Newman's nasty characters make it a surreal night of song
Randy Newman
At: the Berklee Performance Center,
Saturday night
"We love you, Randy!" a woman yelled from the back of the Berklee Performance Center Saturday night.
The gray-haired man at the Steinway didn't miss a beat.
"You wouldn't if you knew me," he said.
The crowd laughed, but Randy Newman might have been telling the truth. As pop music's master storyteller, he is protected by the first rule of fiction: The voice might be his, but the rednecks, perverts, and money-grubbers who have been singing through him for 35 years are just characters. This motley crew was reintroduced during Newman's two-hour show, in which he played solo on the piano.
The performance was sometimes refreshingly raw. Newman's voice betrays him at times, particularly on the high notes. He makes up for it with his lower register, which has grown richer over the years. That quality worked particularly well on "You Can Leave Your Hat On." After apologizing because "after this, there are no more hits. I'm not Steve Miller, unfortunately," Newman pulled off a grinding, gutteral version that didn't try to approach the growling machismo of Joe Cocker's better-known cover version. Instead of sexy seduction, the song was revealed as a sad, creepy come-on.
There was a surreal and sometimes uncomfortable quality to Newman's performance, particularly on his darker songs. The crowds he sings to at his shows might agree with his politics, but they're also part of the economic structure he abhors. So is he. So when, on Saturday night, he sneered while singing "It's Money That I Love," it was with the audience knowing that Newman had earned millions scoring films, from "Toy Story" to "Parenthood." And when he sang "Rednecks," in which the racist narrator repeats the "N" word eight times, the crowd cheered admiringly at his courage. Curiously, a few even applauded at the "free to be put in a cage in Roxbury in Boston" line. Of course, virtually everyone in the house was white.
For Newman, the Berklee show was the first in a monthlong tour to support "The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1," a series of solo rerecordings set for a Sept. 30 release. Though he never mentioned the album, Newman played many of the 18 songs on "Songbook," including "It's Lonely at the Top," "Political Science," and "Sail Away."
There was even a singalong, Newman-style. During "I'm Dead (But I Don't Know It)," his ode to washed-up rockers everywhere, he rehearsed the fans so that on the chorus, they were able to sing, "You're Dead." As an auditorium of loyalists questioned his artistic relevance, Newman smiled and leaned back on the piano bench, pleased to have filled the house with a few people who got the joke.
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.
