The Smiler with a Knife

By JAY COCKS

Pop's premier satirist draws a sharp bead on lotus land

"Well," said Randy Newman, right on time for a party in Santa Monica, "when do all the other bores get here?"

Any time now. And they may even walk in whistling a Randy Newman tune. Not one of those devastating early songs like Davy the Fat Boy or Vine St. or even Sail Away. More likely they will be puckering their lips around one of the novelty numbers of comparatively recent vintage, like Short People. (Remember "Short people got no reason to live"?) Says the composer, who will have scarfed up the cocktail peanuts by this time and will likely be heading for home: "That song was a joke. It's about someone who is insane. Nobody harbors that kind of animus toward short people." Then, typically, he adds the cruncher: "Except I do now."

So much for the world's bigots and half-pints, whose hash has been temporarily settled by the quirkiest, most implacable satiric sensibility in American pop. They may join the ragtag list of victims, victimizers, unanointed antiheroes and assorted foul balls about whom Newman has sung with stinging wit and unexpected compassion. Newman, 39, exults in playing musically the same role he has picked for himself socially: the perennial sourpuss at the party, over in the corner, casing the room and making nasty cracks about the other guests. On his new album, Trouble in Paradise (Warner Bros.), he has no equal at the underhanded parry and the thrust that kills. The smiler with a knife, making some of our best music from over there in the corner.

"My wife and I eat fast, we go to places early, we leave early," Newman reflected recently. "I hate wine. I don't like people who like it. I don't drink. I don't know how to live. There is no ease in me." For that last, the thanks of a grateful nation. Trouble in Paradise is a series of twelve interrelated songs set within the balmy regions of superficial ease where disaster keeps bobbing to the surface like a corpse in a reflecting pool. I Love L.A., which opens the record, is a mock-heroic epic of the sun-kissed glories of Southern California, mixing conventional imagery of Beach Boys serenades and fast rides in convertibles with darker asides about "a big nasty redhead" and a bum "down on his knees." Like the other keynote songs on the record--Christmas in Capetown, Miami--I Love L.A. turns the topography of tourist cliche into a nightmare landscape on which the sun never sets.

The narrators of these songs are scared racists, displaced lunkheads, pseudo celebrities or pitiful nonentities blinded by the artificial radiance of undeflected ego.

In My Life Is Good, Newman slings an arm over the shoulder of his "very good friend . . . Mr. Bruce Springsteen." In Take Me Back, a lively rave-up propelled by a roadhouse-style Farfisa organ, he chronicles how a life of early promise guttered and ended "by this dirty old airport/ In this greasy little shack." Randy Newman may live far from that kind of address--in Santa Monica, Calif., in fact, with a wife and three sons--but his imagination still dwells in the long shadows. Says his brother Alan: "Randy looks at the world from the underside."

Looking and listening were always something of a problem for Newman. He grew up comfortably in Southern California, in the midst of much music. His uncles Lionel, Emil and Alfred formed a triumvirate of movie composer-conductors, whose august company Newman joined with his excellent score for Ragtime in 1981. His father, a highly regarded internist, once wrote a song that Bing Crosby recorded. At three, little Randy could identify the symphonies of Beethoven ("A comedown from Mozart," he observes glumly, "who could play music at that age"). Soon after, his parents installed an upright piano in his room. "I didn't know what the goddam thing was," he recalls. 'It was like I was supposed to write a sonata or something. Maybe that's why music has always been just a job to me. I never sit down to play for fun."

Plagued by cross-eyes, now largely corrected, and double vision, which still troubles him, Randy had some difficult early times. His father remembers his son once walking into school backward so his classmates would not notice his eyes. "It wasn't a great big deal," Randy says now, "but it was a little tough. I know it was a long time before I could look people in the face. I mean, my eyes look all right to you, don't they? I don't think they had anything to do with my songwriting.

I don't know. I wouldn't want to admit to it."

As a high school student, Newman handed in his math homework scribbled on brown-paper lunch bags. He had already started to buy rhythm-and-blues records and play games of arranger-producer with his pal Lenny Waronker, who eventually became co-producer of Newman's albums. Waronker's father founded a record company, Liberty, with which Newman landed a songwriting contract when he was all of 17. At 24 he released his first album, which set the Newman style: odd lyrics, inventive orchestrations, vocals like a blues singer on novocaine, and a rolling piano technique that sounded like a shotgun marriage of Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Domino: It also established the Newman sales curve: rave reviews and wobbly revenues.

Short People, his first major commercial success, seemed to signal that Newman was turning from the bold directions of Sail Away and Good Old Boys, his concept album about the redneck South, toward the easier, more insinuating comedy of a Tom Lehrer. Trouble in Paradise corrects the course. Lavishly produced and orchestrated, with a host of highly commercial guest stars chipping in their platinum vocal talents (including Don Henley, Rickie Lee Jones, Bob Seger, Linda Ronstadt, two members of Fleetwood Mac and Paul Simon, who good-naturedly joins in his own self-demolition on a piece called The Blues), Trouble in Paradise challenges and surprises as no other recent record has. Go ahead, risk it. Invite Randy Newman to the party. He may leave early, but at least he won't walk in backward.

-- By Jay Cocks. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.