Blissful Night in Randy Newman’s Cosmos

Goethe’s “Faust” is the operative literary source for Randy Newman these days. It’s the text from which he very, very loosely adapted his latest fine bit of work, an album and musical comedy called “Randy Newman’s Faust.” The stage production was a rather rough theatrical beast in its debut last year in La Jolla, but Newman hopes it will slouch its way eventually to Broadway. Chicago is the production’s next scheduled stop.

Another classic concerned with God, Devil and Humanity--Dante’s “Divine Comedy”--may be the literary epic that provides the best frame for analyzing Newman’s wonderful songwriting art in general, and in particular his riveting, thought-provoking, career-spanning concert at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Saturday night.

Dante’s spiritual cosmos is divided into Paradise for the blessed, Purgatory for the repentant sinners who have a spark of good in them, and the Inferno for the unredeemable.

In Newman’s cosmos there is no Paradise. His theatrical alter ego--Satan--a straight shooter in his own bent way, makes this abundantly clear in “RN’s Faust” during his first friendly tiff with the play’s amiably flimflamming God. The best anyone does in a Newman song is to achieve a spot in an earthbound Purgatory inhabited by struggling, sympathetic and very human people who reach for love but are wounded by it, or who seek a firm place to stand in society but constantly are hard-pressed by life’s fundamental treacherousness and insecurity.

Newman has a complex, nuanced take on human nature, so even bigots--a breed he often satirizes--can gain a spot in his Purgatory, a nod of recognition and respect for their flawed humanity.

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In fact, the First Citizen of Purgatory, as Newman’s concert unfolded, was the central character of “Good Old Boys,” Newman’s landmark 1974 concept album about the South. Newman sang five songs from the album, and clearly he has a fond spot for the resiliency and honesty of its protagonist, a self-confessed redneck. Poverty, social stigma, comical episodes of sexual humiliation--the tribulations of “this poor cracker” seem endless, but he maintains a certain beleaguered pride and a staunchly romantic heart.

(Newman, 52, was raised and remains based in Los Angeles, but he was born in New Orleans. His fondness for things Southern shows in the cracked, raggedy drawl of his vocal delivery, his sometimes elegant, sometimes easy-rolling Dixie-tinged piano style and his couching of most songs in music drawn from the south: gospel, Dixieland, ragtime and Stephen Foster ballads.)

Newman’s Inferno would be inhabited by the comfortably smug and the cruelly indifferent, epitomized by the rich, egotistical blowhard of “My Life Is Good.” Buried deeper still in his chambers of ignominy are the deceivers and the betrayers of trust. There’s the slave ship captain of “Sail Away” who, in a sort of hymnal parody of “Amazing Grace,” tries to seduce his hapless chattel (and maybe his own guilty conscience) with phony visions of the idyllic life they are to enjoy in America. And in the deeply bitter “Davy the Fat Boy,” a protagonist charged with looking after the titular misfit turns him into a sideshow freak and tries to claim that his exploitation is in fact an act of concerned friendship.

This moral cosmology makes Newman one of the few true musical satirists we have today. The likes of Mark Russell and the Capitol Steps are mere jesters who will tweak political noses indiscriminately for the sake of a laugh. Without ever mounting a soapbox, and with few topical references, Newman takes a moral stance, but relies on his audience to draw its own conclusions about the worth or blameworthiness of the characters who come to life in his songs.

This reliance on character in the songs frees Newman to be himself onstage: an affable entertainer who embraces an audience with humor and lets his darker material speak for itself. Laugh lines were abundant in the songs, especially during the first set of his two-hour, 36-song performance. Joking introductions, parenthetical quips and wry, self-deprecating asides were numerous, if familiar-ringing for veterans of Newman concerts.

He didn’t perform “Faust,” but he did sprinkle in a representative sampling of it. We got two humorous bits of byplay between God and Lucifer, “Glory Train” and “Northern Boy,” as well as the musical’s three superb ballads.

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On the “Faust” album, Elton John performs “Little Island,” Linda Ronstadt sings the desolate lullaby “Sandman’s Coming,” and Bonnie Raitt handles “Feels Like Home,” a glorious hymn of romantic yearning. The latter two are career highlights for both pop divas, indispensable moments that their fans should seek out. Newman made them vivid in his own way, his gruff, straining delivery striking a note of profound sorrow and affecting vulnerability, like that of a grieving old man. Not many songwriters who debuted in the 1960s can still equal or surpass their peak work three decades on; with “Faust,” Newman joins Richard Thompson and Neil Young among the few who have.

“Sandman’s Coming” and “Feels Like Home” were part of a remarkable second half that leaned heavily toward the bleak, hurting side of Newman’s repertoire. Heard after such first-rank songs as “Baltimore” and “Same Girl,” even a minor song like “Jolly Coppers on Parade” gained new stature: After songs that strikingly detailed the helplessness of life on mean, impoverished streets, the account of parading police officers seemed especially chilling. Here were America’s despairing, possibly doomed neighborhoods, and here were the shining knights charged with keeping them pacified.

“Dixie Flyer” also stood out on renewed hearing. It evoked both the great promise of American life (in bright sections full of hopeful momentum) and the cost of being marginal in America. In one of the song’s darker-hued segments, Newman sang, with a sharp, bitter tone, about how his Jewish relatives in the South tried nervously to assimilate, circa 1943:

Drinkin’ rye whiskey from a flask in the back seat

Tryin’ to do like the Gentiles do.

Christ, they wanted to be Gentiles, too.

Who wouldn’t down there, wouldn’t you?

An American Christian. God damn!

Pick whatever racial or ethnic group you like, in whatever period you wish, and “Dixie Flyer” becomes an emblem for a whole swath of double-edged American experience. That’s accomplishing about as much as a pop song can, and Newman has many others that accomplish as much. This was a concert of familiar material, but with Newman the familiar repertoire has a way of speaking freshly with each encounter--one sure sign of an enduring classic.