The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: The Power of Sour

August 1999

If you listen to Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman, the box set that came out last year, it's hard not to hear Newman's loss of delight as the decades pass, and the fall from ambition into laziness. On "Vine Street," a 1968 piano demo made around the time of Randy Newman Creates Something New Un­der the Sun, his first album, the melody stretches, yawns, and then begins to twist and crawl like some­one waking up in a huge bed in the middle of the af­ternoon. By its words, the song is about a band that didn't make it, but the words come off as an excuse for something to sing. By feeling, the song is about desire and the pleasure of putting off doing any­thing about it—about, as the title of an L.A. novel once described it, the weather tomorrow. Viiiiiiiiiiiine street, Newman sang, until you could feel the plant the street was named for curling around gates and mailboxes. The famous Sunset and Vine is there in the song just as a re­minder of the fame the singer will never get; where the song takes you is simply to an ordinary street where people live. You can see it—you won't see the same L.A. street I see, with its bungalows and chipped pastel paint jobs, but you can imagine a whole way of life unfolding on whatever street you do see.

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As Newman's career progressed, the pieces with similar reach went back to classic movie music and then started over. Both "Sail Away" and "Louisiana 1927" are far richer than the actual movie music from which Newman has made his living over the last decade: His work on Pleasantville, which brought Newman one of his three 1999 Oscar nominations, is lovely, sunshine breaking over the film's climactic scene. Listen to the soundtrack album and you'll realize it's a trick Newman knows by heart, which is to say there's no heart in it. The sun that shines here is a movie sun; the sun in "Vine Street" comes from the singer, the composer.

Jay Leno brought up Newman's Oscar nomina­tions ("Lost for all three," Newman said) just after Newman premiered his thoroughly unpleasant new album, Bad Love, with a noisy performance of the dopey "I'm Dead (But I Don't Know It)." "Like, when you did A Bug's Life, did this attract younger fans?" "Yeah, it does!" Newman said with the happy enthusiasm his fans have learned to trust like a car salesman's handshake. "I played a thing where I had a four-year-old coming up to the stage and heckling me 'cause I didn't do 'You've Got a Friend'—I couldn't, I had to leave. I couldn't say anything too foul to the little guy. And they couldn't get him away from the stage: 'You've Got a Friend!' You've Got a Friend!" "Just whack him and leave," Leno offered. "Well, I couldn't," Newman said. "Not while the audience was there.”

That's like Newman's sun in Pleasantville; he can play the misanthrope in his sleep. Bad Love is in­somnia: a messy, powerful piece of work about, as a friend of mine who is a year or so younger than Newman's fifty-five put it in an unpublished memoir, the sense that one's world is about "to go into the past." On Bad Love that means the contempt older men feel from the younger women who want to live in the world of their money, and the way one's whole frame of reference—from expressions like "two bits" to events like the Second World War—changes from lingua franca to a dead language. Oh sure, Bad Love says, you can go out on the street and speak it, but not only will people give you a wide berth because you're talking to yourself, you'll feel like a foreigner in your own country.

On "Shame" a man who long ago would have been called a sugar daddy conducts a hateful dia­logue with a female chorus singing the title word over and over again: He just wants sex and flattery, he can give the woman a good life in exchange, he's not talking about leaving money on the bed, and the chorus acts as if he wants her to lick her shit off his dick. Really, he asks decently, what's so terrible about what I want? The song rolls along easily, Newman's usu­al New Orleans piano roll, the embarrassment and self-loathing nowhere near the surface until the song blows up, as if the singer has just realized these women sneering at him from the chorus have no right to mock him. He shouts, curses, threat­ens. "Shut up!" he says; suddenly he realizes that's the worst thing he can say. In seconds he's on his knees apol­ogizing—and begging for kindness. Don't you think I know what a fool I am? But this is a free country!

Whatever that means. Randy Newman Creates Something New Under the Sun opened with "Love Story," a romance from courtship to death wrapped up in three minutes of clichés embraced by the lucky couple without resentment or hope, just with the sense that the clichés of American life were so powerful there was no life to be lived outside of them. It was a notion Newman echoed in "Sail Away": "In America, every man is free," he sang flatly, "to take care of his home and his family." It was like that most chilling line from the Starr Report: "All Americans, including the President, are en­titled to enjoy a private family life." That means there is no other sort of privacy that need be respected, none at all if you are not part of a "family" just as, Newman was saying, in America freedom stops when you walk out your front door.

As affirmations that politics don't exist, these were profoundly political songs—heartbreakers, like "The World Isn't Fair" on Bad Love. It's pitched as a letter to Karl Marx, with the singer at once laughing at Marx's dreams of changing the world and trying to soften the horror Marx would feel if he could see what to­day the world would give him to see: his new world definitely consigned to the past. Follow the mu­sic, the turns in Newman's voice, just one step fur­ther, and you hear the real song: the self-hatred of a man who doesn't care, who wishes he could, who wishes he could believe the world could be dif­ferent even more painfully than he wishes he could piss without sitting down.

"DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO HAVE TO BEG A LITTLE BUM LIKE YOU FOR LOVE?" So says the man in "Shame"; so says Newman to his audi­ence, whoever might be in it, promising that sooner or later everyone will feel the same. As he put it with­out irony on Land of Dreams more than a decade ago, "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do." It's fair: A fan's fantasy is that the artist will hurt just like the fan. This time I think Newman is a few steps out front.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, August 1999