"Maybe people want personal confessions. Maybe that's why I don't sell 2 million records. In fact, I always thought people could tell what I was like from my stuff more easily than they necessarily could tell about a confessional kind of songwriter ... I don't know what [Dan] Fogelberg is like from his songs. You can tell what I'm like."

-- Playboy interview, 1987

People feel like they know Randy Newman, that they know someone just like him. Tall and a little awkward, cynical but sort of sensitive, smarter than you but not shouting about it. Someone who wants you to like him, though you can't imagine being really close friends. Someone who lives like you -- wife, a couple of kids, maybe even watches the same TV shows you do. But someone who thinks about things you never do and maybe late at night, after he's had a couple, even talks about them.

Newman was born Nov. 28, 1944, in New Orleans, where his mother's people were from. It was there, in that jambalaya of colors and creeds, that he learned some of the puzzling rules of race, as recalled in a rare bit of autobiography, "New Orleans Wins the War":

Momma used to wheel me past an ice cream wagon
One side for white, one side for colored ...
Momma used to take me to Audobon Park
Show me the ways of the world
She'd say, "Here comes a white boy
There goes a black one
That one's an octoroon ...

The boy's puzzlement over society's divisions continued after the family moved to Los Angeles when he was 7. His father, Irving, dabbled in songwriting but became a successful doctor with a celebrity practice. His brothers were stars, too; Alfred composed or conducted the music for more than 200 films, everything from "Dead End" to "The King and I." As musical director at 20th Century Fox, he wielded considerable power (his brass fanfare is still heard when the studio's logo is shown at the beginning of a Fox film), but there were other forces afoot in the world, as Randy discovered.

"When Randy was a kid, he was invited to the Riviera Country Club by some girl for a cotillion," Randy's father told Timothy White (in an article included in the "Guilty" booklet). "The night of the ball the girl's father called and said, 'I'm sorry, Randy, my daughter had no right to invite you because no Jews are allowed.' Randy said, 'That's all right sir,' and he hung up the phone and said, 'Hey, Dad, what's a Jew?'"

Clearly, the Newmans weren't what you would call observant and the revelation of his Jewishness prompted in Randy a study of comparative religion that made him a devout atheist ("except when I'm sick"). But the awareness of his otherness (like the otherness he'd seen assigned to blacks in New Orleans) had a subversive effect on his schooling as well. He already hated school (his glasses and a cross-eyed condition made him the subject of much derision), but his pursuit of America's other history put the lie to what he was being taught as well. Those contrary currents in America's story run throughout his work, from "Sail Away" to all of "Good Old Boys" to "Bad Love's" Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque "Great Nations of Europe," with its cheerful description of Indians "torn apart by dogs on religious grounds they say." The message throughout is woe be to the outsider, and Newman would doubtless delight in the joke Stanley Kubrick told Michael Herr: "What's the American dream?" "A million blacks swimming back to Africa with a Jew under each arm."

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Everybody gather round
Pick up what I'm putting down
Got to dig this crazy sound, it won't hurt you
If you've got music in your heart
Then you've made a real good start
Your love of music never will desert you

-- "Days of Heaven," 1987

It may be unfair to call Newman a child prodigy though there is a photo of him sitting at the piano in his diapers, at age 8-and-a-half months, and it looks like he knows his way around. He learned firsthand of scoring films, as lifelong friend, producer and proponent Lenny Waronker recalls in his notes in the "Guilty" boxed set:

"When we were kids, Randy and I used to hang around the soundstage and watch his uncle work," Waronker writes. "It was unbelievable -- to be seven or eight and watch a piece of film go by in a room filled with 85 musicians playing the soundtrack. We saw the whole thing happen. It helped us understand how music transforms film. And it influenced the way we listen to music."

By a form of musical osmosis (family, radio, self-education) young Randy picked up on everything from classical to classic American (Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, George Gershwin) and spiced it all with a dose of New Orleans soul, courtesy of Fats Domino. Not that those influences were evidenced in the pop ditties he wrote for Metric Music as a teenager. "He was a lonely guy," Waronker recalls, "no girlfriends, was hard to get through to, and he'd work so hard on those songs. But he'd get terrible writing blocks and couldn't ever satisfy himself." But the numbers he created (unremarkable June-moon stuff, by and large) were soon being covered by everyone from Irma Thomas to Harper's Bazaar, culminating in an entire album's worth of his material done by then-boy-wonder Harry Nilsson ("Nilsson Sings Newman"). The oft-tackled "Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear" (1965) was, according to Newman, "the first song I wrote where I wasn't trying to be Carole King. It was the first song I wrote that sounds like me." True, with its stride piano and comic imagery, there is something distinctly likable about "Simon" (which Newman himself recorded on "Sail Away"). But there is a note of apprehension there as well -- "They'll love us, won't they?/They feed us, don't they?" -- boy and bear linked in servitude, performing for each meal.

In 1967 Waronker (who had joined Warner's Reprise label as an A&R man) signed his boyhood friend to the label and, working with legendary producer and Beach Boy collaborator Van Dyke Parks, began work on Newman's debut, "Randy Newman Creates Something New Under the Sun" (1968). Even in the post "Sgt. Pepper"/"Pet Sounds" musical landscape of the day, Newman's opener was a stunner: Eleven songs (most under three minutes long), filled with shifting beats, obscure lyrics and varied landscapes, were brought to life in arrangements that involved everything from solo piano to a 75-piece orchestra. Then there was Newman's voice (which one critic likened to "a frightened bison") croaking its way through tales of lost cowboys, Utah ("the friendly Beehive State") and the songwriter's first masterpiece, "Davy the Fat Boy." The narrator, asked by Davy's parents to look after their charge, puts him in a sideshow instead, challenging people to guess his weight. It contains the immortal call to accept the grotesque -- "You've got to let this fat boy in your life!" -- that Marcus likened to Nathanael West and Sherwood Anderson, and set a standard Newman often felt he fell short of.

"I'm interested in people's reactions to 'Davy the Fat Boy,'" he told Chuck Marshall in 1978. "I never get tired of doing 'Davy,' when I really think of it ... it depresses me that I wrote it so long ago. I don't know that I've written stuff much better than that."

Audiences apparently did not want something new under the sun, though, and Newman's debut slipped away largely unheard (though critics were mostly kind and even the Beatles were said to have dug it). With "12 Songs" (1970), Newman and Waronker tried a whole new approach: Armed with a stripped-down quartet (featuring Ry Cooder on slide guitar and Milt Holland's percussive genius) and a dozen gem-like story-songs, Newman's second album blew holes in the increasingly bombastic pop music fabric of the day. "Suzanne" was decidedly not the Leonard Cohen composition (this girl's name is found in a telephone booth, inspiring rape fantasies in the singer), "Lucinda" featured a girl in her high school graduation gown killed by a beach-cleaning machine, and "Let's Burn Down the Cornfield" was an invitation to do just that. And after the experimentation of his first album Newman had found his vocal style as well, singing in a voice that could only be called black-influenced. This, taken with the sleeve photo of the singer standing with his wife and child, backlit by a Vons supermarket, explains Waronker's handle for his friend: "The King of the Suburban Blues Singers."

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