By Larry Schwartz
RANDY Newman wrapped his arms about his chest. “I like it when I make myself laugh,” he said. “Maybe I’ve done so much comedy to cheer myself up while I’m working, you know.”
Half a century since he started out as a professional songwriter, Newman, who turns 68 this year, talked of the confidence-sapping anxiety, conceding he could see himself “being happier if I didn’t have to write any more and maybe I don’t. I don’t know”.
He remembered a telephone conversation with Jimi Hendrix when he unsuccessfully approached him to play guitar on one of his songs. “He says I don’t read music and I said, Ah Jeez, it doesn’t matter. Then he said, you’re a Sagittarius; he said I am too. He just sounded not confident. Like you think a genius like that would be. But I know better. A lot of people like that aren’t very confident…”
Later Newman confided: “I am so down on the whole writing process and on myself. I’m not confident at all.”
Months after winning a second Academy Award for best original song, We Belong Together, in the movie Toy Story 3, the celebrated singer-songwriter, film music composer and arranger was on tour in Australia for the first time in 28 years.
“There is a certain point where I got busy doing movies all the time,” he explained his lengthy absence the chilly afternoon we met at the ABC Southbank Centre, days before his performances at the Victorian Arts Centre with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
“The singer Graham Parker and the novelist John Irving, both certified short people, told me how impressed they were that a ‘short person like Randy Newman had the nerve to write a song like that’,” critic Greil Marcus once wrote of his controversial Short People. “Both were visibly unhappy to learn of Randy’s excessive height.”
The sad truth is the master of ironic songs sung from the perspective of “untrustworthy narrators” – bigots, creeps, miscreants and others – is of medium height.
The song was a crowd pleaser with Australian audiences, as predictably was Political Science, in which an aggrieved US patriot, suggests nuking unappreciative countries but saving Australia. “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo…/ They’ve got surfin’ too”.
“It’s just kind of a babyish arrogance,” Newman told me.
Onstage, his endearing blues-inflected vocals and distinctive, New Orleans-influenced piano style made all the more seductive his slave trader’s pitch, Sail Away.
But there was a notable omission from the program. “That’s about the darkest song I ever wrote,” he said of Old Man, in which a cold-hearted son reminds his dying father he has taught him there is no comforting God. “I don’t play it live because I can’t get the audience back to laugh. When you come on and you’re playing a guy that is as cold as the guy in that song is, it’s hard for them to like you again.”
Though he mostly sings in character, it’s tempting to hear this one as autobiographical. “I wrote, I always thought, the roughest stuff till rap came along and changed things and that (song) is … about the toughest. And when my dad did die, it was close to being the case…”
Music is in the blood. Newman’s physician father, Irving, once wrote a song for Bing Crosby. But it was his Hollywood composer and conductor uncles Alfred, Lionel and Emil who he came to mind when he stepped away from the piano on occasion to wield the baton and conduct his scores for Toy Story, The Natural, Maverick and Avalon.
“My percentages aren’t great,” he’d said in his recent Academy Award acceptance speech. It had been his second win after 20 Oscar nominations. He last won the Academy Award in 2001 for the song I Didn’t Have You from Monsters Inc .
“I take it more seriously than anything, maybe because the family,” he said of his film work when we met.
He remembered a famous uncle who won nine Oscars, playing him songs when he was just 10. “He did 200 pictures, Alfred, and in my opinion he was the best that has ever been. Even as an adult I feel that way. But he didn’t look like this was easy. He was always worried-looking…”
Newman’s most autobiographical song is a childhood reminiscence, Dixie Flyer, which begins with a train trip from Los Angeles to his mother’s hometown, New Orleans, during World War II. But he was not sure if his uncles who came to meet them “in a great green Hudson” were, as he sang, “drinkin’ rye whisky from a flask in the back seat/ tryin’ to do like the Gentiles do…”
The nights I saw him in Melbourne, Newman left the stage to a standing ovation after his glorious Louisiana 1927, a song about a historic flood that became an anthem after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
He came back to sing Lonely at the Top and finished up with the bleak I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.
“Lonely,” he sang. “Lonely.”
He’d had us singing “he’s dead/he’s dead” to another song parodying entertainers who refuse to retire.
But he told me his most recent album of new songs, Harps and Angels, might have been his best and, looking back over his lengthy career, there “certainly isn’t a big decline in any way”.
Big Issue
Larry Schwartz Writer 