When Randy protested, the guy smashed him in the face. The first time Randy was standing in the candy line at junior high school and this “crazy guy” ran up and butted in front. The nose on Randy Newman’s face is straight and narrow, usually supporting metal-rimmed glasses of some sort and stabilizing his curly, anarchic dark hair like the dart end of a magician’s exploding flower. I can only invite such opportunists to listen to his music, check the sales figures, and see if they can come up with a more plausible explanation. The evidence is somewhat spotty, gathered primarily during a long afternoon interview at Randy’s comfortable, no-flash, two-story home, and some may seize upon the circumstantial nature of it to attack the theory itself as unfounded or even unimportant. executives to physically drag him out of bed – and why his song/stories have become increasingly cynical and their characters increasingly creepy. Indeed, Randy’s rise from an obscure son of a Beverly Hills physician to an obscure composer of black-humored rock is one of the great Cinderella stories of our time – the first half no doubt it also explains why he has become more and more difficult to work with – occasionally forcing Warner Bros. No, we must learn from history, I feel, from Randy’s history of mishaps, screwups, unfortunate remarks and other cruel fates that have helped abort, at least temporarily, his rocket to stardom. And many of his songs have approached hit status – when sung by someone else, particularly Judy Collins with “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” and Three Dog Night with “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” His lyrics include none of the fuzzy bullshit symbolism that so often passes for rock poetry these days. Yet Newman’s songs are not that highbrow or reserved. Newman is the man some predict will influence American music as much as George Gershwin or Cole Porter, the man Dave Van Ronk called “the Hoagy Carmichael of the Sixties.” Critic Robert Hilburn wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Randy Newman is one of the most important singer-songwriters of this generation, a fact that has not, unfortunately, helped him sell records in the past two years.”īut why not? It would be easy to finger the rock buying audience, to dismiss it as a band of lowbrow red freaks who respond to little below the threshold of pain. albums are considered masterpieces of humor, innovation, economy and good humming tunes yet, according to Randy, their total sales fall far short of what Jethro Tull‘s latest album has sold just in Atlanta. – whose own bashful performances have earned the first-hand praise of Dylan, McCartney and nearly every practicing rock critic – why does Randy Newman remain so hopelessly unpopular? Nevertheless, there is a growing body of thought, growing at least for the duration of this article, that somewhere among the tedious back pages of Randy’s life may lie the answer to one of the more infuriating riddles of modern rock: Why does a brilliant, 28-year-old composer and performer whose songs have been recorded by scores of famous people – Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Three Dog Night, Fats Domino, Harry Nilsson, etc. Vote for the 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees Randy himself once told a writer for New Musical Express:
He lives with his wife Roswitha and two young sons in the middle of a block in the Mandeville Canyon area above West Los Angeles not far from where he grew up and went to college, likes to read, watch news and cartoons on TV, buy groceries, listen to some of the world’s great music on a broken-down Zenith portable stereo, and occasionally wander outside if the weather’s nice and the mail’s there. For one thing it’s not all that exciting. His feelings are so clear on the matter that it would be entirely appropriate and respectful, in this discussion of songwriter Randy Newman, to ignore his personal life and history completely.