THBBM - My Randy Newman

My Randy Newman
Closed the shop, sold the house, bought a ticket to the west coast...
11-5

Last night after doing some arranging and unpacking in the baby's room, I settled down in the living room and started watching our copy of "The Big Lebowski." There are a lot of reasons that I love this film, a lot of reasons I'm glad we finally have a copy of it on videotape so that we can watch it over and over and over again.
: I first saw the film in Tallahassee while we were living in the house by the lake with Justin. The movie came along at a point in my life where Justin had sort of eased me into a sense of peace with a lot of music I had previously disliked. I hated most of this music simply because the other people I had known who had liked it were schmucks. I suppose I was being unfair to dismiss Bob Dylan and the Flying Burrito Brothers based off the acquaintance of a few stoners that I used to work with, but it had been a fairly effective policy for me up to that point.
Justin was a different sort, so eventually I decided to open my eyes a little bit.
: Coming into contact with a great movie that just happens to be chock full of these sorts of songs right at the time you are learning to appreciate them is the sort of serendipitous event that happened a lot in that house by the lake. Maybe that's why I miss it so much sometimes...
: Anyways, I'm watching the movie and having a blast with it, when we get to the dance sequence that runs over the 1st Edition's "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition my Condition Is In)."
: Maybe it's because I've seen this movie a bunch of times, or maybe it was just because I was in a really wistful mood, but I found myself disconnecting with the movie and flashing back to the days when I was a little kid listening to my parent's record collection.
: The lead singer of the 1st Edition was a young man by the name of Kenny Rogers. Kenny Rogers, as in "the gambler," (the song and the TV movie), "islands in the stream," and of course, "Kenny Rogers Roasters."
My dad loved Kenny Rogers.
: When my brother and I got old enough to enjoy music (but were still too young to pick music out for ourselves) we used to listen to a number of albums from my parents record collection. One of these LP's was "Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits" - featuring "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition my Condition Is In)," "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town," "Love Lifted Me," and a little ditty by the name of "Lucille" that I used to sing along with.
: For those of you who don't know the song, the chorus goes something like this:
You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille With four hungry children, and crops in the field...
: The problem is, Kenny Rogers (like most country singers) doesn't exactly spell out every word when he sings it. Since I was just a little kid, I didn't really understand what he was saying, so when I sang the tune, it went a something like this:
You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille
With four hundred children, and a crop in the field...
It cracked my dad up every time I sang it that way.
: My father had inherited an old Victrolla cabinet from his family, and for a while he kept the family stereo inside of it. The system was a mishmash of stuff from radio shack and sears, but it did the job. A few years later my parents upgraded to an all in one set that included a record player, radio, and an 8-track deck. 8 tracks were on the way out at that point in time, but that didn't stop my parents from getting into the act for a while. Soon, in addition to the stacks of LP's that were carefully filed in the homemade cabinet under the stereo, a number of 8 track cassettes began to show up in the house.
: I know technology still needed to evolve to get to where it is today, but 8 tracks are just weird. How anyone managed to keep a functional music collection with these things is beyond me. Songs would cut off in the middle, and there were these weird buttons you had to push while you attempted to get close to the song you wanted to hear. It was more like a game than a listening experience, and frequently my brother and I would end up just hitting the buttons to hear the songs skip rather than listen to the music itself.
: Back then, my mother had a taste for singer/songwriters. We had tons of albums by Billy Joel, Harry Nillson, Jim Croce, and Paul Simon. She also had a thing for piano music. When she got the itch to play, my mother was a really good pianist - but for whatever reason she didn't play that often. She did, however, buy a lot of music by guys who played the piano -- Elton John, Barry Manilow, and one particularly goofy-looking dude by the name of Randy Newman.
Randy Newman is a hack.
: Most people first heard about Randy when he put out a song called "Short People Got No Reason to Live" -- but his biggest hit was probably the annoying yet anthem-ish "I love L.A.."
: He is famous now for doing movie soundtrack music for Disney, over and over and over again. The annoying muppet voice songs that litter the soundtrack of the "Toy Story" movies? That would be Randy. Basically he's been reworking the lyrics to one song for the past 15 years and selling it to Miramax, Dreamworks, Pixar, and anyone else who feels their movie would really benefit from this particular brand of crap.
: If Tom Hanks is trying to pull off that "kid stuck in an adults body" gag he's always doing -- Randy is there. If Julia Roberts is once again in love with the guy who doesn't even know she exists -- Randy, Randy, Randy...
He's like Raffi for baby boomers.
: It's one thing to have a particular musical style that's easily recognized, even if it's the rather comical sound of your voice. It's quite another thing to only have one song.
: If you're ever hanging out with me in an elevator, or the Disney store, or anywhere else where adult contemporary music is piped in through hidden speakers in the walls, expect at some point to have this conversation:
Me: "Hey, they're playing that Randy Newman song again"
You: "Which Randy Newman Song?"
Me: "All of them."
Fucking hack.
: The reason (if you're curious) as to why I'm so down on Randy is this: Back when my mom and dad had the all in one stereo with the 8 track deck on it, one of the tapes I used to listen to all the time was called "Little Criminals."
: The album was fantastic. Ranging from the silliness of "Short People" to the melancholy of "Baltimore" (which is still one of my favorite tunes), I would listen to that tape over and over. It was a dark album, sorta moody - but I really connected with it.
: But best of all, none of the tunes on the disc sounded anything like "You've Got a Friend in Me."
: I'm down on Randy because he has the ability to write a songs that reach in and touch my soul, but instead he chooses to sell out and record soundtracks for the next 15 Meg Ryan films.
: It's like when Elton John started re-working the lyrics to older songs so that they would make better tributes to dead people he used to hang out with. It felt sorta cheap. I mean, from what I read, Princess Diana was like one of Elton John's best friends in the whole world -- doesn't it seem a little disingenuous that when she was tragically killed the best he could do was rewrite the lyrics to a song he wrote about Marylin Monroe?
: It would be like getting a birthday card in the mail that had someone else's name scratched out and yours written below it!
: I wish I had a way to not notice it so much, I wish there was a way for me to block it out -- the way music is treated like such a product these days. I know I'm not the only one who dreads seeing television commercials out of the fear that one of my favorite songs is going to get co-opted in order to help sell more Toyota Corollas.
: I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who has seen TV commercials featuring the music of The Ramones, The Smiths, the Sex Pistols, Tones on Tail, and The Cult where the first words out of my mouth were "Awwww Man!"
: The only thing that's going to be worse than seeing the music that I grew up with being mangles into soundtracks for jean commercials is the point when the singer/songwriters of the present day start falling to the lure of easy cash and begin reworking their songs in the name of commerce.
: You know -- Fiona Apple doing a jingle for IMac, Tori Amos doing a (supposedly) heartfelt wrangling of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to help sell more... Teen Spirit deodorant, Metallica doing ads for the newly revamped and corporate controlled version of Napster? Hey, maybe they could even get a street rapper like Busta Rhymes to do original music that would help sell some undrinkable soda to young people....
Oh wait, they already did that, didn't they?
: I hope Randy Newman reads this. And Busta, and Morrisey too. If you need money, call me and the other hundreds of billions of people who love the music you make, and tell us to buy more albums. Go on tour or write new songs, whatever...
: Don't go crawling to corporate America and hand them your work... I mean, what are you thinking? Is the payday that good? If you see someone driving a Toyota or drinking a Mountain Dew, do you feel some sort of pride inside because you helped to sell it to them?
: Here's a helpful hint. When I go to a car dealership, I never say -- "Hey, can you show me the car that was in the Stone Temple Pilots commercial? I love that song!"

Don't be that guy. Just don't.
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