Randy Newman - Live CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

"so nothing matters."

What matters terribly is that Randy has the deepest, most consistent, most original comic vision to be found in pop music today. This live recording captures his personal, utterly unique style far better than either of his two highly arranged albums, and the insights of the songs are so devastating that I can't think of a single American who wouldn't be better off for having heard it. Now that Dan Ellsberg is done with the Pentagon papers, he might think about getting Randy Newman/Live into mass circulation.

The world at large knows Randy's songs in dozens of cover versions, most notably Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come" and Judy Collins' "Think It's Gonna Rain Today." Fine as those versions were, they failed to convey the range of feeling that only Randy's voice can properly express. If you heard nothing but Joan Baez's rendition of "Don't Think Twice," you might think the song was a heartbreaking, darkling ballad; Dylan's snarl tells you that it is a scathing put-down. In the same way, Three Dog Night perform "Mama" as a driving, slightly offbeat rock number; when Randy sings it, the drama in the song suddenly comes into focus: he is clearly parroting the words of a helplessly frightened girl, making merciless fun of her and inviting us to hate him for it.

Randy is not so much a singer as a monologuist. In each of his songs, he becomes a new character, and his characters are all so frankly heartless and low-minded that they are funny. In recent years, most popular-song satire has beaten whatever dead horses happened to be lying conveniently around - witness the Beatles' descriptions of the shallowness of suburban life or Ray Davies' hamfisted lampoons of jet set frivolity. Randy walks past these barn-side targets and goes in for the kill.

His songs deal with the fact that love, charity, and human kindness are appallingly low on the list of motives for human behavior. With unthinkable candor, Randy's characters blandly flaunt their callousness. Like the guy in "Tickle Me," who asks the question "What can you do to amuse me, now that there's nothing to do?" and answers, "Why don't you tickle me?/Gee whiz won't that be fine/What a great idea, what a perfect way to kill some time." As u