Novelist and musician Damien Wilkins looks closely at the layered life and lyrics of Randy Newman.<\/p>\n
This essay is adapted from a talk given at the WORD Festival in \u014ctautahi, Christchurch, for a panel called \u2018This Band Could Be Your Life\u2019.<\/p>\n
Randy Newman mostly exists in the wider public\u2019s mind, if at all, as the guy who wrote that song \u2018Short People\u2019, you know the one about how short people got no reason to live and how they wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet. That isn\u2019t the song I\u2019ve chosen to read closely today but I do think it\u2019s worth pausing on it.<\/p>\n
First of all, though, let\u2019s say some basic things. Randy Newman was born in 1943, so he\u2019s over 80 now. He was born into a musical family of a very special sort. His three uncles were all composers of film scores in Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age. The most famous of them, Alfred Newman, won several Academy Awards and the uncles were powerful figures in Randy\u2019s childhood, and from a very early age Randy was known as an intensely gifted musician. Now Randy\u2019s father was the only brother who wasn\u2019t a professional musician. He was dissuaded from it by his father and became a doctor, a successful Beverly Hills physician who treated, among others, Pat Boone, but he wanted to be a musician. We need to remember that fact when we come to the song I\u2019ve chosen, which is about that father.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now because of this orchestral\/classical music background and because he composes and sings with the piano in a style influenced mainly by Black musicians such as his beloved Ray Charles and Fats Domino \u2013 he spent some of his early years in New Orleans \u2013 it\u2019s hard to put Randy Newman comfortably inside rock music. Indeed when he started recording his own material, Newman said he wanted to write popular music as if the Rolling Stones had never happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s also hard to put him inside the standard literary singer-songwriter genre with people like Bob Dylan or Neil Young or Leonard Cohen, who basically strummed a guitar. There\u2019s an interview in which Newman talks about his great song \u2018Suzanne\u2019, which is about a creep who reads a woman\u2019s name and number in a phone booth and sings to her, imagining she could love him, and Newman admits that it was a kind of answer or reply song to Leonard Cohen\u2019s classic song of the same name. He found that Cohen\u2019s famous line \u201cFor you\u2019ve touched her perfect body with your mind\u201d to be a bit meh. He joked that his song lived on a lower moral plane. And I\u2019ve always liked Newman\u2019s wish to re-route the source of emotion in songs, away from the self-conscious \u201cpoetry\u201d of confessional writing, to bring things down a peg or two to where most of us live. His songs might be full of these dexterous piano bits but lyrically they live in a plainspokenness. There\u2019s nothing on the surface that is hard to follow in the language. A typical Randy Newman love song early on will have a line like \u201cI\u2019m drunk right now, baby, but I\u2019ve got to be\/Or I never could tell you what you mean to me\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Randy Newman (Photo: W. Punt for Anefo, via WikiCommons)<\/p>\n
Generally, Newman doesn\u2019t write confessional autobiographical songs. He writes from someone\u2019s point of view, someone who is not Randy Newman. And, as his admiring critics have said, he writes as not about. If his subject is, say, racism, the lyrics are not about racism; they live inside the speaking voice or the singing voice and sometimes that person is the racist or the alcoholic or the spurned lover or the creep and more often than not, there\u2019s a moment when the white audience, when we (if we\u2019re white), we who might feel safe in condemning this person in the song, we who feel superior in our moral universe, we who feel different and distant from the singing voice, the character \u2013 because Newman above all creates characters, just like in short stories or novels \u2013 when we feel suddenly kind of squeamish, kind of implicated, not so pure or safe after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now back to \u2018Short People\u2019. If you are a long-time Randy Newman listener, you will probably want to defend your man, to prove to other people that the song isn\u2019t meant to be taken literally, that it\u2019s about prejudice rather than celebrating bigotry. Yes, but there\u2019s something else going on. Surely you have to contend not only with the song\u2019s relish of those mean details: \u201cThey got grubby little fingers\/And dirty little minds\/They\u2019re gonna get you every time\u201d and the great singalong jauntiness of the thing. And then you also won\u2019t get much support from the songwriter himself who thought the song wasn\u2019t about anything and the narrator of the song, whose voice announces this gleeful hostility, was simply deranged, in Newman\u2019s words \u201ca loon\u201d and he said he didn\u2019t think there was any great animus against short people, that it didn\u2019t exist in the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The song \u2013 Newman\u2019s biggest hit outside the songs he wrote much later for Disney kids movies \u2013 became a sour thing for him. There were protests against the song on behalf of short people. He said he lost his sense of humour about it and called the windfall the hit record gave him, \u201cdirty money\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How did it fall in my own life? Well, my best friend and I \u2013 and we were about 12 years old when it came out \u2013 we used to taunt his younger brother, who was indeed a very short person, by singing the song aggressively into his face and usually the brothers ended up punching each other, therefore proving that Randy Newman was wrong, and that the prejudice against short people was there all along and ready to explode in the boys bedrooms of Lower Hutt.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But how to think about such a song? The standard explanation that Randy Newman is doing a character kind of works but it feels like it leaves something out of the picture; it sort of sanitises it, removes the danger, the riskiness of it; how to cope with the glee in it, which is in excess of any irony? This quality the song carries of having too much gusto, too much loving detail, just too much. I was giving a workshop recently and someone asked me what was the difference between fiction and non-fiction in writing. And I said with fiction there\u2019s always something left over.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t do the biography here. (See Robert Hilburn\u2019s solid recent book<\/a> for the life.) It\u2019s useful to know that as a middle class kid growing up in Los Angeles, Randy Newman suffered from a condition which meant he went through a series of unsuccessful eye operations \u2013 these were really traumatic and he was bullied. His own adult children believe it marked him as someone who was always fighting for the underdog. (What a relief to find out from the biography that Newman was\/is a good father.)<\/p>\n