One Track Mind: Randy Newman "Rednecks" (1974)

by Pico

Unlike most One Track Minds, this isn't a song about amazing muscianship, surprising chord changes or nifty little hooks. Rather, it's a tribute to the power of lyrics.

Of all the Great American Songwriters of our time, Randy Newman is perhaps the only one who could be considered a continuation of the line of classic songwriters from before our time. His deft combination of Broadway show tunes with contemporary pop follows a similar prescription for success enjoyed by Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein and George Gershwin.

And while I'm generally not the biggest fan of the albums under his own name, the dude was on a certifiable roll in the early seventies. Sail Away and Good Old Boys together make an unbeatable one-two punch in the history of popular music.

Even when Newman wasn't writing for movies or plays, as when he focused more on being a successful professional songwriter in his early years, the character sketches he always thrived on combined with traditional pop structures made it each song seem as if it was meant for one. The words conjures up vivid imagery and bashed up against the lush orchestration that often accompanies his tunes gets an imaginary movie playing in your head.

What really gets the songs to demand attention, though, are the way he paints those characters. He can write a real pretty love song but he's more inclined not to elicit any sympathy from listeners; Newman is more interested in creating flawed, unseemly personalities doing unsavory things in order to make a statement on the duplicity and greed of modern society. And often, he does so by drawing historical references, as he was trying to do (I think) with "Louisiana 1927."

As a result, Newman's heavily sarcastic wit was often sharper than a brand new ice pick. Sometimes, though, he missed the mark to those only casually paying attention, as what happened back in left field hit of 1978 "Short People," a dig at bigotry that got confused for bigotry itself. But that wasn't the first time he took on the cause of pointing out the folly of racism.

In fact, "Short People" was pretty tame compared to "Rednecks," the song that first appeared at the beginning of the Southern-themed Good Old Boys.

The song was inspired by an episode on the Dick Cavett show Newman watched that had the just-elected governor of Georgia Lester Maddox on as a guest. Without making this too much of a history lesson in Southern politics, Maddox had a reputation as a segregationist that he was trying to shake off. Cavett didn't seem to let him. Maddox got mad and walked off the show.

That got Newman inspired to write a song about racism against African-Americans, narrating from the point of view of a "redneck," and even opens the song stating why he wrote it:

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart-ass New York Jew
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too.
Well, he may be a fool but he's our fool
If they think they're better than him they're wrong
So I went to the park and I took some paper along
And that's where I made this song

Randy Newman has always loved to use ridicule to make a point and judging from much of the song he seems to be ridiculing Southerners. But what he's really doing here is ridiculing Northerners who ridicule Southerners through use of double sarcasm when he sings that "Negros" are...

to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he's free to be put in a cage in the South-Side of Chicago, the West-Side
And he's free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland
And he's free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis
And he's free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco
And he's free to be put in a cage in Roxbury in Boston
They're gatherin' 'em up from miles around
Keepin' the niggers down

It's not all that hard to understand where Newman was coming from when you consider that Newman himself is a native Southerner, born and raised in New Orleans. He doesn't like what he's seen from his fellow Southerners, but he doesn't like what he sees as hypocrisy, either.

The venom Newman spews is not sugar-coated, but it is softened by being wrapped in clever satire. The colorful language warbled by Newman is contrasted by the vaudevillian arrangement and the pedal steel in the chorus used to underscore the narrator's hillbilly sensibilities. His thinking man's rants aren't some gimmick, it's just his trademark, and when it works as it does here, it's genius.

And what did Lester Maddox himself think of Newman's opening lines to the song? He was said to be offended most of all to Newman's rude reference to a Jewish man. Newman himself, incidentally, is of Jewish ancestry.



Listen: Randy Newman "Rednecks"

Purchase: Randy Newman - Good Old Boys

"One Track Mind" is a more-or-less weekly drool over a single song selected on a whim and a short thesis on why you should be drooling over it, too.

John Hiatt - Slow Turning (1988)

by Pico

Today, John Hiatt iss among the leading American folk-rock singer-songwriters, standing in stature just below Springsteen and Mellencamp, but it was no overnight success story for him.

Hiatt struggled to get traction on his career for over a dozen years after releasing his first album in 1974. This, despite some critical acclaim and his songs regularly being picked up by others for their own albums. Going through a multitude of record companies, stylistic makeovers and personal demons, Hiatt finally found his groove with the stellar Bring The Family. It's probably one of the rare examples where an artist peaks after cleaning up instead of before.

It's hard to follow up on a record like the breakthrough Bring The Family. I mean, how do you top songs like "Have A Little Faith In Me" and a backing band of Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe, and Jim Keltner? I realize I'm in a tiny minority, but Hiatt did indeed best that record the following year with Slow Turning.

Slow Turning does continue the theme introduced on Family of the pain of recovery from youthful indiscretion and the bliss of raising a family. And Hiatt wisely sticks with his new signature blend of roots rock, folk, blues and country. But this time, there's a little more country and a little less blues. Which suits Hiatt's songwriting style a tad better, actually.

The other big difference is the backing band. Hiatt was unable to get the A-list crew from the last go-around to come back to the studio so he ultimately settled on his touring band, The Goners. That would be Ken Blevins on drums, David Ranson on bass and Lafayette, Louisiana's own slide specialist, Sonny Landreth, on various guitars. These guys can't match the technical sophistication of Keltner/Lowe/Cooder, but they bring more down-home feel to Hiatt's down-home ditties. They aren't the brand new fine Italian leather shoes, they're like an old pair of cowboy boots; more rugged but more comfortable.

Take for example the kickoff track, "Drive South," which covers similar subject ground as Family's "Memphis In The Meantime." The electric guitars are dispensed with altogether in favor of a bank of acoustic guitars as Hiatt sings "Come on, baby drive south with the one you love" with an assuring twang in his voice.

"Trudy And Dave" is graced by mandolins, mandicellos, and Landreth's pedal steel-style slide. "Sometime Other Than Now" is a gentle, perfectly constructed country ballad that I'm surprised hadn't been covered yet that I'm aware of. "Ride Along" and "Tennessee Plates" are jaunty country-rockers.

Hiatt's grin-inducing wit is everywhere on this CD, like when he sings "took the money for the laundry and drove away clean" in "Trudy And Dave" and the whole story about stealing Elvis' car in "Tennessee Plates."

The autobiographical title track also rocks in a Nashville way, too, with all the energy coming from an acoustic guitar strumming away persistently as Hiatt sings about the nuisances of everyday life as a family man but takes it in stride and counts his blessings. It's immediately countered by a funky number, "It'll Come To You," which suggests that you can't always escape the past.

The trials of a recovering alcoholic that underpins "Paper Thin" with it's aggressive guitar riff, lurid lyrics and Hiatt's gruff vocal delivery, is plainly the best Stones song the Stones never wrote. The closer "Feels Like Rain" starts out with a Curtis Mayfield guitar riff and unfolds as a gentle Crescent City soul number with New Orleans-themed lyrics to match.

The whole album doesn't have a single weak song in it and Glyn Johns did a perfect job on production; here we are almost twenty years later and it's still impossible to pin it down as a relic of late Reagan-era synthesized and compressed excess.

John Hiatt would go on to make many more records using the template he forged on these two late-eighties classics; some are good, a few of them great. But I don't think any of them were ever as great as Slow Turning.


Purchase: John Hiatt - Slow Turning

Adam's Farm, "Rock Music Machine" (1994)

NICK DERISO: The now-defunct Dallas-area group Adam's Farm was this nifty blending of popular music that still resonates with me, more than a decade after they split.

Band motto: If they can't take a joke, folk 'em.

Well, at first anyway. Adam's Farm started out as a respectible set of earnest, well-meaning acoustics. Then they took a left turn in early January 1992 when Jeff Whittington picked up a Marshall amp and a distortion pedal.

Along the way, they once again showed that, when held in the right hands, pop is an endlessly appealing, yet still challenging proposition.

There was a furious songcraft to "Rock Music Machine" -- now apparently out of print on Rainmaker Records -- along with some of the age-appropriate knitted brows and a touch of real danger.

"Want In," for instance, is genuinely nasty, a driving example of what made this group special. They take a shot at the Lemonheads, too. Even more traditionally folkie pieces like "Fulsom" have a sneering guitar deep in the mix, making for a pleasantly rumbling sound texture. Like Neil Young, but with updated threads.

It made sense, then, that Whittington's "twenty-five pin connector" -- a solo record from a few years ago, it was initially only available by e-mail from homonculous98@hotmail.com -- closes with a stripped down version of the Psychedelic Furs' "Heaven." Or that he performed as part of the 2006 experimental theater tribute "Waiting for a Train: The Life and Songs of Jimmie Rodgers, the Father of Country Music."

Or that his next band grew out of a shared moment with a Beatles tune.

Whittington, who has such a solid, unironic way of singing, apparently tried moving into straight life, working as a "special-events coordinator" for a television station. But his frisky infatuation with song brought him back to the stage -- this time with Tony Pipes from Deep Blue Something ("Breakfast at Tiffany's") as the Hundred Inevitables.

Adam's Farm had opened for Deep Blue at the height of its one-hit-wonderdom, and Whittington would often join them onstage for the encore, which included "Dear Prudence." Pipes and Whittington later recorded "Trampoline" and "Kind to Hold" from "twenty-five pin."

Paul Nugent's Rainmaker Records also put out some Nixons stuff. The old Adam's Farm rhythm section, bassist Mark Hedman and drummer Matt Pence, subsequently helped form Centro-matic.

Purchase: Whittington's later work with the Hundred Inevitables - Studder (2000)

Carla Bley - The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu (2007)

by Pico

A few months ago, we bemoaned the loss of a quality modern jazz composer in Paul Nash and noted how it seems we are well past the heyday of melodists of large-form jazz. Oh my, how did I ever forget about the still-thriving Carla Bley?

Carla has been one of the most unique and consistent stylists of jazz compositions ever since her first husband Paul Bley started recording her songs in the late fifties, "Ida Lupino" being one of the more notable ones. But she was destined for much more than providing material for Paul's piano trio settings and soon found her works covered by other notables like George Russell, Jimmy Guiffre, Art Farmer and Gary Burton.

Her stature grew further in the early seventies as she took on more ambitious projects like the stunning chaos of 1971's Escalator Over The Hill and Charlie Haden's opus of jazz protest music, The Liberation Music Orchestra. Since then, she has been involved in a dizzying array of projects ranging from piano/bass duets with master electric bassist and long-time companion Steve Swallow to writing for and leading full-blown orchestras. All the while, she's covered and blended styles ranging from experimental big-band to rock. One of the more interesting side roads she took was a six-month stint in former Cream member Jack Bruce's band alongside ex-Stones guitarist Mick Taylor.

Lately, Bley has focused more on traditional small combos. A few years ago she formed a nice little quartet dubbed The Lost Chords, which included her on piano, Swallow on electric bass, the Brit Andy Sheppard on saxes and Billy Drummond on drums. That association brought forth an album by the same name back in '04. But at the subtle encouragement of Sheppard, Paolo Fresu was added to the band and The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu is the result.

Fresu is quite possibly the heir apparent to Enrico Rava as Italy's premier trumpet player. He is blessed with a warm, lyrical tone that approximates Miles Davis' Gil Evans days without replicating it. Combined with similarly-minded Sheppard, Bley had the right horn section for her small-ensemble compositions.

Bley's composing style typically utilizes wit, quirkiness and drama all wrapped up into one. Those are the kind of attributes that appear in Find Paolo Fresu. Carla's primary method of carrying out this task this time is through use of ostinatos that reveal and transform progressively at each repetition. The compositions still have an orchestral feel to it and the band undertakes them ever so mindful of the melody and enhances it as much as possible while remaining creative within their own instruments. The result is a band that is not your conventional jazz quintet; it's almost like a pocket orchestra with the nimbleness of a bop combo.

This is especially true in the six-section piece informally called "The Banana Quintet." The first section, "One Banana" starts out solemnly with Fesu and Sheppard engaging in a soft-form call and response before Fresu takes over with a pretty, thoughtful solo and followed by a different musical phrase featuring an astonishingly beautiful high-register bass solo by Swallow.

"Four" (not the Miles song) reveals more of Bley's noted humor. The first time I listened to this piece I couldn't help but think how Bley's circular blues-inflected riff sounded coincidentally similar to that thick guitar riff in the slower, plodding section of the "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" from Abbey Road. Near the end of the piece Bley suddenly quotes the Beatles directly and intently for two repetitions in two different keys before going off of it entirely and concluding the song.

Some themes are reycled, but in different forms. For instance, "Five Banana" borrows some from "One Banana" but with a more uptempo pace. "Two Banana," "Three Banana" and "Four," meanwhile, are all tied together by the blues.

The whole "Banana" suite is followed by three distinct songs. The first of these, "Liver Of Life" the gently strutting piece written as a showcase for Fresu's highly lyrical horn, as well as Sheppard's. "Death Of Superman/Dream Sequence #1 - Flying" is a leftover from a de-commissioned project that tabbed Bley to write a piece commemorating Superman actor Christopher Reeves. Swallow makes his bass sound just like a softly plucked acoustic guitar on this somber tone poem.

The set concludes with a previously recorded Bley tune, a lively straight-bop rendition of "Ad Infinitum" that allows the horn players to stretch out a little more than on the rest of the album.

Immaculately recorded in France and produced by Bley and Swallow, The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu is another leg on the long musical adventure of Carla Bley. It's an adventure that has taken listeners to so many interesting places over the decades. And today's release by Bley reveals no indication that her ample supply of new ideas are close to being exhausted.


Purchase: Carla Bley - The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu