By Dwight Garner
Randy Newman was a nepo baby, a sprig of musical royalty. Three of his uncles were Hollywood film composers. One received 45 Oscar nominations and won nine times.
Newman’s father wanted to be a composer. His parents, sensing the family needed to diversify its portfolio, dissuaded him. He became a physician with a celebrity-studded clientele. Those celebrities included Pat Boone, the bland pop singer, who tried to get young Randy signed to the publishing arm of his label.
Randy didn’t need Boone — or anyone else. He was writing songs professionally while still in his teens and by his early 20s was recognized as an uncommon sort of genius. His first four records, released between 1968 and 1974, floored those who knew the real thing when they heard it. His songs were literate, mocking and dense with the ghosts of American history.
His greatness did not go unsung. Rolling Stone named Newman Rock Star of the Year for 1971, the same year Marvin Gaye released “What’s Going On,” Joni Mitchell released “Blue” and the Rolling Stones released “Sticky Fingers.”
He broke through to the rest of America six years later, when his song “Short People” began blasting from car radios. Here was an anchovy amid pop radio’s peaches. Many can remember where they were when they first heard it. No one could recall a hit like it. It was a novelty song with a poison tip.
“Short People” was hilarious (“you got to pick ’em up just to say hello”) and, oh, it was cruel (“short people got no reason to live”). It divided people; some highly cheesed-off little people began to picket his concerts.
Newman wrote songs with unreliable narrators, so many listeners gave him the benefit of the doubt about “Short People.” When interviewers asked, “The song’s all about prejudice, isn’t it?” he would reply, “Yeah.” He later commented: “But it wasn’t at the beginning. I just thought it was funny and it was. I wrote it because we needed an up song.”
Newman made more critically admired albums, but he wouldn’t have another major hit until he entered the family business: film music. He wrote and sang “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the theme song for the Pixar movie “Toy Story,” one of the highest grossing films of 1995. He went on to write songs and scores for many other movies.
The Pixar work brought him new fans but baffled old ones. It was like learning that Ambrose Bierce or Lenny Bruce had written a picture book about a bunny. For Newman — to co-opt a line from his mighty song “Louisiana 1927,” which has been a beloved standard in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 — the money rolled all day, the money rolled all night.
Newman, 80, is a serious, complicated man who deserves a serious, complicated biography. Robert Hilburn’s new book, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman,” is not that book. It’s a toothless hagiography packed with obvious filler, notably extended quotations from song lyrics and panegyrics from admirers.
Hilburn, who was a longtime pop critic for the Los Angeles Times, has written well-received biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon, but his talents are not in evidence here. This book demonstrates little feel for Newman’s music. I wanted it to contain memorable ideas and sentences, but it does not.
If this book has a theme, it’s Newman’s lack of comfort in his own body and in America writ large. He was born a bit cross-eyed and was bullied. His shyness blended, as it often will, with misanthropy. He liked to stay inside, reading books and watching television. He was in several car crashes when young, and had health problems throughout his life.
He felt like an outsider because of his Jewishness. One of his songs, “Dixie Flyer,” describes what it felt like to arrive in New Orleans with his mother early on, and trying to fit in. Asked about assimilation in an interview, he gave an answer that still resonates:
“That’s never been done. There have been thousands of Jewish songwriters, and they have never done it. To be Jewish in America is different. No one wants to be an American more than a Jew. Irving Berlin was more American than John Wayne. But there’s a lack of comfort here for Jews, somehow. Is this really our country? And I think sometimes, maybe not.”
Newman is not presented as an angel. He had a drug period. He left his wife of 16 years for a 21-year-old Cal State student in 1983. But any grit is relentlessly sanded down.
Newman’s best songs carry you through six or seven emotions in a few stanzas, and they disturb the sediment at the bottom of the American experiment. “Sail Away” is related in the voice of a slave trader; “Rednecks” refuses to let the North off the hook for its racism; “Political Science” provides sardonic encouragement to “drop the big one now.”
There is a lot of knockabout humanity, and sympathy for the underdog, in his work. He’s been a consummate and contrary user of the English language. A better-reported and more critical biography will probably have to wait until Newman, and others central to his story, are no longer with us.
In the early 1970s, Newman wrote a subversive song for Frank Sinatra about celebrity. Sinatra didn’t get the joke, so Newman recorded it himself. Something about the song captured Newman’s own ambivalent and awkward embrace of fame:
Listen, all you fools out there
Go on and love me — I don’t care
Oh, it’s lonely at the top.
Publication Notes:
“A Few Words In Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman”
By Robert Hilburn
Hachette. 513 pages. $34.
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