Post-war pop has produced a lot of great songwriters, but not even such singular talents
as Leiber and Stoller, Bob Dylan, or Tom T. Hall are quite like Randy Newman.
Musically, Newman reaches back to an earlier era, the
film soundtrack work that is his family business
informing his pop songcraft as much as the New Orleans
R&B that is his equal love. But, conceptually, it’s Newman’s
reliance on songwriting’s most daring, perilous, and increasingly
rare construct the untrustworthy narrator that has set
him apart. When most listeners hear a song in the first person,
they assume that the perspective being shared is that of the
singer, but in the world of Randy Newman, it is rarely that simple.
Newman isn’t the only major artist to find an audience
despite, or even because of, having his songs misunderstood.
How many of Chuck Berry’s fans (especially the white teens who
were probably his primary audience) heard “Brown-Eyed
Handsome Man” as a black-power anthem or “Promised Land” as a
Freedom Rides travelogue? How many of the stadium masses
heard the bitter defiance in Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In the
U.S.A.” rather than patriotic pride? And how many of the record
buyers and radio programmers who made Little Richard’s “Lucille”
or Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” into hits fully grasped the
sexual anarchy on display?
It’s easy to see that same kind of misreading as an
explanation for Newman’s two actual hits. “Short People” was a
commentary on the know-nothingism that perpetuates bigotry,
but it shot up the charts as a novelty. And the deeply sardonic
“I Love L.A.” was embraced by city boosters who missed the
one lyric that gives the game away: “Look at that bum over
there, man!/He’s down on his knees!” But the explanation isn’t
quite that easy. The simple bigotry of “Short People” is
supposedly undercut by the liberal platitudes of the refrain “Short
People are just the same/As you and I/All men are brothers/Until
the day they die,” but in practice, it works the other way around,
as the familiar pieties are shot down by the narrator’s far
more entertaining ignorance: “They got little baby legs/And they
stand so low/You got to pick ’em up/Just to say hello.” The joy
so many took in the song may have had less to do with the
song’s ironic commentary on bigotry than with the opportunity it
afforded to express aggression in a manner a bit more
suitable than picking on more legitimately aggrieved groups.
That Newman doesn’t erase the distance between himself and
the narrator only serves to confirm this reading and forces the
listener to evaluate his or her own enjoyment of the song.
Only with his very cheapest jokes does Newman mock
his narrators, even at their meanest, cruelest, or most perverse.
And it’s this nerviness that’s allowed Newman to give voice to
so many unlikely, and unlikable, characters: the sexual predator
in “Suzanne,” the carnival huckster in “Davy the Fat Boy,”
the pimp in “Same Girl,” the governor of Louisiana in “Kingfish.”
But Newman’s bravery can also be as emotionally
devastating as it is intellectually satisfying. On “Old Man,” he
gives voice to a man at his father’s deathbed telling him to give up
the ghost (“Won’t be no God to comfort/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”). On “Louisiana
1927,” he recounts the flooding of the Mississippi as God’s
punishment of the South (“What has happened down here is the
winds have changed/Clouds roll in from the north and it starts to
rain”), and on “I Want You To Hurt Like I Do” and, later, “I
Miss You,” he gives disarmingly cold voice to a man leaving his
wife and children. “I just want you to hurt like I do,”
Newman’s father says to his young son before walking out the door,
then he tweaks an old Sam Cooke refrain: “Honest, I do. Honest,
I do. Honest, I do.”
But if the untrustworthy narrator is Newman’s
trademark literary device, American know-nothingism (and the
cultural and economic privilege that drives it) is his great subject. In
the early part of his career, this subject manifested itself most
strongly by investigating racism with a fearlessness perhaps
unrivaled among white popular artists in America. Newman’s second,
and best, album, 12 Songs, paired the old Cotton Club song
“Underneath the Harlem Moon” with the original “Yellow Man.”
But that acknowledgment of racism’s historical allure was only a
setup for the explosion to come. With “Sail Away,” the title song of
his next album, Newman crafted his masterpiece, an
advertisement for the slave trade in which beauty and horror intermingle.
Newman’s consideration of racism in America was
broadened with Good Old Boys, his concept album about the South, but
in recent years, his social criticism has expanded to include
failed patriarchy writ large. The decade-apart paired singles “It’s
Money That I Love” and “It’s the Money That Matters” set the
scene; the trickle-down boogie of “Roll With the Punches” raised
the stakes. But Newman gave the subject its fullest treatment
with his last album, and his best since 12
Songs, 1999’s Bad Love.
Presaging the current Bush administration,
Bad Love is a concept album about old white men clinging to power, with nine of
the album’s 12 songs about failed patriarchy. Newman’s
protagonists can be repulsively familiar, like the despicable lecher of “Shame,”
or comically clueless, like the aging rocker of “I’m Dead (But I
Don’t Know It).” Twice, the singer plays an ugly old bastard preying
on women half his age, and twice, he plays the same old bastard
giving jaded advice to a younger counterpart. The same guy from
“Shame,” who implores the “little baby girl” to come over and see his
new Lexus, turns around on “Better Off Dead” to complain about
women who “just treat you like dirt/They make you feel all fat and
fumbly/Make you feel kind of dirty.”
But nowhere does Newman nail his subject with as light
a touch as on the Broadway lilt of “The World Isn’t Fair.” Here,
he exhumes Karl Marx, brings him to his big house on the hill,
and explains that, while Marx’s aims were noble, they just didn’t
work out in an unfair world. He introduces Marx to his wealthy,
aging friends who are paired with beautiful second wives half their
age. “I’m glad I’m living in the land of the free,” Newman adds,
singing from the sunny side of the economic divide with far
more reluctant sympathy than sarcasm or bitterness, “where the
rich just get richer and the poor you don’t ever have to see.”
The liberal cynic in Newman may shrink from his characters’
crassness, but he doesn’t shrink too much. He acknowledges
complicity. After all, their rewards are his for the taking.
Randy Newman
Bartlett Performing Arts
and Conference Center
Friday, August 16th
Local Beat
by Andria Lisle
Just drop this 45 rpm single on your turntable and watch the
black wax spin: “I’m in Memphis,
Tennessee,” croons a soulful voice. “Now, c’mon
and break down!” And the music does just
that, dropping straight into a hip-hop rhythm. The voice belongs to Oliver Sain, an
underrated giant of Southern soul, but the beats are courtesy of
Red Eye Jedi, aka 27-year-old Luke
Sexton of Memphix Records.
The Memphix label goes ’round as loops from Rufus Thomas and
Howlin’ Wolf hit the speakers. “You know,”
Sexton says after the track is over, “I have
newfound respect for this city. When I started
getting into samples, I realized that half of the
music I loved was Memphis music.”
Sexton and 24-year-old Chad “Chase One”
Weekley are the brains behind Memphix, along with Chicago-based
DJ Dante Carfagna. They started the hip-hop label in 1999, pressing an average
of 500 copies per single. “The label just happened,” Weekley explains. “Nobody
was doing hip-hop 45s at the time. We decided to cut a split single with Dante, then
he came up with the Memphix logo. Things kept rolling from there.”
“DJ Klever started winning European competitions right after we put out
his record,” says Weekley. “So we headed overseas for two weeks. It was a good
experience. We made excellent contacts. When we went back a year later, we
had 13 shows set up.”
That second visit was wild. Carfagna was on tour with DJ Shadow and
Cut Chemist, huge stars on the international hip-hop scene. “They were like
the Beatles,” Weekley recalls. “I’d never
been involved with anything like that walking off the bus and seeing a street
loaded with kids. I thought, What the hell? That ain’t happening in Memphis.”
According to Weekley, the local hip-hop scene suffers from a lack of
organization. “I can’t walk down the street
and sell 100 Memphix records locally,” he explains. “I need to go out of town to
handle my business. You just can’t do it here.”
But Memphis remains Weekley’s and Sexton’s home base for now. “I do love
it here,” says Sexton, who continues to draw inspiration from the local music
scene. “Right now, I’m taking a lot of Willie
Hall breaks and working ’em into my new record.” Hall, a session drummer
who’s backed Isaac Hayes and the Blues Brothers, currently plays with
The Bo-Keys, a Stax-influenced instrumental group
led by bassist Scott Bomar.
Both Sexton and Weekley are big fans. “I’d like to see the Bo-Keys
on Memphix,” Weekley says. “It would
help them open some doors in Europe, where people want to hear original players
like Willie Hall. I was just over there, and there were plenty of decent bands [in
that vein] but none as good as the Bo-Keys.”
As a record collector, Sexton says he has “about 1,500 hip-hop records,
500 jazz records, some blues, high school marching bands, movie soundtracks “
“We’re just getting started
collecting,” Weekley claims, though he’s been
digging for vinyl for a decade now. Both cite River Records on South Highland as
one of their preferred haunts. “I got the Memphians’ single on Bluff City
Records there,” Weekley says, referring to a
rare instrumental track from the early ’70s. “It’s so hard to find.”
His favorite Memphis record is an obscurity by
Ricky Calloway called “Get It Right” on the
Camaro label. It was recorded by Style Wooten,
who, Weekley explains, “ran an ad in the
newspaper saying, ‘Come on in and cut a record.’ He’d
press up 100 copies of anything. You could walk
in and scream, and he’d record you!” A single
by Gran Am, on Wooten’s J’Ace imprint, was another lucky find.
“It sounds like it was recorded with the mics
in one room and the drums out on the street,” Sexton laughs.
“Very funky and very low budget.”
With only dozens of copies originally pressed, singles by Gran Am
and Calloway are rare finds today, and, thanks to exposure from DJs like Weekley
and Sexton, they might go for hundreds of dollars on eBay. “That makes it hard
to find fresh stuff,” Sexton says, somewhat frustrated. “But that’s how it goes
keep the supply low, so there will be a demand.”
It’s an ongoing tradition: All five Memphix 45s, released in pressings
of 500 or less, have quickly sold out. “We sold all the copies of our last record
in the first day,” Weekley says proudly. Two hundred copies were shipped to
Europe and Japan, and 100 went straight to New York. Dusty Groove, a mail-order
company in Chicago, took the rest. “I held
onto a handful,” says Weekley, “so I only had
15 copies left to sell in Memphis.” n
Andria Lisle covers local music news
and notes each week in Local Beat. You can e-mail her at localbeat@memphisflyer.com.
Memphix with The Bo-Keys
The Hi-Tone Café
Saturday, August 17th