Little Criminals

Randy Newman's favorite song on the dazzling new "Little Criminals," his first album in almost three years, is called "In Germany Before The War," and it gives a brief account of the same Dusseldorf child murderer who figured in Fritz Lang's film "M." The song is stark, very frightening, and deliberately bereft of detail: all we know about the killer is that he sits on the bank of the Rhine at precisely the same time each day, telling himself, "I'm looking at the river but I'm thinking of the sea/ I'm thinking of the sea." All we know about him, in short, is that he is in some way removed from the mainstream, just as surely as he is distracted from the Rhine. And it is his sheer strangeness, rather than his depravity, that makes him a fitting subject for Newman's attention.

Newman, who will appear at Avery Fisher Hall this Friday, doesn't always write about figures as drastically estranged as this one. But he does specialize in songs about people who "just aren't heroes. They're a little off-a step to the right, a step to the left." His songs are virtually never autobiographical, which is unusual for a pop composer. Even more atypically, Newman deliberately stays out of his own masterfully ambiguous material, forcing the listener to develop his or her own point of view-"I'm just a reporter," he has said. His subject matter tends to be bizarre, and his narrative mumble has a way of sounding almost cavalier. But even when he sings about people who are demonstrably ridiculous, he is never cruel. His implicit respect for their aberrance amounts to a backhanded compassion, and an unexpected generosity.

However, Newman's most popular numbers, and his funniest, are the ones that seem, at least on the surface, to be extravagantly mean. An early favorite, "Davy The Fat Boy," is sung by someone who, having promised to take good care of Davy, promptly turns him into a sideshow attraction. Two albums back, "Political Science" posited a wicked new foreign policy ("Let's drop the big one and see what happens"), and the title song, "Sail Away," was ostensibly a sales pitch delivered in Africa, to recruit potential slaves. The very outrageousness of such conceits is enough to keep them from being taken literally. Besides, there's a moral implicit in each of these stories, even if Newman often makes his points in the most oblique ways imaginable.

Newman's 1974 "Good Old Boys" contained "Rednecks," which skewered several different kinds of prejudice by adopting, and then abruptly mocking, racist language and attitudes. " 'Rednecks' is rough but I don't think it's mean‐spirited," Newman said in an interview at Tanglewood several weeks ago, as he fidgeted in his tiny dressingroom before shuffling out to the stage and hunching over his piano. "It's got terrible language in it, language that I don't like singing and didn't like writing down. But as long as you're funny, I think you're all right."

In that case, Newman may not even be in trouble with "Short People," a showstopper on his current tour and, by his own reckoning, his funniest song ever. Its premise, stated simply, is that short people have no reason to live. ("They got little cars that go beep, beep, beep. They got little voices goin' peep, peep, peep.") Though Newman himself once made headlines by announcing, on an English radio program, that short men were so insecure they were dangerous and therefore ought to be gotten rid of, he insists that he was and is joking. What makes the song funny, he says, is the crazy misanthropy of the singer, which has nothing to do with any crazy misanthropy of his own.

"I'm not interested in myself that way," he said. "Why should songwriters have to work under strictures that shortstory writers don't have to work under? Why do you always have to write about yourself? Why do you ever have to write about yourself? I don't understand why more people don't do it-be different characters. It's a lot more fun."

So "Little Criminals" features Newman as a grieving young woman, in "Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father." He plays a groom who is so eager to marry his Irish sweetheart that he confuses the Mass with the lyrics to Italian pop songs in "Kathleen (Catholicism Made Easier)." In the title song, he's the leader of a street gang with dreams of hitting the big time by knocking over a neighborhood gas station. And in "Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America," he's a great physicist with a dirty mind.

In the past, Newman could play characters as diverse as these without altering even a shade of his gruff, offhanded delivery. But "Little Criminals," which Newman thinks is his "most radical" album in terms of its subject matter ("People aren't going to like it-it's strange"), also marks something of a musical departure. The songs are more varied than usual, Newman's vocals are more colorful and, surprise of surprises, some of his lush, orchestral arrangements have been souped up with electric guitar. "Like electric guitar-like Jimi Hendrix," Newman said, also adding, "I'll do orchestra until I die."

"Little Criminals" is the first Newman album with a full complement of musical witticisms to match the verbal ones. "Jolly Coppers on Parade" is a song describing a police march, but instead of a martial beat it has the sleepy, soulful rhythm of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" ; when Newman moans "Oh, Mama," it turns out he's a little boy telling his mother he wants to be a police man some day. "Rider in the Rain" is a hilarious cowboy number featuring Randy as the silliest desperado who ever "raped and pillaged 'cross the plains," and the Eagles, not previously noted for their sense of humor ("That"s why they"re rich," Newman explained), as his admiring chorus. At the end of the song Newman calmly orders "Take it, boys"-and, much to the Eagles' credit, they do, oohing and mm‐hmming for all they're worth.

"Little Criminals" is a remarkable album for a lot of reasons, not the least of them being that it very nearly wasn't made. After "Good Old Boys" was released, Newman had used up his backlog of material and was certain he would never turn out anything more. (One older song, "I'll Be Home," is included on the new album, partly because Newman simply couldn't come up with another love song-"Let"s face it, I don"t love anybody but myself," he deadpanned-and partly because he had an idea for a new string arrangement of the number.)

Newman spent two and half years grappling with writer"s block, coming up with only his Einstein song and a jingle for Dr. Pepper. "I know it's hard to figure," he explained, "but I really didn't do anything at all. I stayed home and played with the kids, more than they wanted to be played with. Or I watched television, or read, or sat in the sun." There was little financial pressure on him to work again, because both "Sail Away" and "Good Old Boys" have sold surprisingly well and steadily. (His three previous albums, the first one released in 1968, have been far less successful.)

In May, Newman decided to rent an office in West Los Angeles ("I drive to work every day along with everyone else-I feel like a real part of the community"). There, he spun out a dozen new songs. Many of them turned out to have a street‐wise, urban feeling, perhaps-Newman speculates-because of the industrial neighborhood his office is in, and perhaps because he spent so much time watching streetwise, urban characters on television. Newman says that lie hasn't really had much experience with young toughs who rob gas stations. He doesn't know much about Baltimore, even though the album contains a whole song about it; he only recalls having seen the city from a train. He doesn't have much contact with old people, either, even though he writes about them often and very movingly. "I used to know some, but they died," he said simply.

Newman's concert repertory is oddball, to say the very least-when he was asked to play something at his brother's wedding recently, the most apt selection he could come up with was "Short People." His set doesn't include many of the songs he considers "rough." Some of them, like one of his favorites, "Old Man" ("Don't cry, old man, don't cry / Everybody dies"), are simply too gloomy: "I very rarely perform those kinds of songs live because it's hard to get people back. It's kind of a heavy load." But he is miraculously able to get away with "God's Song," arguably his single best composition and one that leaves audiences stunned and sober. Newman, this time in the role of the Lord, patiently tells man how foolish and inconsequential he is, but finally adds: "You all must be crazy to put your faith in Me/ That's why I love mankind -you really need Me/That's why I love mankind."

It's hard not to wonder what sort of person would come up with such eccentric ideas for pop songs, and Newman says he wonders, too.

Asked to remember why it occurred to him to write about the German killer, he can only come up with the fact that his wife is from Dusseldorf. He took the title of "Jolly Coppers On Parade" from a Swedish mystery novel.

At 33, Newman is surly but charming, even funnier in person than he is on stage or on record, and reasonably tall. He has a hot temper, but he says he's more and more in control of it ("It doesn't pay to have a temper if you're relatively weak"). He says he's a lot more lazy than he is driven ("Well, sometimes I'd feel little twinges of guilt about wasting my talent and stuff"). And he worries a great deal about being mistaken for any species of a cynic.

"I never want to be nasty in a song, I think that's a terrible mistake," he said. "I don't think the world's a cesspool, I like it. I know some of the stuff sounds a little cynical, but I'm not cynical about people as individuals, not at all. As groups, I got my doubts.

"Listen, I get along with everybody, I do," he insisted, with a half‐smile. "You couldn't meet a sweeter guy."

Though Newman, despite his great protestations of sloth, takes his work very seriously, he seems uncertain about how much he values pop music in general, perhaps because his background is primarily classical. (He studied classical composition at U.C.L.A., and three of his uncles, Alfred, Lionel and Emil, composed orchestral movie scores.) But he does know how very good he is at what he does. Other people make better records, as Newman himself is quick to point out. But there aren't many others who write better songs.

New York Times, September 25, 1977.