented songwriter of its own — singer-guitarist Mike Nesmith penned the pop classic “Different Drum,” which was recorded by the Stone Poneys (featuring Linda Ronstadt) in 1967 and memorably covered by the Lemonheads in 1990.
According to former bassist Nic Dalton in Everett True’s The Lemonheads: The Illustrated Story, Nilsson visited the band at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles in the summer of ‘93 during the recording of their sixth album, Come On Feel the Lemonheads. He “came in, smoked some pot and played us some new demos he’d just done … Mostly, they were songs looking back on his Seventies days, kind of like The Beatles meet Ween. They sounded lo-fi and cool, especially coming from this middle-aged guy with a paunch.”
In 1998, after four albums and one best-of compilation, the Lemonheads parted ways with Atlantic Records, the label cofounded by Ahmet Ertegun, who nurtured the careers of legends like Ray Charles. Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for his portrayal of Charles in Taylor Hackford’s Ray (2004), while Ertegun was played by none other than Curtis “Center of the Universe” Armstrong.
It may be the height of over-sharing to admit this, but Revenge of the Nerds was a movie that really spoke to me in high school. As a computer-loving, comic book-collecting, Dungeons & Dragons-playing sophomore, I certainly related to Lewis and Gilbert and their struggle and desire to fit in. Maybe I wasn’t as persecuted as they were, but I certainly felt a kinship for being teased for being smart and not athletic (not that I was any sort of genius, mind you). While the movie was meant to be another Animal House-style comedic romp, the background and weight given to the lead characters led to a few actually somewhat poignant moments.