Randy’s Inferno : Newman, at Coach House Tonight, Plans ‘Faust’ for Broadway

Randy Newman is coming to the Coach House, and then he’s going to hell.

Not to slight the South County nightclub, but Newman’s foray to the underworld might take precedence. He won’t literally be going to hell, unless sent there by New York’s drama critics: The songwriting great and Grammy-winning soundtrack composer finally is pursuing a decade-old ambition to craft a musical version of the Faust legend. He has written the book and nine songs thus far; there are plans for the show to open in New York late next year.

Though it is Newman’s first musical, he thinks his past work has prepared him for it, as he tends to write his songs through characters. Speaking by phone Monday from his Los Angeles home, while also distractedly plinking piano keys, he said: “I think I’m pretty well prepared to write dialogue too, because my songs are sort-of portrayals of people talking. But I really won’t know until I’m done.”

Newman has remarked that the characters in his earlier songs aren’t always too bright, lacking the self-knowledge to see through the warped views they espouse. He’s interested now in writing more complex characters.

“I think I did a little of it on the last record,” he said, referring to 1988’s “Land of Dreams,” “and I have to do it with this, because I have God and the Devil in it, some intelligent people.”

If all goes as intended, the musical will be produced by “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels and financed by Newman’s record label, Warner Bros. While others involved in the production want a different title, the author is holding out for “Faust.”

“It really amuses me just to think of ‘Randy Newman’s Faust’ instead of Goethe’s or Marlowe’s,” he said.

He may shy from doing any songs from it tonight at the Coach House. “It would take a lot of explanation and a little courage on my part to do them, because they’re different characters and they occur within the context of the show.”

(Not that we’d ever try to steer events, but it couldn’t hurt if everybody at the club started banging on the tables and chanting “Faust! Faust!” until Newman caves in.)

Newman--who doesn’t have a new album to tout and doesn’t need the money--is doing concerts for a reason that’s becoming a rarity in the music biz: He enjoys the stage.

‘I think I like it better than anything else,” he said. “I’d done almost no dates in two years, and I figured if I went another year without doing some stuff I’d just let performing go altogether. I wanted to see if I could do it and (if) I still liked it, and I do. When you’re into your writing there’s no one applauding, and it’s nice to hear that applause. You get contact with the people.”

There are those who might presume that Newman’s idea of “contact with the people” is to skewer them on his barbed wit and hammer ‘em with irony. The roles he assumes in some songs--bigots, the arrogant rich, blind patriots and others--can be piercingly accurate, though rendered with a sympathy that can make a listener examine the similar traits we may keep hidden ourselves. Despite the humor and rich melodic sense running through his songs, they often make harrowing listening.

But Newman also is the man who sings “I Love to See You Smile” in the Colgate commercials, who composed the glowing, wonder-strewn soundtracks to “Awakenings,” “The Natural,” “Parenthood” and other films (his uncles, Alfred and Lionel Newman, were film composers, as are his cousins, David and Tom Newman). Scattered among his more caustic works are songs so tender and real they can make one cry.

“I don’t want people to think I don’t mean anything I sing about,” he said. “One of the worst things that has happened to me with the nature of the work I’ve done is (that sometimes) they think that everything is sort of coming out of the side of my mouth. ‘Ooooh, does he mean it? What does he mean?’

“I think it’s clear what I’m doing, but maybe it isn’t.”

Indeed. It’s possible many folks wouldn’t even know of Newman if he weren’t so misunderstood. His biggest hit, 1978’s “Short People” used the plight of the vertically disadvantaged as a metaphor for general prejudice, but many bought it just for its cruel humor. His “I Love L.A.” has been adopted as a tailgate-party sing-along by people who evidently don’t notice that the genuine affection expressed for the town is laced with a knowledge of its bitter realities.

Tom Lehrer, the preeminent musical political satirist of the ‘60s, said he retired because he realized that “in a time when Henry Kissinger could win the Nobel Peace Prize, political satire has become redundant.” Newman too finds that it is sometimes harder to make his satirical commentaries seem more out of kilter than life already is.

“Things get ambiguous. There’s a song I wrote on my last record, ‘Roll With the Punches,’ which I don’t mean one word of, and I disagree absolutely completely with everything the guy says in the song. And I was doing it on these few dates recently, and I’ve given up “--here Newman’s voice rose in exasperation--”because I think a lot of people believe what the guy is saying, which is that sort of Clarence Thomas philosophy that people should do everything on their own, and government should just let people sink or swim. They believe it.

“And I thought it was clear that this guy singing was so hard-assed, talking about little kids living alone in a dark room with a junkie on the stairway. I thought it was clear. Maybe I didn’t do it well enough.”

He said such responses are more common these days. But he isn’t overly discouraged by them.

“A thing that always used to bother me was everyone saying how pessimistic I am and how it’s all sort of grim. Actually, I am not.

“I’m optimistic enough to write this kind of stuff and expect that people--not just a few of the intellectual elite, whatever the hell that might be--will notice that these people I’m writing about are kind of wrongheaded. I believe that the audience and the public is a hell of a lot better than the people I’m writing about. It may be getting closer to the 50/50 mark now,” Newman said with a laugh, “but I’ve always believed that.”

Looking at the world today, he sees cause for both hope and concern. “The events in Eastern Europe are encouraging, and in Russia, shocking,” he said. “I never believed in my lifetime that we’d see that. It looks like it’s not going to be easy, going through all these nasty 1914 nationalist things, but it’s still a nice development.

“In this country the Supreme Court for me is a sad thing: For the rest of my lifetime I know I’ll disagree with everything they do. With all the heat that was generated for the Gulf War, where there was such unanimity and passion and heat and everyone was ‘ready to go,’ I wish that kind of passion could be generated about helping the poor in this pretty rich nation. I don’t like to see the cities of Europe--Hamburg or Amsterdam or Stockholm or Antwerp--and look real hard and not find as bad housing as I find within five minutes of where I am now. Why is that?”

Earlier this year, Newman had the distinction of being the first artist to release a song questioning the Persian Gulf War. With “Lines in the Sand,” he said, he was moved to attempt consciously to write a song on a subject, instead of his usual practice of simply working at his piano until something unexpected arrives.

“I’d never done that type of thing before,” he said. “I’d been listening to the Senate debates, and it was nice hearing the country talk about it, that we were discussing it. I felt good about that and wrote this, and put it out. And then it disappeared. The radio doesn’t play me much anyway, and with something like that, I’m never going to get played.”

Only a few stations had played the song, and they dropped it as soon as war fervor caught on. Despite the emotions that raged over the war, Newman said, he got very little feedback from the song, positive or negative. “You don’t really expect to, when something isn’t heard,” he said. “It’s a small business, the record business, within a pretty big world. The thing most people know me for still is ‘Short People’ and the Colgate Commercial.

“With some of the things I wrote like ‘Rednecks’ or some of the things on the last album, I used to think, ‘Wow, I’m being brave to do something like this! People are going to be (upset) when they hear this, they’re going to be mad and everything. And I’m unhappy about it because I don’t like that kind of effect, but that’s the way I write. But they don’t even notice it.”

But then, Newman has never been one to believe, as did so many of his early contemporaries, that music was going to change the world.

“I think that Madonna’s style, the way she dresses, the way she acts, has a larger effect on young girls than music, period,” he said. “I don’t think music changes anything. It would have been nice if everybody in the ‘60s were right and it turned out that way, but it hasn’t really. I never had much faith in it changing things, but you do still sort of try in what you do.”

If the planet hasn’t exactly shifted on its axis, Newman does hear from fans who say his music has helped them in their lives.

“Yeah, and every time it surprises me,” he said. “Because I can’t think of anyone’s music that’s necessarily helped me, you know? I’m glad Beethoven was there, and I’m glad the Beatles were there, and I’m glad Prince is there, but I never look to it for solace.

“The one song I sort of regret writing was one called ‘The Blues’ that I did with Paul Simon. It kind of makes fun of sensitive-songwriter types, but it also has this part about this kid going to his room when he felt bad and banging away at his piano--which is something I never did. I felt bad when I was banging away at my piano. But I shouldn’t have overlooked the fact that music is a great comfort to a great number of people.

“For me it was the family job, and I never felt that way about it. I love music. I like seeing how great Brahms was, and Stravinsky and Schoenberg and things like that,” but the things Newman finds comfort in are “family, predominantly, and friends and books.”

(Of the latter, he likes John Updike’s last couple of novels but generally prefers nonfiction. Recent reading has included 19th-Century writer Thomas Babington Macaulay’s history of England.)

In the year ahead, he doesn’t anticipate taking on any soundtrack work, and he does hope to record a new album of songs. It will depend on how much of his time is occupied by the staging of “Faust.” Even without such distractions, he’s far from prolific. Five years passed between “Land of Dreams” and its predecessor, 1983’s “Trouble in Paradise” (which, Newman said, remains his favorite of his albums).

Part of the gap between those works was caused by his long struggle with the exhausting Epstein-Barr virus. Some accounts have also asserted that Newman has writer’s block, but he says he doesn’t.

“I never did. It’s just that often, I didn’t want to go up there and try,” he said. “Once I did start working, I never did go too long without doing something. It’s just hard to hang in there through four or five hours of nothing for it.

“It’s easier with a film score, in that you have something to work with: There’s a picture to write for, so there’s some idea. With songs, I don’t go into it with an idea, unfortunately. Usually when I sit at the piano, I don’t have a thing in mind--until something just comes after hammering away for a long time.”

Though what emerges from such hammering often seems fairly bleak, Newman said he doesn’t “think I’m a grumpy guy. I think that is a misapprehension. I think in person, at shows, people realize that. I’m not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but I’m not . . . uh, I’m trying to think of someone, but I don’t have the intelligence anymore to do it: I’m not Anthony Burgess or Bukowski, or a Paul Thoreaux who has such a bleak view of human beings.

“It isn’t so black and white. All these writers who believe the world is a cesspool and that people are just irredeemably awful, I can’t stand that kind of writing and thinking. I don’t believe it. It’s not so, clearly.”

Randy Newman sings tonight at 7:30 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $32.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.