SF Music Club, Take Two - The Albums - Page 11

Odd man out in California's early-'70s panoply of singer-songwriters, Randy Newman didn't play guitar, refused to confess specific personal dreams and sins, and sidestepped the countercultural trinity of sex, rebellion, and self. Newman dared to be a neoclassical pop survivor, narrative guerilla, and prankster, and no album summarizes these gifts better than this 1973 classic, which found the singer, songwriter, pianist, and arranger spreading his wings to fuse the economy of his songwriting with his lush talents as a composer. The classic title song mingles its elegiac orchestral bloom with the devastating, deadpanned sales pitch of its slave trader protagonist, while elsewhere Newman wraps his whiskey drawl and laconic piano around acerbic meditations on God ("He Gives Us All His Love," "God's Song"), celebrity ("Lonely at the Top"), nuclear Armageddon ("Political Science"), and sex ("You Can Leave Your Hat On"). Sail Away captures funny, tragic, moving American pop at its zenith.

If the best evidence of genius is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at once, few of Randy Newman's songs fail to offer evidence of genius. Take, for example, "Dayton, Ohio-1903," a track from Sail Away, one of three Newman titles inaugurating a set of Rhino reissues. On the surface a celebration of simple afternoon diversions, the song has a devil in its details. "The air was clean and you could see / and folks were nice to you," Newman sings, in the guise of a character recalling an idyll that looks all the better for the intervening years of change. In America, as everywhere else, the only paradise is a paradise lost, and the song works at once as a heartfelt tribute to times past, a poke at free-floating nostalgia, and an examination of how history can lay waste to those in its path, all within the Trojan-horse confines of a simple pop song. Newman's characters don't always come by their divided consciences so honestly. The charming sales pitch of "Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear" has a grim echo in Sail Away's title track, a recruitment ad for the slave trade sung with a smile that hides the whip. Sail Away dates from 1972, the heart of a fruitful early period in Newman's career that revealed his ability to write songs of biting wit, novelistic complexity, and deep understanding. It's easy to laugh at the guy stage-directing his own debasement in "You Can Leave Your Hat On," but it's hard not to feel for him and maybe wish him luck, too.