This British sunday paper profile of Randy Newman includes this -
I suspect that Newman's perfectionism and self-deprecation reveal a justified conviction that he will be remembered as one of the greats. He guards his back catalogue with a jealousy associated with classical composers. "I heard the record producer Hal Willner was planning a Randy Newman tribute night in Los Angeles," I tell him.
"Yeah, he did it, last month."
"Did you go?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"It was my son's birthday."
"Did they want you to go?"
"I don't know."
"Are you saying you think it would have been difficult
for you to listen to other people doing your songs?"
"Hey - I don't think that. I know it. I really appreciate Hal Willner doing that evening. But I worked hard on the opening chords of 'Sail Away', you know?" So, yes - what the fuck - I want to hear what I did. Anything is not great with a song like that, you know? Some musicians I would trust. Van Dyke Parks I
would trust. Elvis Costello I would trust. But you know what? I would be real careful if I did 'Watching the Detectives'."
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Feeling Randy
He is one of the few truly unique figures in music. A satirist who creates unforgettable melodies. A writer whose lyrics are poetry. A political commentator who knows just what Donald Rumsfeld is up to. So why is he best known for his 'Toy Story' score? Randy Newman talks about drugs, death threats and depression and why he wishes he could be more like Elton John
By Robert Chalmers - 15 February 2004
They wander the earth like evangelists for some neglected Messiah, tormenting themselves, and others, with the same questions, again and again. Why don't more people love him? Why don't those who do love him, love him more? What kind of a world is it, in which he is not universally revered? I understand the pain of Randy Newman's ardent fans, I tell the singer, because I am one.
"I do recognise that pattern of behaviour," he says. "I always believed that my songs were the kind lots of people could like. That hasn't really proven to be the case. But you know..." Newman pauses, and stares at the rain driving against the window of his Amsterdam hotel room. "I haven't done badly."
And he does have a point. As self- proclaimed underachievers go, Randy Newman is in a league of his own. He has an Oscar in his luxurious residence in west LA. He's supremely talented, wealthy, lauded by performers as diverse as Bob Dylan and Eminem, and regarded by many as America's greatest living songwriter. He has been favourably compared to George Gershwin, Cole Porter and - because music critics, like the rest of us, suffer the occasional rush of blood - Swift and Defoe. Now 60, he's never made a bad record, and his latest CD, The Randy Newman Songbook Vol One, in which he revisits some of his greatest songs with only a piano accompaniment, is majestic. But none of this, somehow, has ever been quite enough.
Newman doesn't enjoy interviews - "grouchy", "miserable" and "sullen" are some of the adjectives he's inspired. He takes a seat opposite me looking like a tousled academic who knows it's his duty to assist but is wary and preoccupied - his manner is that of a forensic scientist who's arrived to testify in court, but has just remembered that he left home with the bath water running.
What is it that he wants, but hasn't got?
"I would have liked to produce more albums," says Newman. His speech, like his singing - in its reed-like quality, not just its southern American vowel sounds - is blacker than that of any white man I've ever met.
"I've made 11 or 12 records in 30 years," he says. "It's just not enough. I mean Elton John at one point did three, maybe even four albums a year and they were, you know..." he gives a mischievous look, "not bad."
The true total of Newman's output, dis-regarding reissues, collections, musicals and live performances, is nine albums - every
one magnificent - in 36 years (see box, page 10). As a result, Newman's position in the rock'n'roll pantheon is rather like one of those million-dollar jackpot machines that stand in the middle of Las Vegas casinos
- surrounded by more prolific yet less rewarding attractions; never less than exhilarating when he does produce, but a source
of widespread frustration in the long peri-
ods when he doesn't.
To those outside his loyal constituency, Newman is best known for his film soundtracks (inspired but unflashy, they include Meet the Parents, Toy Story and Monsters, Inc) and versions of his songs by other people: Alan Price's "Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear", say, or Tom Jones's "You Can Leave Your Hat On". Neither of those singles gives much of a clue to the wit, eloquence, and mournful vitality of his own performances on albums such as Sail Away, Little Criminals or his last original release, Bad Love, which came out in 1999. There was an 11 year wait for that one.
"When I wrote 'You Can Leave Your Hat On'," he says, "I never thought anyone could take the guy in the song seriously. To me he wasn't a sexual predator. He was a wimp. I never anticipated that strippers would use that music. I lack the instinct for hits."
Titles, he claims, are something he's never had the knack for. If he'd written a song for Billy Joel, Newman says, he would probably have called it: "I Love You Just the Way You Are, You Old Whore".
One of our own national treasures, the poet John Cooper Clarke, does a routine called Songs That Would Have Been Hits If I Hadn't Made One Mistake In the Title, which includes a reference to a composition called: "Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's My Hat".
Newman gives his deep, sonorous laugh.
"Well, that's been my problem, exactly," he says. "And 95 per cent of hits are straightforward love songs. Mine aren't."
Randy Newman is one of the very few figures in popular music who can truly be termed unique: a satirist who creates unforgettable melodies, he writes lyrics it would be perverse not to describe as poetry. Untypically for a rock legend, the main preoccupation in his writing is often not himself. "Baltimore" would have resonance for anyone living in Hull, Marseille or Peterhead. "Beat up little seagull," the song begins, "on a marble stair. Trying to find the ocean; looking everywhere..."
Other songs are delivered in the persona of racists, child-murderers, slave-traders and alcoholics. "This is not," Newman says "music to eat potato chips by."
A front of cynicism - in the music, as in the man - conceals a smouldering rage at injustice and bigotry. In 1972 he released his study of US foreign policy, "Political Science": "No one likes us, I don't know why/We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try/But all around even our old friends put us down/ Let's drop the big one and pulverise them/ Asia's crowded and Europe's too old/Africa is far too hot and Canada's too cold/And South America stole our name/Let's drop the big one, there'll be no one left to blame us..."
Performing in the US, he used to introduce "Political Science" (which contains his most famous single line "Boom goes London, and boom Paree") by saying: "You know, over in Europe, they believe this song to be a joke."
Three decades ago, "Political Science" was wryly amusing song noir in the mould of Tom Lehrer. Today, after Donald Rumsfeld's remarks about "Old Europe", it reads more like Nostradamus.
"I doubt that Rumsfeld had those lines at the back of his mind when he said that," Newman says. "It's more worrying than that. He's a like-minded guy to the character in the song."
"It's a bizarre coincidence."
"It is, because he used the phrase practically word for word. 'Political Science' is closer now than ever to being something beyond jingoistic exaggeration. It's like the current US administration just don't know the rules. They don't understand that you can't consign a nation - Germany or France, say - to being part of an Old Europe that we don't need any more." *
He's about to begin his European tour in Belgium, where he'll be playing another tune from his Songbook Vol One, "God's Song".
("I burn down your cities/How blind you must be/I take from you your children, and you say how blessed are we/You all must
be crazy to put your faith in me/That's why
I love mankind.")
They go absolutely mad for this in Bruges. It puzzles Newman that he's always been more successful in Belgium than the UK.
"Don't you think you might have sold
better in Britain," I ask him, "if you hadn't been called Randy?"
"I don't know," he says. Newman, whose eyesight is seriously impaired by his crossed eyes, peers at me like a professor acknowledging an impudent but possibly useful interruption from a first-year student. "I do well in London. But on my one foray to Liverpool and Manchester, in the late 1970s..." he frowns, "I just didn't draw. I mean - I enjoyed it. I saw some beautiful country, Jesus. And I had an interesting experience when my car broke down and I had to hitch to Manchester in a truck carrying rat rope."
"Carrying what?"
"Rat rope. The truck was driven by a husband and wife; they made that rope with knots in, that stops rats getting on ships. They dropped me off, then came to the show. I talked to them afterwards, and they just looked so very tired. They'd been hauling rat rope since five o'clock that morning; I guess it just wasn't the best preparation for an evening with the Dean of Satire."
"Are you still in touch with them?"
"Yes," he says, clearly not joking. "They wrote to me the other day, actually."
Now you wouldn't get Bob Dylan writing back to you after 25 years, however great the scenery you showed him from your rat truck. Newman is a real person - interested in others; he can listen as well as talk. When he was starting out, he used to lark about with reporters. In a Chicago hotel, for instance, one woman journalist asked him if his then wife Roswitha was fair or dark. "Look for yourself," he told her, indicating the bedroom where the first Mrs Newman was asleep. Then, when the writer refused - "OK then, you wait here. I'll go look. I've got so famous now, I don't notice any more."
These days, there's more of a sense of distance about him. It's not hard to recognise the man who said of himself: "I have no ease."
"Well, you should have talked to me back then," Newman says, amiably. "In my prime, you should have met me."
Randall Stuart Newman was born in Los Angeles but spent the first years of his childhood, while his father Irving was abroad with the military, travelling the South with his mother Adele, whose Louisiana accent her son inherited. When Randy was eight, his father returned to civilian life as a doctor in LA. Three of Irving's brothers were successful composers in Hollywood.
"You described your father as 'forthright', which sounds like an obituarist's euphemism."
"He was the only adult I knew who got in fights," Newman says. "Once in a parking lot, he told the young attendant: 'Thank you, son.' This kid replied: 'I'm not your son.' My dad said, 'I know you're not my son.' Then, boom, they were fighting. I saw the same thing after someone called him a 'dirty Jew'."
Experience of anti-Semitism has informed Newman's brutal caricatures of bigotry, though neither he nor his father was raised in the religion. When Irving Newman died in 1990, there was no funeral, in accordance with the wishes of the deceased. In the 1970s, Dr Newman told an interviewer he believed his atheism inspired Randy Newman's song "Old Man" ("Won't be no God to comfort you/You taught me not to believe that lie/You don't need anybody/Nobody needs you/Don't cry, old man, don't cry/Everybody dies").
When his father did die, Newman says, "I had trouble feeling the way I should have.
I had warm feelings for him," he explains. "I felt bad all right. But at the end, when he and I were alone together, that song was closer to being about us than was comfortable for me."
As a boy, he says, there were moments when he found his dad "scary".
"I remember once I was lying around watching television with the volume too loud. He kicked me - not that hard - and he called me a turd. I mean he was funny. But he was angry, internally. I don't know what about."
"Do you have that anger?"
"I have had."
"I can imagine you losing it."
"Yeah." He stops himself. "But I don't
any more."
"When did you?"
"Driving my car. Playing sports as a kid. Sometimes in the studio."
Randy's uncle, Alfred Newman, won nine Oscars and wrote the music for, among other pictures, All About Eve, Wuthering Heights
and How the West Was Won. Irving wrote songs too - one was recorded - and played the clarinet. So many sons, I suggest to Newman, fulfill their fathers' thwarted ambitions.
Newman was mocked at school for his severe squint. Corrective surgery achieved little. His condition "made me more insecure, and afraid in the world". His father said that one failed operation, when Randy was a teenager, left his son "shattered and crushed. His problems with his eyesight influenced his thinking a lot; influenced his sadness."
"Some people," Newman says, "have made far too much of my eyes."
Newman went to UCLA where he studied composition. In 1962 he signed to Metric Music, LA's "songwriting factory", where he wrote for The O'Jays, Irma Thomas and Pat Boone. He was cajoled into performing by childhood friend Lenny Waronker, who became his regular producer and, later, president of Warner Brothers.
"You began your career..."
"By complaining," Newman interrupts. "By not even playing on my own demos. Really timid, the whole way, I've been. I only sang because people pushed me."
Once he began recording, his songs were grown-up from the start. The opinions of his invented characters, who are often grotesque, have tended to be mistaken for the singer's own - a misfortune, he says, that he shares with Eminem. It happened with "Short People", Newman's one serious hit, in 1977. "They got little noses and tiny little teeth," he sang. "They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet." "Short People" was a waspish satire by Newman (6ft) on the absurdity of prejudice - a point that eluded some of his more compact compatriots.
"I got death threats," he says. "My shows were picketed by midgets."
In Alabama a couple of years ago, I tell him, I met an elderly white woman - a liberal, weary of being stigmatised as a Southerner - who brought up the subject of "Rednecks", his scathing indictment of racism sung from the viewpoint of a separatist from Georgia. Talking about the record brought her to the verge of tears - no mean achievement, when it wasn't even playing. ("Now your Northern nigger's a Negro," Newman wrote. "You see he's got his dignity/Down here we're too ignorant to realise/That the North has set the nigger free/And 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 in the South Side of Chicago, and the West Side...")
"What he understood," the woman explained, "was that, whatever the South may have done, we lived shoulder to shoulder with black people, for generations."
"Well she's right," Newman says. "That's all I was saying. The North has no right to moral superiority. Because it's a lie, basically. White people have black friends on television. You know Los Angeles. It's a segregated town. They all are."
"Rednecks" appeared on Good Old Boys, his fourth studio album, released in 1974. By then the pattern was set - ecstatic reviews; fair but unspectacular sales. Newman had married Roswitha when he was 23; and it had been clear since his teens that music would be his * living. But songwriting, as with many things in Newman's life, has never come easily.
He says the only way he could write - then as now - was to force himself to sit at a keyboard, for four hours at a stretch. Sometimes, he explains, he sits there and nothing happens; after which he avoids the piano for weeks, in favour of televised baseball or history books.
"I spent more time than anyone I know doing nothing. To get into the studio," he says, "I'd have to be running out of money, or they'd have to force me."
Paradoxically, Newman says, given a deadline to produce film music, "I can fulfill any assignment, and fulfill it well."
He began his movie career proper in 1981 with Ragtime, which earned him two Academy Award nominations. (Newman had been a disappointed nominee 16 times at Oscar ceremonies before he finally won for Monsters, Inc.)
As a boy, he recalls, he watched his uncles composing and noticed how "worried and unhappy" they seemed.
"Alfred especially. Maybe it is genetic. It has literally just dawned on me - just this second - that my uncles might have been genetically prone to depression. My uncle Al did 300 movies. He was the greatest there ever was, in my opinion. But basically he'd work till five every afternoon, then start drinking."
"And then?"
"And then he'd go to bed, get up, and do it all again. I don't know why having success - going on stage, having the music sound great, and being happy with it - doesn't carry over into the rest of your life, for him or for me. I hope his depression has no influence on me. I did my best not to have it happen to me. But it did," Newman adds. "Something happened."
"Meaning?"
"I have the same... problem, you know, that my uncle Alfred had."
"How does it manifest itself with you?"
"I don't do the work. My uncle had to, because he did pictures. And if all I did was pictures, I'd work all the time. I'd keep going."
"So you've never woken up with an idea and rushed to the piano?"
"No."
"Which is unusual."
"It is. I think I must block those ideas out. I'm going to try and change that. To try and address the fact that... when you asked me right at the start what was the thing I would wish for most, and I said more work."
In 1986 Newman contracted Epstein-Barr virus, which debilitated him for two years and compounded his malaise. "But imposing discipline on myself was difficult at 12, and it's difficult at 60. To say - OK; today I'll sit there for four hours, no matter what." Of late, he says, "I just haven't been doing it."
Even the title of Songbook Volume One sounds like a mental note to himself to keep at it. According to his record label, Nonesuch, Volume Two comes out next year, and will consist of new, as yet unwritten songs.
"I hope they're right," says Newman.
He now lives quietly with his second wife Gretchen, whom he married in 1990, and their children Patrick, 12, and Alice, 10. He has three grown-up sons from his first marriage, which ended in the mid-1980s. "I was erratic then," says Newman. "I did bad things."
"Bad things?" I hear myself ask, like Alan Partridge in one of his baser moments.
"Drugs and women..." Newman sniffs. "Not being steady. I haven't been in rehab, but I have been erratic." He doesn't wish to expand on this, but it's no secret that one of his enthusiasms used to be amphetamines.
Though he's had his moments with alcohol (Lenny Waronker tells a story about the young Newman spending a night in a cell for mooning), he never drank like his uncle.
"The only thing I ever loved was pain pills. Things like codeine. Or Percocet." More recently, he adds, he has taken Vicodin: these last two prescription drugs, a British expert told me, are "extremely addicting, inducing euphoria and relaxation. Consuming either, unless one is in unremitting pain, constitutes a large and unusual dose."
His use of such drugs, Newman says "may have cost me some".
"Cost you how?"
"Well, they take away that feeling of - now I should be working. You can't work with the pills, or at least I've never been able to. Actually I did, on this last picture I did, Seabiscuit. I couldn't understand what the director wanted. Eventually I just couldn't go on. I took a Vicodin. It's the only time I've worked taking anything like that. They asked me to copy the temp track [music intended to create mood during the editing process, but not destined for the finished film]. The director said, "I love it. It brings tears to my eyes." And I said: "Shit. I can't deal with this." Newman pauses, sounding emotional at what is clearly a very bad memory. "Ultimately, Seabiscuit was an unpleasant experience because I wasn't allowed to do what I was certain was right."
I suspect that Newman's perfectionism and self-deprecation reveal a justified conviction that he will be remembered as one of the greats. He guards his back catalogue with a jealousy associated with classical composers.
"I heard the record producer Hal Willner was planning a Randy Newman tribute night in Los Angeles," I tell him.
"Yeah, he did it, last month."
"Did you go?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"It was my son's birthday."
"Did they want you to go?"
"I don't know."
"Are you saying you think it would have been difficult for you to listen to other people doing your songs?"
"Hey - I don't think that. I know it. I really appreciate Hal Willner doing that evening. But I worked hard on the opening chords of 'Sail Away', you know?" So, yes - what the fuck - I want to hear what I did. Anything is not great with a song like that, you know? Some musicians I would trust. Van Dyke Parks I would trust. Elvis Costello I would trust. But you know what? I would be real careful if I did 'Watching the Detectives'."
We meet again three days later in Antwerp, where Newman gives as good a live performance as I've ever seen, to a public that understands him. Introducing "I Miss You" - "A love song I wrote for my first wife, after I'd married my second", Newman tells the audience: "I ran out on my first wife and our children." A ripple of applause. "Thank you so much," he responds. "I'm kinda proud of that too."
Later, he pauses over a chord sequence that reveals his classical training. "I was thinking the other day about Stravinsky, and other artists born in the century before Randy Newman. I got to thinking about the list of all-time great composers, and I was briefly troubled by the thought that I couldn't be absolutely sure my name would be on it... But then Chopin died when he was 39. Now this..." Newman returns to his Steinway, "is one of the chords he didn't grow old enough to learn."
He includes the theme from Toy Story, "You've Got a Friend in Me". "That movie grossed millions," Newman explains, "as I understand it, mainly because of my music, even though sometimes you can't hear it properly because of other noises - like footsteps and dialogue. A dog barks," he adds, "and a week's work is gone."
Backstage, he seems ill at ease, and unsure as to how the evening went. He autographs a Toy Story flyer for my seven-year-old son. I know the name of Randy Newman won't mean much to Jamie now, but - if I can have my own brief rush of blood - if I could bequeath him one record that captures life's capacity to delight, horrify, amuse and disappoint, it would be Newman's Songbook.
Years ago, when he was interviewed by Playboy, the magazine asked Newman for one piece of advice that would benefit readers for the rest of their life.
"And what you told them," I remind him, "was: 'Don't Bend Over.'"
"I was young," he says. "That was a joke."
"You're 60 now - what's your real advice?"
Newman buries his face in his hands, and remains silent for a very long time indeed.
"I'm..." he says eventually, sounding very intense. "That is to say... Jesus, I don't know." Another pause. "You know what my real advice is? It's this: be optimistic. About your life and future. That way, if bad things happen, at least you'll have had some time when you were feeling good."
"And can we learn something from your own life, as an example of how to implement this philosophy?"
"From my life?" Newman replies - this time without a second's hesitation - "No."
'The Randy Newman Songbook Vol One' is out now on EastWest/Nonesuch records. Newman performs on Thursday at the Barbican, London, and on 23 February at Queen's Hall, Edinburgh. For full details visit www.randynewman.com
For the record: the albums that made Randy Newman a cult
Randy Newman 1968: Newman's debut features "I Think It's Going to Rain Today", a hit for both Judy Collins and UB40
12 Songs 1970: "Mama Told Me (Not To Come)" is his first number-one, albeit when performed by Three Dog Night
Sail Away 1972: A classic song cycle including such works as "Political Science" and "You Can Leave Your Hat On"
Good Old Boys 1974: Newman's satire comes to the fore in this concept album about the Deep South
Little Criminals 1977: The commercial breakthrough album, featuring the surprise hit single "Short People"
Born Again 1979: Not his best-loved work, but still covers subjects from spies and gay truckers to rich people
Trouble in Paradise 1984: Springsteen parodies and songs lamenting the state of South Africa. Underrated and very funny
Land of Dreams 1988: Still character-based songwriting, but a little autobiography ("Four Eyes") can be found here too
Bad Love 1999: The 11-year wait was ended with Bad Love. The biting wit (often aimed at himself) was still intact
This album is now available for pre-orders from 