Pop's premier satirist draws a sharp bead on lotus land
"Well," said Randy Newman, right on time for a party in Santa Monica, "when do all the other bores get here?"
Any time now. And they may even walk in whistling a Randy Newman tune. Not one of those devastating early songs like Davy the Fat Boy or Vine St. or even Sail Away. More likely they will be puckering their lips around one of the novelty numbers of comparatively recent vintage, like Short People. (Remember "Short people got no reason to live"?) Says the composer, who will have scarfed up the cocktail peanuts by this time and will likely be heading for home: "That song was a joke. It's about someone who is insane. Nobody harbors that kind of animus toward short people." Then, typically, he adds the cruncher: "Except I do now."
So much for the world's bigots and half-pints, whose hash has been temporarily settled by the quirkiest, most implacable satiric sensibility in American pop. They may join the ragtag list of victims, victimizers, unanointed antiheroes and assorted foul balls about whom Newman has sung with stinging wit and unexpected compassion. Newman, 39, exults in playing musically the same role he has picked for himself socially: the perennial sourpuss at the party, over in the corner, casing the room and making nasty cracks about the other guests. On his new album, Trouble in Paradise (Warner Bros.), he has no equal at the underhanded parry and the thrust that kills. The smiler with a knife, making some of our best music from over there in the corner.
"My wife and I eat fast, we go to places early, we leave early," Newman reflected recently. "I hate wine. I don't like people who like it. I don't drink. I don't know how to live. There is no ease in me." For that last, the thanks of a grateful nation. Trouble in Paradise is a series of twelve interrelated songs set within the balmy regions of superficial ease where disaster keeps bobbing to the surface like a corpse in a reflecting pool. I Love L.A., which opens the record, is a mock-heroic epic of the sun-kissed glories of Southern California, mixing conventional imagery of Beach Boys serenades and fast rides in convertibles with darker asides about "a big nasty redhead" and a bum "down on his knees." Like the other keynote songs on the record—Christmas in Capetown, Miami—I Love L.A. turns the topography of tourist cliché into a nightmare landscape on which the sun never sets.
The narrators of these songs are scared racists, displaced lunkheads, pseudo celebrities or pitiful nonentities blinded by the artificial radiance of undeflected ego.
In My Life Is Good, Newman slings an arm over the shoulder of his "very good friend . . . Mr. Bruce Springsteen." In Take Me Back, a lively rave-up propelled by a roadhouse-style Farfisa organ, he chronicles how a life of early promise guttered and ended "by this dirty old airport/ In this greasy little shack." Randy Newman may live far from that kind of address—in Santa Monica, Calif., in fact, with a wife and three sons—but his imagination still dwells in the long shadows. Says his brother Alan: "Randy looks at the world from the underside."