Of Chickens as Flat as Our Spirits

Look at that mountain

Look at those trees

Look at the bum over there

Man, he’s down on his knees

. . . I love L.A. (we love it)

. . . I love L.A. (we love it)

--From the Randy Newman song “I Love L.A.”

Randy Newman scanned the menu. Braised celery hearts, salads served with “warm new potatoes,” goat cheese cheeseburgers--standard West L.A. fare. What stopped him was the flattened chicken breast. “Flattened chicken?” Newman said with a chuckle. “No wonder the whole world laughs at L.A.”

This was last Tuesday. Downtown, a jury was lurching toward judgment in the Reginald O. Denny case. Farther east, a new freeway was up and running to nowhere. There was smog against the mountains and, no doubt, somewhere, fresh blood on the streets. In Brentwood, though, the sky was almost blue and the air was almost sweet, and the first question to ask the songwriter was also the most obvious.

“That’s what the press always wants to know,” Newman said. “Do I still love L.A.?”

*

In person, as in his music, Randy Newman seems a regular sort, with a droll sense of humor. On this afternoon, he was fighting off the flu and the thought of soon turning 50. “It’s one of those days,” he sighed, “when you drive around with your seat belt unbuckled.” Nonetheless, he settled back in his seat at a patio cafe, ordered scrambled eggs, “on toast points,” and talked for a couple of hours about his city and his song.

A lot has transpired since Newman wrote “I Love L.A.” Looking back, 1984 was a high-water mark for L.A., a time of Magic and Dancing Barry, of Olympic torches and fancy talk about the new mecca of multiculturalism. And despite its satire--the notion of a “perfect day” encompassing Beach Boys and “big nasty redheads” and the Imperial Highway and that bum on his knees--Newman’s song became a municipal anthem, the soundtrack of a city that thought it was going somewhere great, fast.

Now, of course, no one looks to Los Angeles for grand talk of tomorrow. Conversation has moved off polyglot possibilities and locked on grittier realities, like who got shot last night and who is going to get laid off tomorrow. In Newman’s view, this is mainly a matter of perception, of what people choose to see. The newspapers, he said, “write about us like we were Calcutta.” Lost in the eulogies is the fact that Los Angeles was never half as pretty as it once pretended to be, nor is it half as bleak today.

“The perception is that the city is radically different,” he said. “The defense cutbacks are real . . . but for most people, it’s not all that different now from how it was in the 1980s, except that maybe, on paper, your house isn’t worth as much. All this will change when the recession ends. Money talks. The malaise will end. The city will turn around--or at least the P.R. will. Whether it ever will change for poor people who live here, I don’t know. I’m not optimistic.”

*

Though he has lived in L.A. since boyhood, the son of a doctor who took him along on house calls across the city, Newman makes no claim to civic expertise. “Nobody knows L.A.,” he said. “It’s too big. We are all too isolated. You know, the car thing. The only people who can speak with any authority about L.A. are cops and firemen and ambulance drivers. And maybe cable installers.”

Still, he does seem to get out a lot. He’s around. And like most everyone in L.A., he has noticed the fear in his neighbors and has wondered about what smog will do to his newborn’s lungs, and he even has toyed with the possibility of moving on. He tried Mariposa once, but his older sons didn’t like the foothill life. And he checked out Eureka. “Beautiful,” he said, “but no one up there got my jokes.”

And so he has stayed. “Do I love L.A.? I love my children. I don’t know if it is possible to ‘love’ a city. But when I go away and come back I do feel some kind of fondness for L.A.” He spoke warmly of certain streets, and the La Banda radio station he’s discovered, and the distinctive way smog can filter sunlight, and the “kind of funny buildings and kind of funny food, like flattened chicken. I love all that.”

He pointed beyond the patio wall. “Look around,” he said. “It’s nice here today. It’s warming up. The sky is getting so blue. It’s OK. Yeah, I guess I do love it. I love it. Yeah.”

(He loves it.)