The 500 - #356 - 12 Songs - Randy Newman

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: # 356

Album Title: 12 Songs

Artist: Randy Newman

Genre: Roots Music, Satirical

Recorded: RCA Studios, Hollywood, LA

Released: February, 1970

My age at release: 4 - my guest blogger, Rob Hodson, was 13.

How familiar was I with it before this week: One Song

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Have You Seen My Baby?

This week, I welcome back a guest blogger, Rob Hodson. We have known each other for 20 years having met met and taught together at two schools in London Ontario -- Lorne Avenue and Eagle Heights. Lunchroom breaks, discussing music, film, television, comedy and comic books with Rob were always highlights in my school day. 

Rob is a gifted artist and I leaned heavily on his expertise when developing art activities for my classes. He and his wife, Susan (Susan Day Ceramics on Instagram), have completed several beautiful and socially relevant tiled murals around our city...with more to come. Rob gave me some ideas for my John post in December, 2019, and he returns here to share his thoughts on Randy Newman's second album. Enjoy.

Three London, Ontario, tile-mural examples
completed by Susan and Rob

It's always amazing to me how music can conjure up a time and a place. You can be walking down the street and hear a familiar melody and a funny smile immediately hits your face. You can't really express why, but something clicks inside and you make a connection to an event from years before. To paraphrase a great line I heard years ago, "the music you listened to from the time in your life when you were most happy and free, will always resonate within you". For me, much of that music comes from Randy Newman's 1970 album 12 Songs.

Randy Newman - 12 Songs Album Cover

I was finishing high school and desperate to escape from home when my best friend, and stoner buddy, Chuck Jewitt, was offered a job in Victoria B.C. He had recently completed his training as a Respiratory Technician and asked me to come with him for moral support and a GREAT ADVENTURE. British Columbia was as far away from London, Ontario as you could get while still remaining in the country -- and I jumped at the chance to escape. It was the summer of 1975. I was 18 and Victoria seemed as exotic as Paris in the 1930s.

London to Victoria 4000 km as the crow flies

The train was the cheapest available transportation and, after nine days of uncomfortable but fantastic travel, there we were on the other side of the world -- British Columbia. We spent a day wandering Vancouver until the ferry left and we travelled (across the ocean!) to Victoria. I'd never seen the ocean, never been on a ship, never seen mountains and never seen anything like the girls in the west. On that first trip across to the island, I saw dolphins working in unison to drive fish ahead of them, and a stunningly beautiful girl kissed me for loaning her a cigarette. I felt like I was in Narnia.

BC Ferry - Current Day

Barely a week after we arrived in Victoria I got a job as a dishwasher at the Keg restaurant right in the heart of the city. It overlooked the inner harbour and the sun set on the water as boat-planes landed and sailboats came and went on shimmering golden waves. For a poor boy from the dull plains of southern Ontario it seemed a place of almost magical beauty. As I worked my way up from dishwasher to prep chef to line cook and finally to waiter and bartender, I made friends with the other members of the staff. The place was huge, the first Keg in Canada, and I learned a work ethic that has lasted me to this day.

The Keg - Victoria - 2018 photo, with harbour view in windows 

I was working in the kitchen when one of the waiters, Jeremy Ball, was talking to another guy about about an album they'd just heard the night before. It was, he said, this weird prog-rock mix of piano, guitar and bizarre sounds and he couldn't get it out of his head, but he couldn't remember the name of the band or the album either. -- common party problem. He and the other guy started doing riffs and lyrics cobbled together from drug influenced memories. They could only remember a few isolated lyrics. I listened and said: “It sounds like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Karn Evil 9 from Brain Salad Surgery?” 

Album Cover for Brain Salad Surgery by 
Emerson, Lake and Palmer

That was it and, for Jeremy, this gave me immediate credibility.  Jeremy, it turned out, was an Audiophile. He was into music with a capital M. All kinds, every kind, but it had to be really, really well made and had to be played on a really, really, good music system. As the nights of work went by he and I talked more and more about music. We'd both been hooked into classical music by the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. We'd both been the only kids at our high school into the progressive rock band King Crimson and we loved the swampy-blues-rock of Little Feat. Most importantly, perhaps, we considered it an outrage that The Tubes weren't considered music gods by more people.

Album Cover for A Clockwork Orange Soundtrack

You have to remember that back then, TV was the lowest of the low.
Almost nobody my age had a TV. If they did, they wouldn't watch anything but late night monster movies with the sound off and the music on. When a twenty-something moved into a new place, the first thing they did was set up the stereo. Nothing else really mattered and very often you truly had nothing else -- Ikea minimalism, long before it was stylish.


Chuck and I had been forced to leave our stereos and albums behind in Ontario and we were saving up to buy a good system. Jeremy was having a party one night after work and by three or four in the morning, it was just a few of us diehards left. His stereo system was like nothing I had ever seen before. The turntable looked like a glistening oil derrick. It had gyroscopes to to balance the album
perfectly. It had a belt drive and you could adjust the speed to make music sound faster and more exciting just like real disc jockeys used to do in the old days. The tone arm took ten seconds to slowly lower to meet the vinyl as gently as a kiss. The speakers were from Germany, six inches thick and hung on the wall strategically for the absolute optimum sound. It was like a cathedral. He carefully cleaned each album with an anti-static brush before and after (!) listening to a side. Nobody was allowed to touch the system except him, and I would never have dared even if he'd asked me.

I was flipping through his vast collection and the artwork on the album cover for 12  Songs caught my eye. A simple black and white photo which struck me as funny right off. A small chair, for a child to sit in and on the other side a rocking chair. In between, a television. Brain candy from the cradle to the grave.

Don't think, just watch. 

I'd never heard of Randy Newman and neither had anyone other than Jeremy and although the album had been released in 1970, five years earlier, it was not what you'd call a hot seller. I did some research and by 1975 it had sold only a meager 4500 copies, despite being publicly adored by Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. 

The album starts off with these almost silly horns honking away to introduce Have You Seen My Baby? The song is less than 3 minutes long, but it pulls you in as a story of a man who just desperately misses the fun and the joy, that a woman (his baby) once brought into his life. 

The next song, Let's Burn Down the Cornfield is another lament for love. Slow, sad, angry and basically about a man who is willing to burn the world for the woman he loves. Mama Told Me Not To Come has all the trademarks of Newman's funny, sly and sarcastic view of society and the world. The song has been recording by a very wide and weird group of performers, topping the charts earlier that year when recorded by Three Dog Night.

Yellow Man was the first of many Newman songs to engage publicly with the systemic racism in the U.S. The lyrics are sad and sarcastic and daringly deceptive because of their simplicity. It was music that was revolutionary because it dared to be quiet. It was hardcore because it was thoughtful. As disco was just beginning to explode this was an album full of twangy guitars and subtle riffs, but also ripe with irony, vision and humour. It wasn't sophisticated, but it certainly wasn't easy either and that has been the core of Newman's work for the last fifty years. Additionally, this album introduced me to one of my absolute favourites, Ry Cooder, whose guitar work is soft, sly and brilliant.

Ry Cooder (mid-70s)

Newman comes by his musical chops honestly. His family contained many musicians that did everything from conducting orchestras to scoring films. Just shortly after 12 Songs was released, Mick Jagger
asked Newman to do the score for his 1970 rock film Performance. 

Movie Poster for Performance (1970)

This opportunity set Newman on the path to becoming a mainstay as a film score composer. He is responsible for the soundtrack to more than 25 motion pictures,  including all four of the Toy Story movies.

One of the early reviews for 12 Songs read: “Once you get used to his voice the album is pretty good.” High praise, and I'll bet Newman laughed his ass off when he heard it.