Randy Newman – Good Old Boys / Sail Away

With the 1972 release Sail Away, tricky songster Randy Newman took a turn toward political satire, producing salutes to the river in Cleveland that had caught fire, the overlooked potential pleasures of thermonuclear war, the never-tasted pain of stardom, and a Top Ten list of ways that God was royally pissed off with all mankind.

The songs have lasted, despite their topicality, but the song “Sail Away” itself was a touchstone for him, a blueprint for a musical production number that would never be filmed, a sort of travel commercial in which a smarmy slave ship master works to con Africans onto a ship for a really swell time over there in America. Outrageous and utterly original, the devastating song evoked horror through sheer musical beauty, and pointed the way to what would came next — one of the great albums of the ’70s, the first “southern rock opera,” Good Old Boys.

The welcome reissue of Sail Away improves its sound and adds a few alternate takes. Good Old Boys, which includes an entire second disc containing Newman’s never-released solo presentation of the original idea for the LP — a character-based narrative set to be called “Johnny Cutler’s Birthday” — is a prime candidate for reissue of the year.

With the strings, horns and piano brought forward now, killer songs such as the beautiful ballad “Marie”, the lilting, minimally ironic Alabama anthem “Birmingham”, and the paranoid flood tale “Louisiana 1927” pop out all the more. Though there was ample reason to know even then that “concept album” chances were dubious, Good Old Boys demanded to be taken on those terms — and worked.

It’s an extraordinary cycle of interrelated songs about race, identity and the workings of the half-imaginary mental landscape of the South, on two races, and all classes. It dared to focus on the ignored, put-upon, guilt-ridden and guilty population of its popular and infamous opening fight song, “Rednecks”, invoking not just that “R” word, but the “N” word. The album doesn’t defuse the hot-button words, it examines their heat.

The keys to Newman’s take are two overlooked numbers, “Naked Man” and “Back On My Feet Again”, which, in gleeful rhythm, show how whites and blacks alike are judged by their surfaces, live with fictions, and can be defined by the eyes of obsessive beholders who have cracked under pressure. This level of exploration of race, self-definition, and delusion in America had been found in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson or Kern & Hammerstein’s epic Showboat, but nowhere in a handful of songs.

Functioning like the best director commentaries added to DVD movies, showing a probing mind at work, “Johnny Cutler” is fascinating, but proves that Newman’s turn away from the concept was sound.

Ditching the character-based single story idea in the face of ongoing 1974 economic upheavals and Watergate, Newman added pointed political/social songs (“Mr. President, Have Pity On The Working Man”), and effectively broadened the album’s scope. He moved well beyond leaving the Southern factory worker at album’s end with satisfaction that getting plastered daily was a way out of the poor white’s humiliating dilemma, a way to “make it.” The result honors the humanity of the “redneck” without pandering to his foibles.

What was most timely about Good Old Boys, this new visit 28 years on suggests, adds to its timelessness. It exploits Newman’s deadpan vocal tics, perfect for leaving all of the layered nuances of his songs intact, and his full arsenal of musical sources that had ever impacted or commented on the Southern landscape — from Stephen Foster songs to New Orleans whorehouse piano to gentlemanly waltzes out from behind the pillars and potted palms, as fabricated in New York City. All of his work after this, in songs and the family soundtrack business, would reflect Good Old Boys’ achievement.