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Randy Newman | page 1, 2, 3

Conveniently labeled and bolstered by a popular live album and an evolving stage persona (self-deferential, neurotic in a sort of Woody Allen way), Newman scored a popular and critical success with the 1972 "Sail Away." Here was more evidence of his hard eye ("Old Man") as well as his humor. "Memo to My Son" remains perhaps the most realistic song about raising children ever written ("What have you done to the mirror?/What have you done to the floor?/Can't I go nowhere without you?/Can't I leave you alone anymore?"). But the album's most popular numbers, "Political Science" and "Burn On," scored hits with easy targets (American jingoism and water pollution), and Newman developed a following of well-intentioned, liberal, college-educated listeners who treated each song as a sort of inside joke. And Newman, to his own remorse, would often pander to them. When I saw him in the '70s, I recall him introducing "Yellow Man" (a fantasy of anti-Oriental racism) as he was hit with a yellow spotlight. "Very sensitive," he wisecracked, and the audience howled. Nearly 10 years later, I saw him again, and when he introduced the number he again got the yellow spotlight and made the same crack. You can call it stage nervousness, but the gag seemed studied and cruel the second time; he wasn't the insensitive one, mind you, and neither were you for laughing. It was that imaginary oaf of a stagehand.

"His best songs implicate the listener," Greil Marcus wrote of Newman, but by the mid-'70s it seemed his audience didn't want to be implicated. "Good Old Boys" still stands as his masterpiece; what began as a the story of one man in Alabama ("Rednecks," "Birmingham") and his marriage ("Marie," "Guilty") and crazy brother ("Naked Man," "Back On My Feet Again") stretched into a tapestry devoted to the tragedy of the South, with songs evoking Huey P. Long ("Kingfish") and the Mississippi flood of 1927. But for a lot of listeners it was an opportunity to laugh at those very rednecks laughing back at you. In the second verse of the opening track, the narrator mocks the free "nigger" of the North:

Yes, he's free to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he's free to be put in a cage on the South Side of Chicago
and the West Side
And he's free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland
And he's free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis
And he's free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco

As Newman performed the song at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco in the late '80s, an audience member actually applauded at that last line, pleased, no doubt, to hear his city represented in the singer's litany of American apartheid.

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Of all of the people that I used to know
Most never adjusted to the great big world
I see them lurking in bookstores
Working for the public radio
Carrying babies around in a sack on their back
Moving careful and slow.

-- "It's Money That Matters," 1988

This number (the well-duh sequel to the 1979 song "It's Money That I Love") comes right out of the gate on Newman's uneven and largely personal album "Land of Dreams." For once, his loyal audience couldn't laugh so easily at the singer's subjects because they now seemed to be them. It's a nifty little number, kicked along by a rocking Mark Knopfler riff, and Newman's comments on it are typically ambiguous: "When I learned a couple of years ago that the world isn't fair, I fairly jumped for joy and reveled in my own good fortune."

Newman has been telling this story to us for a while and continues in this vein on "Bad Love" with "The World Isn't Fair," in which he explains the facts of life to Karl Marx. His output grew spottier in the '80s -- the singer seemed subdued by both the Epstein-Barr virus and the very crassness of the Reagan-Bush years -- but "Land of Dreams" was a partial return to form. Especially the closer, "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do," which he calls "an authentic rock ballad in the manner of 'We Are the World.'" Again he is expressing sentiments no one wants to hear, yet it is hard to turn away:

I ran out on my children
And I ran out on my wife
Gonna run out on you too, baby
I've done it all my life
Everybody cried the night I left
Well, almost everybody did
My little boy just hung his head
I put my arm around his little shoulders
And this is what I said:
"Sonny, I just want you to hurt like I do ...
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do."

It is the song of selfishness and we are all singing it, from the folks who want to be left alone to watch a little television to the mass murderer dragging his family with him into his black hole of rage. That Newman envisioned it as a rock anthem, complete with satellite coverage "and all of the world singing along," just emphasizes the distance he feels from the music community whose nexus is in Los Angeles. L.A. is identified with Newman the way Lou Reed is linked to New York (due in part to his 1983 "I Love L.A." having been adopted by the Olympics in the summer of '84), and he is certainly no outsider to the industry. Waronker is now at Dreamworks (Newman moved to Dreamworks for "Bad Love"), and his 1995 "Faust" opera featured such varied big-name talents as Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor and the recently impoverished Elton John. But Newman manages to remain without, dangerous to the end.

On the cover of "Bad Love," Newman faces the camera square-on for the first time on a record, and the effect is disquieting: His eyes appear to be looking in different directions, just as his songs pull you apart in surprising ways, making you care and making you hate yourself for caring. Yes, "Faust" was a fulfillment of the Twainesque pessimism found in the 1972 "God's Song," and the Lord (sung by Taylor) is sort of a cruel imbecile, the kind of god who puts the Buddhists out with the trash. But there is no Faustian finality here: The Lord advises Lucifer (Newman, of course) to "Relax Enjoy Yourself" and Gretchen's love song, "Feels Like Home," is as simple a paean to romantic love as "Toy Story's" "You've Got a Friend In Me" is a joyous ode to camaraderie. (Newman's softer side finds great expression in his movie work, especially the scores he's written for children's films such as "James and the Giant Peach.") Even Lucifer finally reinvents himself in classic American style by heading for Vegas ("You can take your desert/Goddamn it, give me mine").

A happy ending after all? Newman is more suspicious of happy endings than you are, and has seen plenty of life's travails. (He overcame an addiction to ups and downs, and his 20-year marriage to Roswitha, which yielded three sons, ended in divorce; he has since remarried and has two new kids.) He speaks of his work in the film business as a form of indentured servitude, and his definition of a director is "a guy who owns a CD player and thinks he's an expert on music." But like most of us, "moving careful and slow," he sees the trade-off and splits the difference. "'I Love to See You Smile' [from the movie 'Parenthood'] made more money for me than anything else I've done," he told the Film and TV Composers' Conference in 1997. "I sold it to toothpaste companies, mule-packing teams, anywhere I could. I worked eight to 10 months on 'Faust' but never made a dime on it." Most of us, trading off the toothpaste ads for the work that matters, would have to call the acceptance of the arrangement -- a devil's bargain, if you will -- a form of wisdom. And looking at Randy Newman full on, trying to meet the gaze of one of his eyes, you may just see yourself.
salon.com | August 24, 1999

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