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Nothing Personal
A vast left-wing conspiracy?
Will Dubya get ground up in the rumor mill? A "clumsy" remark by a senator may have given birth to a brand-new bouncing baby rumor.
By Amy Reiter
[08/24/99]

Nothing Personal
Going gets strange, strange get going
Hottest sideshow on earth packing it in; one Fat Lady eulogized eggsactly the way she would have liked; is that a gun in your paw or the new NRA-sponsored Milkbone?
By Amy Reiter
[08/23/99]

People Feature
Tell Laura I love her
Though the national nag is snippish, overbearing and often insulting, some of us can't help but admire Schlessinger. Most of all we love her for her bubbles.
By Lorenzo W. Milam
[08/23/99]

Nothing Personal
Everybody wants a piece of "The Body"
Nevada brothel to commemorate governor's visit; Brooke Shields' biological clock's a-rockin'; Stiller and Garofalo didn't do it -- really. Plus: Exciting results of Gore vs. Bradley cockroach race.
By Amy Reiter
[08/20/99]

People Feature
Julia Child: Still cookin' after all these years
At 87, America's most famous and influential chef is about to serve up a new book and a new TV series, and again take us into her culinary embrace.
By Kathryn Kellinger
[08/20/99]

Complete archives for People

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By Sean Elder

Who needs money
When you're funny?

-- "Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear"

August 24, 1999 | By way of introducing his song "Naked Man" to audiences, Randy Newman tells the story -- a true story, mind you -- that inspired it. Seems a public defender he knew in New Orleans was called upon to represent a man who was accused of stealing a woman's purse while naked, just like the man in the song. His alibi was even more remarkable than the charges leveled against him: He had been in the bedroom of a woman who was not his wife when her husband returned and he jumped out the window, naked as he was when he came into the world. Running down the road he encountered another naked man carrying a purse who handed it to him, without comment, before disappearing into the night, leaving the defendant to explain it all to the police.

In this song (from his 1974 opus "Good Old Boys"), and in the shaggy dog story he uses to introduce it, you'll find the keys to much of Newman's music. There's the lyric itself, with the comic image of an old lady "shufflin' uptown against the wind"; all the Freudian implications of a naked man stealing a purse; the grotesque, as evidenced in the proffered explanation of the culprit ("They found out about my sister/Kicked me out of the navy/Would have strung me up if they could"), all set to what sounds like an organ grinder's shuffle. And then there's the singer/storyteller himself, an unreliable narrator offering the story of another unreliable narrator (or maybe two) as an unlikely pair of naked men go running off in opposite directions, one of them bearing the prize.

Randy Newman's best music often pulls the listener in two directions at once, against the expectations the sound sets up. Coming from a family of film composers, he knew the effect music could have on a story and the audience's reactions. Greil Marcus, in his groundbreaking 1974 essay on Newman ("Every Man Is Free") in "Mystery Train," wrote, "He uses the familiarity of the music to set us in the moods and situations the music automatically calls up; we respond in predictable ways to the music, and as we do, Newman's words and his singing pull us in other directions, or shift the story just enough to make it new." The most famous example of this sort of cognitive dissonance may be in the singer-songwriter's 1972 composition "Sail Away" -- still regarded by many as his best song. Born aloft by a soaring melody and a full orchestra (conducted by uncle Emil), Newman assumes the voice of a slave trader wooing Africans to the new world: "Ain't no lions and tigers, ain't no mamba snake/Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake." The truth of the reality that awaits them rests with the listener: You become one with the singer's lie. "It's great to be an American."

There are other examples of Newman's unsettling talent -- the tentative, haunting melody of "In Germany Before the War" (1977) belies the story, told in sketchy detail, of a child murderer ("A little girl has lost her way/With hair of gold and eyes of gray/Reflected in his glasses as he watches her") -- and on the recent "Bad Love," Newman's first studio album in five years and his best in over 20, the tradition continues. The album's opener, "This Is My Country," begins simply and nostalgically, like Archie and Edith sitting around the piano: "Let's go back to yesterday/When a phone call costs a dime/In New Orleans, just a nickel/Turn back the hands of time." By the time we've reached the chorus the melody has assumed a sort of martial air -- rolling drums, trilling horns -- that cues a vaguely patriotic, family-values zeal as Newman sings, "This is my country/These are my people/This is the world I understand ..."

And how that feeling dissipates as you realize he is singing about television ("Watching other people living/Seeing other people play/Hearing other people's voices in our minds") and the family is the singer's grown children:

When they speak to you
You got to listen to what they have to say
But they all live alone now
They have TVs of their own
But they keep on coming over anyway
And much as I love them
I'm always kind of glad when they go away

This is disquieting stuff, best left unsaid, and there certainly aren't many people hearing it. Despite strong notices, only a few months after its release "Bad Love" has all but disappeared from the charts, even as Rhino Records has released a stunning four-CD box set ("Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman") and California's South Coast Repertory Theater is mounting a musical based on his work ("The Education of Randy Newman"). Rock is seldom given to nuance, and with his challenging song craft and sardonic eye, Newman can only be called a rocker in the way Andy Kaufman was a comedian. Pop fortune is usually bestowed upon numbers that are personal ("I Love You Just the Way You Are") or anthemic ("No New Tale to Tell"), and Newman's lyrics are more like short fiction, with stories told by all kinds of people. Problems have arisen, then, when his songs were taken at face value, most notably (and incredibly) in 1977, when some short people actually thought Newman's one bona fide national hit, "Short People," was an attack on them and not a parody of prejudice itself. Singer-songwriters are supposed to sing about themselves, rock listeners reckon; they are supposed to stand naked to the world. And when presented with two naked men, one of whom may not be telling the truth, people get confused.

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