Gather round, youngsters, and I’ll tell you of a long-gone age in which the species known as auteur singer-songwriter was nurtured – indulged even – and encouraged to ply its art for art’s sake, free from the tentacular constrictions of commerce and the penury of public relations management. Meditate a moment and the names might swim into view like fragments of headlines in a Citizen Kane newsreel: Tim Buckley, Laura Nyro, Nilsson – and now the subject of the book under review: Randy Newman, crown prince of AOR sarcasm and satire, best known, ironically, for his most unironic songs, the ones carefully tailored and stitched into Pixar movies.
That Newman can sell a tune as warmhearted as Toy Story’s You’ve Got a Friend in Me is largely because of a long and distinguished career as an equal-opportunities offender: of short people, of rednecks, of American hucksters on both sides of the aisle. Here’s a Jewish-American boy of New Orleans origins who dared to use racial and sexual slurs in song lyrics in order to make the same serrated point as any novelist or playwright.
There’s no disputing that Newman – scion of a Hollywood composer dynasty – has earned his entry in the great American songbook. What’s more debatable is whether or not his biographical arc merits Robert Hilburn’s 500-page study. It’s not that there’s no story, but from the perspective of, say, a struggling twentysomething musician stranded in the hostile climate of 21st-century culture, A Few Words… reads like a fuzzy-hued flashback to a golden age of artistic privilege, days when there was a music industry (as in, a functioning system in which people actually got paid for production of goods and services); when forward thinking executives such as Newman’s childhood friend Lenny Waronker, or Warners legend Mo Ostin, were prepared to invest in talent over the long term, even if that long term included seasons of their investment sitting in shag-carpeted rooms stewing over the agonies of songwriter’s block, or logging weeks in high-end LA recording facilities with string sections on call, or humming and hawing over whether or not to play live.
Uncomfortable topics such as the collapse of Newman’s first marriage are dealt with in a few paragraphs, and the extensive – I would say excessive – quoting of song lyrics feels baggy
Hilburn, once a long-term senior pop critic for the Los Angeles Times, and author of biographies of American institutions such as Johnny Cash and Paul Simon, has for this book managed to gain access to Newman himself, his family members, friends, musical collaborators and film and music industry allies. Accordingly, he writes like an insider, not just in terms of the subject’s personal circle, but the old boys’ club of the music biz in general, with its gold watch luncheons, Rock‘n’Roll Hall of Fame gossip and plush restaurant pow-wows about album budgets (as opposed to the present-day model, a coffee in Dunkin’ Donuts).
There’s such a thing as being too close to a subject. A Few Words… begins with not one but two prologues so intent on framing Newman as America’s song laureate, they risk hagiography. Hilburn’s prose is functional but fusty, prone to song descriptors such as “lively” and “fun”. (Cammell’s and Roeg’s weirdo psychotropic gangster classic Performance, whose soundtrack featured Newman on a number of tunes, is summed up as “morbid” and “sexually charged” – sold!). Interstitial testimonials from Laurel Canyon luminaries such as Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt and Don Henley read like carefully pre-chewed emails or book jacket blurbs. The best, by far, are from Pulitzer winner Wesley Morris and veteran critic Robert Christgau, both of whom have stuff to say and voices with which to say it.
Hilburn works best as a researcher who can contextualise Newman’s more historically and conceptually ambitious works: the slaver-shyster saga Sail Away, the recurring flood myth of Louisiana 1927, the audacious Faust musical. But he has a habit of substituting analysis for statistics: Village Voice poll performances, Rotten Tomatoes percentages, Oscar nominations, box office numbers. Every statement is loaded in Newman’s favour, every defeat is framed as a secret victory, every criticism equivocated: a perpetual case for the defence when there’s no prosecution. Uncomfortable topics such as the collapse of Newman’s first marriage are dealt with in a few paragraphs, and the extensive – I would say excessive – quoting of song lyrics feels baggy. Deprived of the rhythm, the vocal phrasing, the music itself, these verses appear exactly as they are – unbolted components of a song.
If you’re a Newman fan you’ll want to read this book, regardless, but the casual browser is left with the lingering feeling that the man’s albums will tell us all we need to know. For me, A Few Words in Defense of Our Nation comes freighted with an unexpected resonance: it acts as a memorial for an operating system that has been dismantled, plundered and sold or given away for free. Gen-Z artists will read these pages and shake their heads in disbelief that there was once an era when musicians were measured by the metric of their work and not their appearance or identity, when they weren’t forced to upskill, or sideskill, or downskill, as influencers and merch sales forces; a time when A&R people strategised careers, labels provided tour support, records generated revenue, and magazines such as Rolling Stone took chances and put curmudgeons on their cover. Disillusioned, they might ask some AI song generator to write them a Randy Newman type satirical number suitable for Spotify’s yacht rock playlist. Call it Not OK Boomer.
Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River (Faber). He performs and records as Cursed Murphy
