Randy Newman is a storyteller without equal. Why, it warms the cockles of my heart, it does, the way ole’ Randy has of telling a tale, and whenever I hear a fella disparage him as a creator of film scores for rug rats, why, I want to haul off and belt that fella in the mouth, take a bit of the smart-ass shine off his canines. Randy (yeah, I call him Randy; you, on the other hand, may address him as Mr. Newman) is best known for his comedic songs, but he has written some of the saddest songs I know. Songs like “Guilty” and “Marie” and “Baltimore,” the last of which is the musical equivalent of your dog dying—in your arms.
Everybody should have a favorite Randy Newman album in order to qualify as a bona fide human being. I of course have one, and it isn’t Little Criminals. But that’s okay, because Little Criminals is my number two. It’s not quite the piece of undiluted perfection that 1974’s Good Old Boys is, but it has gads of great songs on it, and is 100% guaranteed to make you happy to still be above ground with the grotesqueries, unreliable narrators, heartless comedians, and feckless characters that Newman, a genius at writing vignettes without resolution, specializes in.
A very brief bio: Randall Stuart Newman was born in 1943 in Los Angeles, but spent significant time as a child in New Orleans. Both cities have played a critical role in his songwriting, and his time in The Big Easy helps explain his uncanny ability to capture both the southland’s mindset and dialect in such albums as Good Old Boys and 1988’s Land of Dreams. He began his career writing tunes for performers such as Petula Clark, Jackie DeShannon, and Gene Pitney, and was briefly a member of the band that became Harper’s Bizarre. His 1968 eponymous debut, Harry Nilsson’s 1970 LP Nilsson Sings Newman, and his 1970 sophomore LP 12 Songs all helped establish Newman’s critical reputation as a songwriter of immense talent—a reputation he solidified with 1972’s great Sail Away.
It’s likely no one has ever written as many mordantly funny songs as Randy Newman; satiric songs that cut so many ways, harboring sly irony beneath their apparent meaning, and a deep well of incurable sadness beneath the sly irony. The dark thread that connects the clueless partygoer of “Mama Told Me Not to Come” to the freezing midnight purse-snatcher in “Naked Man” to the impotent bridegroom (“Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword?”) in “A Wedding in Cherokee County” is the unhappiness that lies at the heart of the human condition. Newman is a surgeon poking about in our heart of darkness, with his razor-sharp scalpel of sarcasm.
Little Criminals opens with what is perhaps Newman’s most famous song, “Short People.” Behind its jaunty piano and happy horns there stands one very cruel narrator, tossing off lines like, “They got little noses and tiny little teeth/They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet“ and “They got grubby little fingers and dirty little minds.” Then comes a seeming twist, in the form of a bridge that goes, “Short people are just the same/As you and I/(A fool such as I)/All men are brothers/Until the day they die/(It’s a wonderful world.)” This could be Newman’s way of unsaying every mean thing he’s said (“Short people got no reason/To live”), but I suspect not. Instead I suspect it’s the narrator’s ultimate joke on his listeners. I don’t buy his empty platitudes about the brotherhood of man any more than I buy his saying it’s a wonderful world. They’re just more sarcasm, the mean icing on a cruel cake.
The slow, bluesy “You Can’t Fool the Fat Man” features one very simple piano, a horn section, and one of Newman’s feckless narrators—a guy with a hard-luck story looking for a handout. His is a typically implausible Newman tale of woe. To wit, his sister, or so he claims, is in jail, and he needs 50 bucks to pay her bail. And—nobody can keep it as simple as Newman, when he wants—the song’s whole meaning lies squarely on the Fat Man’s response: “You can’t fool the Fat Man/No, you can’t fool me/You’re just a two-bit grifter/That’s all you’ll ever be.” Repeated twice. It seems too minimalist a message to hinge a whole story on, but it works.
More complex is the title track, which is faster paced, and features one repetitive piano line, some cool percussion by jazzman Milt Holland, and the guitars of Joe Walsh and Glenn Frey. (I regret to inform you that the Eagles, and such Eagles hangers-on as J.D. Souther and Timothy B. Schmit, are all over this LP, like locusts over a cornfield.) In it, Newman plays the part of a small-time crook telling another crook to get lost, because, well, “What you wanna come back here for?/Thought you’re with your uptown friends/Don’t need none of your junkie business/You gonna screw us up again.” On and on he goes (“We don’t need you ‘round here, jerk-off/Chuck, I want you off my back”), before declaring, “We’ve almost made it/We’ve almost made it/We’ve almost made it to the top.” But in typical Newman fashion, the song isn’t quite what it appears; the joke isn’t on the guy who’s being told to beat it, but on the singer, whose conviction that “we’ve almost made it to the top” is pure delusion, and whose planned heist (“Got a gun from Uncle Freddy/Got a station all picked out/Got a plan and now we’re ready/Gonna take that station out”) has zero chance of succeeding.
“Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father” is sad, simple and sad. “Here I am/Lost in the wind,” sings the girl, to the accompaniment of some lugubrious strings and the piano of one Ralph Grierson, “Round in circles sailing/Like a ship/That never comes in/Standin’ by myself.” She sings, “Sing a sad song/For a good man/Sing a sad song/For me/A sad song/For a sailor/A thousand miles from the sea.” It’s as flat as the plain she’s standing on, until she adds at the very end, “Papa, we’re going sailing.” And if they don’t break your heart, those lines, you don’t have a heart to break beating inside you.
More inscrutable is “Jolly Coppers on Parade,” which I love and don’t know why. Newman sings it from the point of view of a child watching a parade, and I suspect the song’s sense of resonance stems from the ironic distance between that child’s idealistic point of view and a cynical adult’s. “They’re comin’ down the street/They’re comin’ right down the middle/They gotta keep the beat/Why they’re as blue as the ocean,” he sings. And, “Oh they look so nice/Looks like angels have come down from paradise/Jolly coppers on parade.” And finally, “Oh, mama/That’s the life for me/When I’m grown/That’s what I’m gonna be.” And you don’t know whether to envy the child his simplistic notion of the cop’s life, or pity him for it. In a discussion of the LP with NME, “There’s one [song] called ‘Jolly Coppers on Parade’ which isn’t an absolutely anti-police song. Maybe it’s even a fascist song. I didn’t notice at the time.” I tell you, the guy’s a crack-up.
Upon first listen, the slow, string-laden “In Germany Before the War” is simply a sad song about a sad man who’s “looking at the river,” but “thinking of the sea” and his encounter with a little girl. Nothing overt happens between the two, but the song’s dark, suggestive undertones (“We lie beneath the autumn sky/My little golden girl and I/And she lies very still”) resonate disquietingly until you come to learn its subject is Peter Kürten, the German serial killer and so-called Vampire of Düsseldorf, many of whose victims during the mid- to late-1920s were little girls.
Follow-up “Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America” is one of Newman’s stranger and funnier tunes. In it, he plays the role of Sigmund Freud, and proceeds to graphically delve into what he perceives as the fantasy life of your average American. To the sound of patriotic marching music, he sings, “Americans dream of gypsies, I have found/Gypsy knives and gypsy thighs/That pound and pound and pound and pound/And African appendages that almost reach the ground/And little boys playing baseball in the rain.” That final line is sheer genius, as is the song’s ironic conclusion: “America, America/Step out into the light/You’re the best dream man has ever dreamed/And may all your Christmases be white.” The line “Step out into the light” is honest and the line that follows it is not. And that “white” doesn’t refer to snow.
“Baltimore” is one of Newman’s saddest and loveliest compositions. An irony-free meditation on urban blight, set to a plaintive and repetitive piano, the guitar work of Glenn Frey, and the backing vocals of Frey and J.D. Souther, its opening lines offer up a brilliantly simple metaphor for a city abandoned to a dismal fate: “Beat-up little seagull/On a marble stair/Tryin’ to find the ocean/Lookin’ everywhere.” And the chorus is one of the purest cries of despair you’ll ever hear: “Oh, Baltimore/Man, it’s hard just to live/Oh, Baltimore/Man, it’s hard just to live, just to live.” The song also resonates with the voice of a child dreaming of escape; “Buy a big old wagon,” he sings, “Gonna haul us all away,” before swearing, “Never comin’ back here/’Til the day I die.” “
I’ll Be Home” is an older song, and consists of a simple declaration of love to a wandering woman. It’s my least favorite song on the LP, because while sad it’s hardly in the same league as “Baltimore,” and lacks the double-edge of irony provided by an unreliable narrator, such as you get on Newman’s more psychologically complex love songs, Good Old Boys’ “Marie” for example.
Of “Rider in the Rain” Newman told NME, “There’s also one about me as a cowboy called ‘Rider in the Rain.’ I think it’s ridiculous. The Eagles are on there. That’s what’s good about it.” And the funny thing is, he’s right. The idea of Newman as a cowboy (“Got a gun in my holster/Got a horse between my knee/And I’m goin’ to Arizona/Pardon me, boys, if you please”) IS ridiculous, and the Eagles are great, providing wonderful backing vocals that practically make the song. Their “He’s a rider in the rain” offer the perfect intro for him to interject, “I’m a rider in the rain!” And, “You know I’m a rider!” And I love the moment after the false fadeout when he says, “Take it boys,” and they throw out a lovely series of “Oohs.” Mock the Eagles if you must, but in “Rider in the Rain” the fake cowboys finally find themselves the perfect ersatz cowboy song—and nail the sum’num bitch like a rattlesnake skin to a corral post.
“Kathleen (Catholicism Made Easier)” never made much of an impression on me, because its “I’ve always been crazy ‘bout Irish girls” says nothing, really, nor does the rest of the song, so far as I can tell. To a vaguely Steely Dan-like melody Newman sings some Spanish, calls Kathleen the “best one in the world,” and throws out a lot of heys, but after establishing the scene (“There is a courtyard here in Chicago/Down by the river where no one goes/We could be married there in the courtyard/By this old Spanish priest that no one knows”) absolutely nothing happens. There’s no humor, no irony, no sly sense of double play, no hidden message—no nothing.
LP closer “Old Man on the Farm,” on the other hand, is a mystery story without any clues. In a mere few dozen words, and to the accompaniment of just his piano, Newman tells a tale that I’ve pondered to no good end for years. It opens with a description of the farmer waiting for some rain, the mail, and the dawn, then goes on to a simple description of his daily chores (“Milk the cow/Slop the pigs/Sweepin’ out the chicken house/Drinkin’ whiskey in the barn”). So far, not much. Then Newman throws a knuckleball in the form of some lines that have nothing whatsoever to do with what’s come before: “Goodnight ladies/Sorry if I stayed too long/So long, it’s been good to know you/I love the way I sing that song.” Then repeats the final two lines, and that’s it, end of tune. And it all leads you to wonder who’s singing those final lines (Newman? the farmer?) and what exactly they mean. Is the farmer going to kill himself? Or is Newman apologizing to us, and sarcastically praising his own interpretative skills? Or does it all mean something altogether different? I don’t know, and I don’t think I’ll ever know, which is one reason I love this song so. It’s opaque, cryptic, and hints at a deeper meaning it has no intention of explaining.
Little Criminals is Randy Newman at his sly best. With the possible exception of the Bob Dylan of The Basement Tapes, I can think of no artist whose songs and lyrics mean as much to me, or go as deep. But I’ve gone on too long, as usual. So allow me to close by saying, Goodnight ladies, sorry if I stayed too long. So long, it’s been good to know you. I love the way he sings that song.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 5/30/14
