Author Archives: Michael H. Little

Remembering Sandy Denny in advance of her birth date tomorrow. —Ed.

If folk music scares me–and it does–English folk music really scares me; I’m still trying to recover from the traumatic consequences of inadvertently viewing a YouTube video of Pentangle performing the pro-virginity dirge “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.”

That said, I’ve always made an exception for Fairport Convention in general, and their LP 1969’s Unhalfbricking in particular. Unhalfbricking was the work of a band moving away from American influences towards the Ye Olde English-style minstrelsy, and the music they performed during said transition is some of their best.

Fairport Convention’s take on folk rock is decidedly English–as English as eel pie. And how couldn’t it be–listening to Sandy Denny, who remains arguably the best English folk singer in the history of recorded music, is like walking the Cornish cliffs of Tintagel on a lovely May morn. But–and the caveat is critical–you never get the awful sense you’ve wandered into the bucolic pagan setting of the 1973 film The Wicker Man, where you’ll be shoved into a wicker totem and burned alive, a sacrifice to a bountiful harvest, as the happy villagers sing “Sumer Is Icumen In.” (A tune I’m sure Pentangle performed all the time.)

While “lovely” best describes the songs on Unhalfbricking, you get plenty of variety: a trio of exceptional Dylan covers; one instant classic; a pair of slower numbers that creep up on you, and one Cajun-flavored rock’n’roller that sticks out, if you’ll bear the obscure allusion, like Beau Brummell at a stevedores’ convention. Oh, and there’s one simply incredible song that somehow manages to bridge the gap between the English traditional folk form and the Velvet Underground.

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I’ll tell you what this fool believes—there has never been a song that wouldn’t sound better with Michael McDonald singing on it. The Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen”? Needs Michael McDonald on backing vocals. The Ramones first album? It would really kick ass with Michael McDonald back there singing up a soulful blue-eyed storm. Sonic Youth? Nothing without Michael McDonald. Ditto Lydia Lunch, the New York Dolls, Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, the Urinals, Public Enemy, and GG Allin.

Ziggy Stardust may be the greatest album ever recorded but it would be an even greater greatest album ever recorded if Michael McDonald was in the mix. I’m sure you agree. Because the McGodfather’s R&B patented rumble—the guy sings like a four-on-the-Richter-scale earthquake that mumbles—will always turn anything it touches into gold. Gold records, that is. What have we done to deserve him? Nothing, so far as I can tell. He’s a form of grace. He’s Michael McDonald. I sure wish he sang on “Holiday in Cambodia.” That would fucking rock.

Of course, why settle for the Yacht Rock Soul King’s singing back-up when he can be right up front and personal? Sure, McDonald enriched songs by Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto, Bonnie Raitt, Stephen Bishop, Wang Chung and others, but he’ll be best remembered for resurrecting those long gone hippies the Doobie Brothers, which let’s face it was a miracle of almost biblical proportions. Come 1975 the Doobs needed a temporary replacement for singer Tom Johnston, and McDonald not only stepped in, he stepped up, lending his trademark resonant mumble to a handful of instant classics. He singlehandedly turned a band on their way down into a first-class Yacht Rock hit machine.

Come 1982 McDonald went the solo route, and while he has recorded some fine songs over the years—including duets with the likes of Patti LaBelle and James Ingram—few equal the power and the glory of such Doobified classics as “Takin’ It to the Streets,” “Minute by Minute” or, let us all fall to our knees and give thanks, the halo-crowned “What a Fool Believes,” one of the few songs I can think of that deserves its own Nativity scene.

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The Irish writer Brendan Behan once said, “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” That’s the way I feel about the English band The Police, and their every bit as pretentious as Bono frontman Sting. If I were to find myself with my head through the shattered windshield of my demolished automobile and one of The Police’s reggae-influenced new wave songs were to come on the car radio I would say, “Oh, come on God! “Roxanne?” Am I really that terrible a person?”

When Sting decided to Garfunkel trio mates Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers at the peak of the band’s success in 1986, I might have heaved a sigh of relief. But a little warning bell in my head told me that Sting’s departure from The Police because he felt artistically constrained by the band’s pop rock style of music boded ill. I couldn’t escape the suspicion that the King of Pain was out to prove to the world that he was more than just the guy who gave us “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.” No, he was a musical artiste set on making grand artistic statements, and he didn’t care who got hurt.

Which is just what he did with his 1986 debut album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. You can tell he’s aiming high because the LP is jam-packed with songs about big societal issues and has a slick jazz veneer. Because, you know, jazz is a more sophisticated musical form than rock, and indulging your jazz itch automatically makes you a classier person.

The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, never one to suffer fools gladly, had this to say about Sting’s debut: “Displacing the Police’s sere dynamics we have bathtubs full of demijazz, drenching this self-aggrandizing and no doubt hitbound project in a whole new dimension of phony class.” That about sums it up. When it comes to rock, jazz is often the last refuge of a scoundrel. It may even be the first.

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Remembering Cliff Williams, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

A very brief history lesson. First Attila was the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then Sir Lord Baltimore took over as the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then along came AC/DC to produce an electrical surge that brought down the hard rock power grid, settling the debate forever. Their ascendancy caused many a band to give up the ghost. Some sold their gear and returned to England to resume their careers as bricklayers. Others picked up dulcimers and went full folkie. I saw Deep Purple at a Greenwich Village folk club and their lute and bodhrán take on “Smoke on the Water”inspired some discerning fan with a flare gun to burn the place to the ground.

AC/DC played a primal, zero frills, straight ahead hard rock that led morons (like the younger me) to conclude their music was for dummies. Frank Zappa (my then idol) played cerebral brain music. AC/DC just punched you in the solar plexus. Theirs was gut music, like Iggy and the Stooges or a souped-up, oversexed early Black Sabbath.

And on 1980’s Back in Black—the band’s seventh studio LP—AC/DC forged its metal into a tool of sledgehammer simplicity. It was former Geordie vocalist Brian Johnson’s first LP with the band, Bon Scott having died from alcohol poisoning the previous February. The band recorded the LP in the Bahamas, where a diehard fan in the form of a crab scuttled across the studio floor. With his cheerleading the band recorded ten tracks that stripped hard rock to its essentials. Three chords, no poofter organ solos, just barf in your face music for the lads at the local.

You get a little dark stuff in the form of “Hell’s Bells,” are invited to have a drink with the lads, and get a lecture on how rock and roll isn’t poisoning the aural environment. But what you mostly get is not so subtle sexual innuendo that reveals Ted Nugent to be a loincloth feminist. This is 12-year-old stuff, but to be fair to the band, there’s nothing on Back in Black as pubescent as Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.”

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Remembering Terry Kirkman, born on this day in 1941. —Ed.

The Association didn’t exactly win friends and influence hippies with their square-john antics in the mid- to late sixties; they may have been the first band to perform at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but most of your smirking counter-culture types considered them about as authentic as a cheap plastic peace symbol.

But hey–as that great philosopher Huey Lewis pointed out it’s hip to be square, and all of your REAL swinging girls and boys know The Association are the Nazz. So what if they flunked the Acid Test and would have been more at home at Tricia Nixon’s wedding than a Human Be-In? The Association rose above it all, producing a rapturous dream pop that Tricky Dick himself might have tapped a toe to.

And you can hear The Association in all their vocal glory on the 2018’s Anthology: Just the Right Sound. Its 51 songs are a definite case of overkill–and I’ve docked it a half-grade accordingly–but it’s worth the purchase price (and more!) if you want to hear not only the songs that melted your heart but such berserker numbers as “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies,” to say nothing of a couple of cuts off 1972’s justifiably neglected Waterbeds in Trinidad!

Just about everybody knows their big ones. “Windy” is a sunshine pop classic about a girl with stormy eyes; its opening guitar riff and superlush vocals are for the ages, and I die a little every time I hear that flute. And then there’s the motorvatin’ “Along Came Mary,” with its handclaps and badass (by Association standards) vocals. And who could forget the moon-eyed “Cherish,” which makes the perfect mate for the lovely “Never My Love,” both of which say I’m going to love you forever by means of those perfectly pureed vocals that were The Association’s bread and butter.

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With Pentecostal fervor—that’s the way prodigies Larry and Lorrie Collins of The Collins Kids played their rockabilly. Precocious doesn’t begin to describe Larry, the little maniac who was storming about stage like a pint-sized dervish while tearing off lightning-fast runs on his Mosrite double-necked guitar—when he was 10. And Lorrie—who was two years older than Larry—was steaming up rooms with sultry vocals that won her comparisons to the wicked Wanda Jackson. They were a mite older (two years or so) when they hit their peak in the late fifties, but they were still definitely kids—which didn’t stop them from cutting some of the hottest rockabilly tracks you’ll ever hear.

After Larry and Lorrie wowed them at amateur shows—first separately, and then as a team—in Tulsa, Oklahoma, their mom convinced their dad to sell the dairy farm, load up the family’s ‘47 Hudson and move west to Los Angeles, which was hardly Rockabilly, USA but where they managed to score a recording contract with Columbia Records. They also became regulars on the L.A.-based TV program Town Hall Party, and if you check out the available YouTube videos you’ll understand why—decked out in full C&W regalia The Collins Kids cook up an electrical storm.

Larry was a born showman, dancing around and mugging it up for the crowd like a cross between Chuck Berry and Angus Young while playing flashy runs on what was only the second double-neck guitar ever made. Meanwhile, Lorrie belted ‘em out, somehow managing to look virginal while upping the temperature in the room considerably. (No wonder she was Rickie Nelson’s first girlfriend.) They were just kids, but theirs was no kiddie novelty act—they served ‘em up red hot, just like Gene V. and Jerry Lee.

Larry, a childhood churchgoer like his sister, would later say, “We just had a natural Pentecostal beat that followed us in our music. It was rockabilly when we started doing it together. We had no one to learn from. We were just doing what we felt. It the song didn’t have a beat and something we could move around to, we didn’t do it.” In short, they found their inspiration to play the Devil’s music in God’s house, and both God and the Devil got a kick out of their handiwork.

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Say a prayer for The Chocolate Watchband. The garage rock group out of San Jose was one of the first to incorporate the psychedelic sounds emanating from up north in acid-drenched San Francisco—imagine the Rolling Stones shacking up with the Jefferson Airplane and you’re pretty much there. And they came out of the starting gates fast with a few rip-roaring singles, along with a pair of explosive songs that found their way into the 1967 hippie exploitation film Riot on Sunset Strip. Then they got their opportunity to record a debut LP, and that’s where things got… weird.

The problem—which would color their legacy and confuse listeners for decades—was producer/Svengali Ed Cobb. Cobb had real genius—he wrote “Tainted Love” for Gloria Jones (yes, the Soft Cell hit) and “Dirty Water” for the Standells. Unfortunately Cobb had a bubblegum mentality. If he felt like replacing the band’s lead singer’s vocals with some ringer’s, he did it. Indeed, if he felt like including whole songs on which the band didn’t even play, he did it. He was looking for hits, and wasn’t about to let alien concepts like artistic integrity get in his way. He reminds me of the famous story about the Ohio Express, those bubblegum unfortunates who showed up at a gig in Cincinnati only to find the audience clamoring for “Chewy Chewy,” a song they’d never heard in their lives but was climbing the charts under their name.

In the case of the Ohio Express producer hijinks led to shock and possible catastrophe—the boys in the band might have been stoned to death by that crowd demanding to hear “Chewy Chewy.” The Chocolate Watchband reacted with disgust. Lead singer Dave Aguilar—who suffered the most at Cobb’s hands—told writer Richie Unterberger that when the band received a copy of the their 1967 debut No Way Out, “We took a look at it, played a couple of songs on it, and said ‘What the hell is this shit?’ And somebody threw it in the trash.” But at another level they didn’t care. They were getting their kicks playing live; it was all that mattered to them. They were opening for a lot of big name acts at the time and took great pride in blowing them off the stage. Indeed, they cared so little they let Cobb pull the same bait and switch act again on their 1968 sophomore LP, Inner Mystique.

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Remembering Jim Morrison in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

The defining moment on what may well be The Doors’ finest album is not the brilliantly cinematic title track, or the moody and rain-drenched “Riders on the Storm.” It’s not even when Jim “Lizard King” Morrison intones the great words, “Out here on the perimeter there are no stars/Out here we is stoned… immaculate.” No, it’s the moment in the excellent “Hyacinth House” when Morrison sings, “I see the bathroom is clear.”

I love 1971’s L.A. Woman, the last Doors LP before the hard-living Jim Morrison imploded in a Paris bathtub, but have been grappling with the enigmatic words, “I see the bathroom is clear” for years. Was Morrison fucking with the minds of all those people who’d anointed him the second coming of Arthur Rimbaud? Or was he being serious, and by so doing proving beyond a doubt that he was not the second coming of Arthur Rimbaud?

The rock critic Robert Christgau—who once wrote shrewdly that Morrison’s “not the genius he makes himself out to be, so maybe his genius is that he doesn’t let his pretentions cancel out his talent”—shares my interest in the bathroom line, saying it proves that a giggling Lizard King was gleefully pulling our collective leg. (That “stronger than dirt” Morrison tosses off at the end of “Touch Me” is a further clue he was putting us on.)

All of this is just to point out that Morrison’s poetic talents have long been a source of disagreement amongst both fans and detractors. I’m of the opinion that anybody capable of coming up with a lyrical conceit as unconscionably dumb as “Twentieth Century Fox”—get it?—is unlikely to be crowned the finest American Poet since Wallace Stevens. And the phrase “mute nostril agony” doesn’t increase my assessment of his poetic skills much either. Which is not to say I don’t think Morrison had a gift. He did. Unfortunately—and he is very much like Patti Smith in this regard—he possessed the perverse knack for burying some of his best lines beneath a Mr. Ed-sized steaming pile of horseshit.

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Remembering Little Richard, born on this day in 1932. —Ed.

An American original if ever there was one, Little Richard (aka Richard Wayne Penniman) remains one of the most charismatic and exciting performers in the history of rock and roll. From his days in Macon, Georgia’s Pentecostal churches, where as a youth he was once banned from singing because his “screaming and hollering” were deemed too loud, to his days touring with traveling shows and singing for Macon’s own prophet and spiritualist Doctor Nubilio, who went about in a turban, colorful cape, and black stick (to say nothing of a “devil’s child,” in the form of a desiccated corpse of a baby with claw feet and horns on his head), Little Richard wowed ‘em all until he finally found his way to Specialty Records, where in September 1955 he recorded the song that would help make him an immortal, “Tutti Frutti.”

And the rest is history. Little Richard’s live performances were so powerful and borderline raunchy (by the standards of the time, that is) that he even helped to bring down the color barrier; his shows drew both blacks and whites, who started off in the mandatory racially segregated areas of the clubs he played but wound up dancing together by the time he was done. He was also known for his outrageous stage garb, including makeup as well as suits studded with semi-precious stones and sequins, and his wild performances and crazed persona soon led women to throw their underwear on stage, much to the dismay and chagrin of such rabid dog segregationists as the North Alabama’s White Citizen Council.

By the time his first LP was released Little Richard was already a millionaire and living in a mansion in Los Angeles next to the boxer Joe Louis. But in 1957 the self-described “omnisexual” who once said, “The only thing I like better than a big penis is a bigger penis” renounced his “sinful” ways and announced his intention to become a preacher of the gospel, which he did after studying theology at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. He ultimately returned to secular music, and to secular hobbies, praise be to God, in 1962, and his performances were so outrageously successful that before long the Beatles were opening for him.

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Remembering Gary Rossington, born on this day in 1951. —Ed.

If there’s one band I’m glad I never belonged to, it’s Lynyrd Skynyrd. I love their music, but I couldn’t have handled their preferred method of conflict resolution, which generally involved a punch to the face. Or worse. Vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, Skynyrd’s highly volatile bandleader, not only managed to knock out piano player Billy Powell’s teeth—twice!—but on one notable occasion responded to drummer Bob Burns’ reluctance to play a song—and this was just a practice, mind you—by placing a gun to his head and saying, “Play the motherfucking song or I’m going to blow your brains all over this room.”

But it wasn’t just Van Zant who was throwing haymakers. Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t a band; it was Fight Club. According to a writer close to the band, “They drank a lot of Jack Daniels and, for recreation, almost, they would beat each other up.” And Ozzy Osbourne recalls seeing “The guitarist come on stage with a bandage on his hand, and the singer come out with a bandage on his head, and they were hugging each other, saying, ‘I’m sorry, brother—I love you, man.’”

But on those rare occasions when they weren’t beating the bejesus out of one another, Lynyrd Skynyrd managed to produce some of the finest rock music to ever come out of the South—or anywhere for that matter—thanks largely to excellent songwriting, the band’s balls-to-the-wall multiple guitar attack, and Van Zant’s timeless lyrics. Van Zant was an ardent student of the recordings of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, and it was part and parcel of his lyrical genius to set their populist leanings and outlaw stance to a rock’n’roll beat.

And Skynyrd had plenty more great music left in them—as their final LP, Street Survivors, amply attests—when their chartered Convair CV-300 went down in a forested swamp outside Gillsburg, Mississippi on October 20, 1977, killing Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and several others. Forget John Lennon—that uxorious has-been whose last gasp, Double Fantasy, is a maudlin farce, despite the sentimental praise heaped upon it solely because he was the Beatle who got shot by a nut—Skynyrd’s plane crash remains the greatest tragedy in rock history, period.

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The Dwarves are vicious and depraved. Vile and obscene. Bad people of low morals who make the kind of music your mother will scream at you to turn off from her grave (that’s how loud and horrible it is). Since 1985 or thereabouts the band that originated in Chicago (hog-butchering capital of the world!) have been offending all decent and right-minded people with ear-cuffing noise rock, live shows that would make Caligula proud, and albums whose covers have featured blood-spattered nudes and borne hilarious titles along the lines of The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking.

You would have thought that at some point during their thirty-eight years of existence somebody would have put a stop to their degenerate antics. Put them down or something. But The Dwarves, god bless them, can’t be stopped. They may not be, as they boast, “the last punk band,” but they’ve long been one of the greatest, and odds are they’ll make good on their boast still be playing before audiences of cockroaches when the world’s nothing but a smoldering pile of toxic debris.

Over the long course of their existence The Dwarves (who now call San Francisco home) have expanded their sound—amazingly so if one looks back to the brutalist neo-hardcore noise of, say, 1990’s Blood, Guts & Pussy. Back then they reminded me a lot of Cows, the greatest noise rock band of them all. Nowadays—and that most definitely includes their latest LP, 2023’s The Dwarves Concept Album—they dip their collective toe into a variety of genres, and have begun to, and I didn’t see this one coming, actually play nice. Some of the tracks on The Dwarves Concept Album make me think The Dwarves have been listening to The Archies or something. Ear damage purists will be shocked, but I think it’s cute. I even hear a Farfisa organ on a few songs. The Age of Miracles is still with us!

I don’t know what the “concept” in The Dwarves Concept Album is, and I’m not about to break my neck finding out. But if I had to impose a concept of my own on it, and why not, it would run along the lines of The Dwarves Get Happy or The Dwarves Are Absolutely Normal, and I can’t think of a more radical concept than that. But there’s no denying that on some, although hardly all, of these songs vocalist Blag Dahlia sounds happy and frighteningly well-adjusted.

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Celebrating Eric Bloom on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

When it comes to 1970s faux evil rock bands that didn’t have a bone of true evil in their bodies, Blue Öyster Cult comes in right behind Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath.

BÖC flirted shamelessly, tongues planted firmly in cheek, with the iconography of the dark side (they sang about S&M, made references to Martin Bormann and put Nazi jet fighters on their album covers, and let’s not forget the Patti Smith-penned “Career of Evil”) and people bought it until, like the previously mentioned bands, the boys from Long Island took it right over the top, and it became obvious that it was all a big joke and they were about as evil as Debbie Gibson.

But if it was all a shuck—and it was: even the rock critic Richard Meltzer, who wrote some of the band’s songs including “Burnin’ for You,” noted, “This is really hard rock comedy”—it led to some pretty great music, culminating Agents of Fortune, which was so wildly successful Robert Christgau dubbed BÖC “the Fleetwood Mac of heavy metal.”

Formed in 1967 as The Soft White Underbelly, the band subsequently changed its name to Oaxaca, then the Stalk-Forrest Group, then and the Santos Sisters before finally settling on Blue Öyster Cult in 1971. They were the first band to employ an umlaut in its name and came up with the most instantly recognizable band logo this side of Black Flag, and were guided step by step by manager Sandy Pearlman, who got them signed, wrote a lot of the band’s lyrics, helped produce their LPs, gave them their name, etc.

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Said “Modfather” Paul Weller in 1990 about his post-Jam outfit The Style Council, “We created some great music in our time, the effects of which won’t be appreciated for some time.” Well, decades have passed, and while many have a deep-seated affection for The Style Council and their inveterate eclecticism, I’m not one of them. Sure, Weller and fellow counselors multi-keyboardist Mick Talbot and drummer Steve White produced a small handful of solid blue-eyed soul numbers. But they didn’t stop there.

Instead they spent much of their time dabbling in other genres, and by so doing laid waste to their powers. They couldn’t decide if they wanted to be a soul band or a sophisticated European lounge band or a jazz band or even a rap band, god help us, so they tried to be all things to all people—generally, and unfortunately, on the same album. And what you ended up with, as is the case with most incorrigible dilettantes, was a slew of admittedly enthusiastic genre exercises that were strictly amateur hour. Take their forays into, say, jazz. They’re nice enough, but why listen to second-rate bop when there’s a whole world of first-rate bop out there?

Why someone like Weller would walk away from a band that produced some of the best New Wave, mod-revivalist music ever recorded to futz around in the rarified realms of more sophisticated sounds is above my pay grade. Or maybe not. It’s a familiar story—artist feels trapped in stylistic prison of his own making and decides to break out. And it certainly can’t be said that The Style Council was just another stylistic prison—the band’s determination to go in any direction it felt inclined to at the moment is as close as you get to complete freedom. But such freedom comes at a cost, and in The Style Council’s case the cost was albums—and this is particularly true in the case of their 1984 debut Café Bleu—that don’t cohere, but are instead disparate collections of songs spanning a dog’s breakfast of styles. “My Ever Changing Moods” indeed.

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Remembering Shane MacGowan. —Ed.

Before I get to my review, a bit of stereotype slinging. About the Irish, who are oft said (you can ask anybody) to have produced the greatest drunken poets the world has ever seen. Here in the States, a drunk is a drunk is a drunk. In Ireland, if you believe the hype, every drunk is a poet and every poet is a drunk, and when the pubs close every last inebriated man, woman, and child who spills into the dimly lit street to stagger home or fall fecklessly into the filthy gutter is conjuring brilliant quatrains in their brain.

It’s obviously shite, and to the part of my lineage that is Irish (or is it Scottish, who knows?) offensive even, but I do believe the Irish harbor a romantic soul and love their whiskey as much as they love a gift for high-blown (Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, anybody?) speech. So just for argument’s sake, who is the greatest drunken Irish poet of them all? My vote goes to The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, hands down.

He may be a spent force now; it’s been years since he wrote any new songs (that we’ve heard, anyway); his voice is every bit as much a ruin as the Acropolis; and the last time I saw him perform he hung precariously onto the microphone stand like a sailor clinging to the ratlines for dear life in the face of 90 mph typhoon winds. But the fact that he continues to draw breath at all is in itself a miracle.

I have done the math, and more whiskey has passed MacGowan’s lips over the course of his lifetime than was imbibed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Jones, Malcolm Lowry, and Dylan Thomas put together. Despite this dubious achievement, he has written some of the best poetry ever set to music, and has brought more happiness to mankind than a regimen of teetotalers.

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Celebrating Randy Newman on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

In my mind’s eye I see Randy Newman supine on a sofa, taking an afternoon nap. Or a morning nap. Or an evening nap. It doesn’t matter. Or I see him in a comfortable armchair watching television, an old movie perhaps, or a documentary about acid rain, or an infomercial–anything at all really, he doesn’t care. He looks as blissful as a Buddha, but he’s talking it all in. Nothing escapes his amused notice. It’s all material for his fantastic songs.

Randy Newman is an unprepossessing fellow, and he likes it that way. He doesn’t worry too much about his image because in a sense he doesn’t have one–he’s spent his whole career hiding behind masks, amidst personae, inhabiting characters who aren’t Randy Newman.

I’m talking a rogue’s gallery of miscreants–whether they be wicked, deranged, pathetic, megalomaniacal, impotent, deluded, dumb but not nearly as dumb as you might think, sad, self-aware but only to a point, proud for no damn reason at all. I could go on, but suffice it to say they’re a terribly flawed bunch, and therein lies their pathos: all of them, no matter how awful, are human to a fault.

Newman gets tagged as a singer-songwriter, but singer-songwriters bare their souls; Randy’s far too reticent a soul for such confessional nonsense, and far too modest as well–Randy Newman would be the first person to tell you there’s nothing very interesting about Randy Newman. No, the label is accurate only to the extent that he writes and sings his own songs and performs a whole lot of them all by his lonesome on the piano.

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