HE MAY BE A FOOL BUT HE'S OUR FOOL:
Randy Newman's Bad Love

by Rob Brookman

I got married a few weeks back, a fact I mention only to highlight the following irony:

The LP that's been commanding center stage in my CD player for the last month is called Bad Love.

"Unchained Melody," it ain't. But "Unchained Melody" makes me gag. And if I'd let it anywhere near my stereo, it would undoubtedly make my wife gag, as well. That's what marriage is about, after all; two people brought together less by destiny than by a shared set of deeply felt dislikes.

Okay, so maybe syrupy love ballads make you a little green around the gills, too. Still, you might ask, what kind of sick individual deliberately makes an album titled Bad Love - a Randy Newman album, to boot - the unofficial soundtrack of his wedding month?

The answer, I guess, is one who desperately needed a stiff shot of steely-eyed cynicism amid the wash of ritualized romance that passes for nuptials these days.

And one, more simply, who thinks Bad Love might be the best album he'll hear this year.

***

It's strange to think there's a whole generation out there that hasn't seen a really good new Randy Newman record hit the shelves (unless you count 1995's Faust soundtrack, which I do but few others would). 1988's Land of Dreams, his last studio effort 11 years back, showed flashes of the old brilliance but was finally swamped by a few lackluster tunes and an insidious mean spiritedness.

Sure, Newman had always trafficked heavily in sardonic knife-twisting, which he's aimed at his characters and occasionally at his audience, too. In fact, some his best and best-known songs, like "Rednecks" and "Sail Away," actually drew protests from listeners who couldn't hear the distance between the composer and his subject. But the distance was there, even if it was, for some, uncomfortably tight.

Of course, that tightness is the point, and it's what makes Newman a cut above most of his singer-songwriter contemporaries. He's well aware of his misanthropic tendencies, and yours, too. We're all liars sometimes, cheats sometimes, and perhaps even racists sometimes. That's why, even while Newman is excoriating a boob like Lester Maddox, or the duplicitous slave hunter in "Sail Away," he always throws in a kernel of sympathy for them. After all, there but for the grace of God go we ourselves.

It's when the distance between Newman and his characters expands that he can get a bit too venomous. Land of Dreams and 1977's Little Criminals both demonstrated the limitations of Newman's irony and how fine a line his best stuff walks between satire and out-and-out virulence. On Land of Dreams alone he takes nasty swipes at kids, parents, proponents of supply side economics, his love interest at the time and a host of other targets, all of whom he disembowels without a hint of compassion or commiseration. Worst of all, Newman's music, a wonderful pastiche of American show tunes and New Orleans barrelhouse piano, seemed as enervated and aimless as his words were bitter.

And then he disappeared to write soundtracks.

That's important, of course, because Bad Love isn't really the follow-up to Land of Dreams. It's the follow-up to The Natural, to Toy Story, to A Bug's Life and, most significantly, to Faust, Newman's brilliant updating (hell, rewriting) of the old Goethe chestnut. Whatever else it offered Newman in terms of prestige, money, etc., writing a musical clearly stretched his boundaries both in terms of lyrics and composition. He hadn't sounded so fresh in 20 years, and it's a measure of the play's genius that the soundtrack recording represents not just great Newman, but great James Taylor, great Don Henley, and great Linda Ronstadt, as well - folks who, let's face it, aren't exactly prone to greatness on their own.

I liked Faust so well I couldn't bring myself to hear a bunch of professional thespians try to pull it off on stage - if Newman's Devil was a one-of-a-kind performance, James Taylor's God was pretty definitive itself. I'd have even understood if Newman decided that Faust was his official pop output for the decade and rode out the '90s slinging kids tunes for Disney.

He didn't, of course, and good for him. Because Bad Love is damn fine music, maybe the most varied and swinging work Newman's produced to date. Lyrically, it's also one of his most cynical, but one of his most deeply felt, too. And that might be because, for the first time, most of the songs are about the old fool himself, a character he has to see sympathetically even when he's enumerating his follies.

Take the detestable old lecher in "Shame," who tries in vain lure a wayward young lover back to him with promises of money and a Lexus before deciding "it's a gun that I need." "Shame, shame, shame," the background singers scold, like a persistent musical conscience. What makes the song work - and it works brilliantly - is Newman's reluctant similarity to the lecher, his understanding of the overwhelming desires and frustrations facing a powerful older man who's powerless in the face of lust. It's not autobiography, of course, at least a hope not. But it's true nonetheless.

In terms of genuine autobiography, Bad Love offers up the daring "Miss You," a melancholy goodbye to Newman's long-gone first wife. It's heartbreaking, in a way, to hear the now-remarried singer lamenting a marriage that failed 20 years ago. But when he admits that "I'd sell my soul and your souls for a song," he not only cuts the sentiment but makes you wonder if the tune wasn't in fact written for his current family, who might be a bit worried about the status of their souls right now, too.

* * *

As it turns out, Bad Love isn't all bad love. Newman also skewers America's fixation with the TV, European imperialism and rock stars who overstay their welcome, all with definitive success. But, as a newlywed, it's the dark-side-of-romance stuff that has my attention right now. And not because I wish - or expect - any tragedies to befall my blessed union.

Just the opposite, in fact. What I hear in Bad Love - and in 12 Songs and Good Old Boys and all of Newman's best stuff - is a world view that goes something like this: We're all fools, we'll always be fools, and the only unredeemable morons are those who don't realize it. In other words, approach love or any other human relationship convinced of your own perfection, and the end result will be anything but perfect.

Considering the lack of introspection we're invited to bring to marriage these days, it's actually pretty good advice, even if it isn't exactly "Unchained Melody," you-make-me-weak-in-the-knees romantic. But really, what good's blind romance if, after it fades, it doesn't help keep good love from turning bad?