O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Newman at UCI: ‘Faust’-Rate Act

In one of his many whimsical but barbed musings Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, Randy Newman imagined including Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana in a celebrity choir to sing his own sequel to “We Are the World.”

In fact, that Newman anthem, “I Want You to Hurt Like I Do,” is sour enough in its portrayal of human motives for Axl Rose, Kurt Cobain, or any of rock’s current crop of angry young would-be subversives to sing it without reservation.

It’s too bad that nobody under 30 appeared to be in attendance as Newman played solo on the UC Irvine campus. The Los Angeles singer-songwriter, who just hit 50 last week, remains one of the most relevant, intelligent and, yes, deeply subversive artists in pop music.

He manages to be these things while achieving a degree of songwriting literacy and onstage humor and personableness beyond the ken of today’s college-oriented rockers. Their bile is obvious. At UC Irvine, Newman frequently disguised his core of anger with laughter in a way that kept the audience entertained, but off-balance.

It has been said before that Newman is a spiritual descendant of Mark Twain. He is at once a humorist capable of provoking laughter, and a dark, biting satirist who has no illusions that human nature oozes with abiding decency.

No surprise, then, that Newman has kept for himself the role of that ultimate subversive, Satan, in his adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust,” a musical-in-progress that he expects to release as an album in mid-’94.

Accompanying himself on a grand piano, Newman dotted his nearly two-hour concert with four segments from “Faust,” singing roles written for James Taylor (the musical’s voice of God), Elton John (an aggrieved British angel) and Linda Ronstadt (who sings the part of Margaret, leading lady to Don Henley’s Faust).

One song was a rousing gospel number in which God invites the heavenly host to “Get on the glory train”--to which the soon-to-be-fallen Lucifer bluntly responds, “Bulls---,” and announces that God and angels are mere figments of the human imagination.

The other “Faust” pieces that Newman performed included a stark, desolate lullaby that Ronstadt’s character sings to the infant daughter she has just drowned and a ballad in which Elton’s angel admonishes God for failing to reward the English for sacrifices that preserved the world from Kaiser and Fuehrer. He also did one in which God and Lucifer spar, a la the Book of Job, over whether humankind, represented by an average, everyday resident of Saskatchewan, is fundamentally good or terminally craven.

It was enough to whet one’s appetite for the album--if only to see how Newman is going to connect all these strands. By the way, let’s reiterate the Faustian bargain Newman made with Orange County fans after previewing a bit of the musical at the Coach House in 1991: “I’ll do the whole thing here someday. Promise.” We expect payment, Rand, or you risk having your immortal soul deposited in the Nixon Library.

While a BBC camera crew hovered about him, unobtrusively for the most part, Newman played 33 songs, including at least one from each of the eight studio albums he has released in a recording career that dates back to 1968.

“They’re doing a series on the greatest musicians who ever lived,” Newman explained with a characteristic quip. “Last week they did Beethoven, this week they’re doing me. Later on, they’ll do Billy Joel.”

Before his set was over, Newman was joking about pianistic clunkers he had committed. “I want to apologize to this piano,” he said, nodding toward the keyboard. “Things happened to it tonight that never happen to a piano this good in its lifetime.”

Other than repeated mishaps on the intro to “I Love L.A.” (and Newman played the moment so skillfully for laughs that one wondered whether the mistakes were deliberate), he did a sturdy job of accompanying himself in a familiar, idiosyncratic style based heavily in ragtime and old-time parlor music.

The parlors in question belong both to genteel residences that would have relished sentimental ballads by Stephen Foster, and New Orleans bawdyhouses that would have wanted something a bit more carefree. Newman’s occasionally florid style works well alongside the crusty sung drawl that locates most of his characters on Southern soil, God included.

The audience rewarded Newman with laughter at all the right times on such openly humorous songs as “Short People.” One might have expected him to give this novelty item short shrift, but Newman’s zesty performance made his biggest hit seem less like a novelty than merely another of his well-crafted satiric monologues.

Like many of his songs, “Short People” employs dramatic irony to undercut its blinkered, dyspeptic character, yet it is believable because it lets that character score some points with funny zingers of his own.

As much as the audience wanted to laugh, and as much as Newman obliged with his engaging, self-deprecating stage manner, the ultimate thrust of this concert was deeply unsettling.

It is a hazard of satire that the artist can be misunderstood. At times, the audience reaction revealed some telling things about what it is to be white, middle class and middle-aged in a place like Orange County, where all manner of tension is wearing away the insulation that had padded the social fabric for a well-off majority.

There were a few guffaws during the first lines of “Dayton Ohio--1903.” But the audience grew hushed as Newman’s portrait continued, with its vision of an orderly, smiling, middle-class paradise, where “the air was clean, and you could see, and folks were nice to you.” Southern California-1993 is the antithesis of that idyllic place, and that disparity hit home.

What we have instead is the souring landscape Newman roved during “I Love L.A.” He released the song in 1983 as a playfully backhanded anthem to a high-spirited city on the make. Ten years later, Newman turned it into a curdled, wrathful thing, delivered in a high, nasal voice in which you could hear bitterness compete with hysteria.

Like Twain, Newman has mustered his highest artistry to engage the greatest American issue, which is race. “Dayton, Ohio--1903,” that vision of the fleeting white-folks’ paradise, was followed by “Christmas in Capetown,” a chilling reflection on the consequences of racism, and one of the most complex and searingly detailed character studies ever accomplished by a pop songwriter. The song is about South Africa; it applies equally to South Central, and to Belfast and Bosnia.

One got the sense that part of this audience, perhaps those less familiar with his work, expected Newman to be a light-satiric cousin to Mark Russell.

As a friendly, disarming host who liked a laugh himself, Newman did play somewhat to that expectation. But at the same time he served his own corrosive art well.

Things grew as dark toward the end as they can in a concert that places so much emphasis on humor. The home stretch included “Sail Away,” one of the most telling blows pop has delivered to the smug strain in the American self-image that doesn’t want to think about the slave trade and its legacy.

It also was weighted with such accounts of personal desolation as “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” and the anguished lullaby from “Faust.”

Memo to Axl and Kurt and to younger rock fans who may not think that Randy Newman has much to say to them: Subversive art doesn’t have to wear a scowl and sound a scream. It can be jaunty and joking, yet designed to turn on an audience in unexpected, discomfiting ways.

It requires advanced artistry in the songwriting, and when you listen to Newman, you encounter one of the very best--a man who accomplishes much more with his anger by honing it to a finely wrought point than by hacking away with inarticulate blunt force.