Randy Newman doesn’t understand why some artists get all the luck: “Joni being worshipped is an odd thing for me”
Since 1968, Randy Newman claims he’s garnered a consistent fanbase of 200,000 globally. That isn’t many for a musical genius. Perhaps the problem is that he once made the unfortunate admission that most of those 200,000 were “ugly”. This creates a predicament for all would-be fans. A natural self-marketer would’ve gone the Richard Ashcroft route, whereby the rocker once cleverly declared, “I have never had a bad review off a good-looking person”. Alas, Newman has never been adept at bolstering his appeal in a commercial manner.
Things get even worse for Newman on this front when his fanbase went down to 199,999 after he received a letter informing him that a fan had committed suicide while listening to a loop of his track ‘Laughing Boy’, Newman responded by saying, “Thank you, great compliment”. Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom for Newman or his followers; firstly, there’s the solace of his mastery, epitomised in the Leonard Cohen line, “We are ugly but we have the music.” Secondly, we also have likes of Bob Dylan in our Newman-loving ranks.
Heaping praise on his peer, Dylan told Paul Zollo in 1991, “Now Randy might not go out on stage and knock you out, or knock your socks off. And he’s not going to get people thrilled in the front row. He ain’t gonna do that,” which doesn’t sound like a strong start. In actual fact, it is not entirely true, at least not when he accidentally became the subject of death threats following the wildly misinterpreted ‘Short People’, prompting him to try to cover as much of his cranium with the mic-stand as possible while performing out of fear for diminutive retribution from the front row.
Happily, however, Dylan continues: “But he’s gonna write a better song than most people who can do it. You know, he’s got that down to an art. Now Randy knows music. He knows music. But it doesn’t get any better than ‘Louisiana’ or [‘Sail Away’]. It doesn’t get any better than that. It’s like a classically heroic anthem theme. He did it. There’s quite a few people who did it. Not that many people in Randy’s class.”
Never have truer words been spoken. But unlike most things Dylan has said, these words have never been given all that much regard. This is largely because of what Dylan says next: “His style is deceiving. He’s so laid back that you kind of forget he’s saying important things.” In other words, like a comedian at the Oscars, Newman is too much of a laughing matter to ever be genuinely revered in the traditional sense.
Although he is an ingenious addition to our dismal daily lives, our respect for the arts is still heavily rooted in the Renaissance-led Catholic traditions of grand artistry that speaks of the Gods, marble and sheer sincerity. Thus, the ‘Dean of Satire’ is never going to get the praise he deserves just yet for his decidedly more humanised output.
This much Newman can understand, however, there is one element of critical adulation that leaves him miffed. “No,” he says, his lack of success doesn’t bother him. “Occasionally, I’ll get briefly angry at the veneration accorded some writers, who the generation decides to give a free ride. Joni being worshipped is an odd thing for me.”
He continued to tell the Guardian: “Dylan knows he doesn’t write like he did on those first two records. The tremendous praise that the last two have gotten, I’m not so sure [that would have happened] if they didn’t have his name on it.”
In truth, this isn’t all that much of a mystery. The discourse of pop culture requires an angle, and some edges need to be sanded off for the sake of comprehension, for the sake of the storyline. Then, when a narrative is in place, and the greats have been picked, chipping away at the stockpile of brilliance that they have apparently produced seems like an iconoclastic act. To explain this in a more practical sense, it is also not all that cynical to assume that some critics want to remain firmly rooted in the cosy anus of a ‘legend’ for obvious reasons.
This, in actual fact, was ironically immediately evidenced by Newman, who found out about Dylan’s praise and quickly added: “Well, I didn’t know that, otherwise I wouldn’t have said what I just said. But he’s a bright guy.”
