Drawing from some relatively unknown older songs (1965's "Bet No One Ever Hurt This Bad"), previously covered songs (1966's "I Think It's Going To Rain Today," 1967's "So Long Dad" and "Love Story"), and recent compositions (1968's "Cowboy" and "Laughing Boy"), Newman focused on arranging the idiosyncratic selection for a full orchestra. Clearly intending to knock listeners' socks off, co-producers Waronker and Parks pulled out all the stops, assembling no less than 75 musicians to help realize Newman's carefully detailled arrangements. The result was unlike anything else released in 1968, or the years to follow.
The heading on the back of the album served as both pronouncement and warning: Randy Newman Creates Something New Under The Sun (Reprise 6286). There was nothing here that remotely rocked, swung, or resembled traditional '60's pop. In the opening song, "Love Story," gentle piano patterns were suddenly awash in stormy orchestrations, only to return peaceably as the nasal singer mused about the joys of marriage ("We'll have a kid/Or maybe we'll rent one/He's got to be straight/We don't want a bent one") and growing old together ("When our kids are grown/With kids of their own/They'll send us away/To a little home in Florida/We'll play checkers all day/Until we pass away").
Unapologetically male-directed lyrics touched on cowboys, fat boys, laughing boys, and one Big Boy (sample lyric from "I Think He's Hiding": "Oh, He's so great/And He's so straight/And you know He's watching") -- songs which had little more chance of radio play in Middle America than the innocuous-sounding "Beehive State" ("We got to tell this country about Utah/'Cause nobody seems to know"). What few women were involved had either moved on or, as in the plaintive "Linda," left a male narrator hanging in uncertainty ("She said she'd be here/On our special pier...I love her"). One can hardly imagine how the marketing heads at Reprise must have rationalized the album's dark commercial appeal.
One commercial single was released in conjunction with the album (Reprise 0692), a mono mix of "I Think It's Going To Rain Today" backed by a unique mix of "Beehive State" that gives one of the song's narrators a megaphone-like voice quality; in Britain, "Love Story" was chosen as the A-side with "Rain ... " as its flip (Reprise RS 23278). Newman also talked Reprise into launching what was to be a very short-lived series of 78 RPM promotional records in 1969, kicking off with Newman's first 45 transposed into a ten-inch vinyl format. While interesting as a curiosity item, it's hard to believe than any radio station actually attempted to play the antique-format platter at a time when men were landing on the moon.
Of more interest to collectors may be a promo-only U.S. single (Reprise 0771) featuring a mono version of "I Think He's Hiding" backed by the then-non-album title, "Last Night I Had A Dream." The most uncharacteristic recording Newman has ever made, this version of " ... Dream" (familiar to most fans in its countrified arrangement on his 1972 Sail Away LP), began life with the sound of four wildly distorted guitars, two drums, a fuzz bass and an echo-heavy vocal mix. While produced, like the debut LP, by Waronker and Parks, the song has virtually nothing in common sonically with the album, sounding more like an experiment recorded during a drug-induced wrap up session. Six takes of "The Goat," a marvelous 1958 Sonny Boy Williamson comic-blues number and long time Newman favorite, were also recorded in May 1968 at a similar late-night session/party for a Harpers Bizarre LP, but remain unreleased.
Newman's debut album itself, clocking in at under 28 minutes, followed a "less is more" dictum; like most of his recordings, neither time nor words are wasted. On "So Long Dad," an entire verse ("Home again/But we won't be staying here dad/The smoke makes Jane's eyes tear so bad/And we can't have that/We'll write you where we're at/And Janie's uncle owns a bank/I think I'll try my hand at that") performed in the earlier Nelson and Minelli covers was cut to help improve song flow.
The album closes with two of Newman's most celebrated compositions, "I Think It's Going To Rain Today" and "Davy The Fat Boy." The surface sentimentality of the first song has led more inept cover artists astray than any song in his repertoire -- where other versions have been prettier (Judy Collins's), more syrupy (Claudine Longet's, accompanied by Newman on piano), or more dramatic (Rod McKuen's) than Newman's own, few have snagged the elusive compassion and need of the author's own grainy vocal. Performed to death at virtually every concert he's done, Newman can still disappear into the song at will and startle an audience with his weary, emotional drawl of the two lines: "Human kindness is overflowing/And I think it's going to rain today."
Where "Rain..." has cover versions to burn, no other artist to date has taken on "Davy The Fat Boy." The reason may be as much respect for what many artists recognize as Newman's signature song as discomfort with the song's storyline: after becoming young Davy's guardian once the boy's parents die, the narrator turns him into a sideshow attraction ("What do he weigh folks/Can you guess what he weigh?/You know, it's only a quarter/Win a teddy bear for the girlfriend/Or something for the wife/You've got to let this fat boy in your life!"). The song's wildly inventive musical structure - an improbable mix of Domino, Kurt Weill and classical influences - is matched by perfectly pitched lyrics. The song stands as an utterly original composite of Newman's imagination, and has often been used as a measure by Newman himself, as he told Chuck Marshall in 1978: "I'm interested in people's reaction's to 'Davy The Fat Boy.' I never get tired of doing 'Davy,' when I really think of it...it depresses me that I wrote it so long ago. I don't know that I've written stuff much better than that."
Die-hard collectors may also wish to seek out the album's initial 1968 release cover, a kitschy collage-art classic that featured a trim Newman slouching wistfully in a yellow turtleneck and tweed jacket amid clouds and scraps of sheet music clippings. After the album spent some months slumbering quietly on store shelves, Reprise pulled this less-than-hip cover and reissued the album with a close up picture of Newman with spectacles and longer hair. Reprise even ran some tongue-in-cheek trade ads to try to sway retailers; one ad explaining the cover switch was headed "Once you get used to it, his voice is really something." The smarter, sexier album slumbered on.
While the general public could not appear to care less, most critics were bubbling over with praise for the artist and album; what few dissenters spoke up generally found fault with the fussy production values over the songwriting itself. In the Sunday New York Times , Susan Lydon made the canny judgement, "He (Newman) writes sophisticated rock for adults: irony, beauty, tragedy, humor, and a taste for the bizarre."
The notion of rock for adults, while familiar at this fourth decade mark in rock's history, was something new under the sun in 1968, when virtually all rock product had a promise of rebellion, catering to a teen-to-twenties marketplace. Although the lack of any real backbeat or drive makes it tough to classify Newman's first album as truly "rock," the lyrics shared a slyly subversive (albeit ironic) attitude and sense of humor with the best rock music of the period. Like much of the Byrds' or Beatles' music of that era, the record defied dancing (or even much toe-tapping) -- you had to just sit there and listen to the damn thing. Out of print in any format in the U.S. for some years, the album was domestically issued on CD for the first time in mid-1995 (an exquisitely mastered Japanese import CD is also worth tracking down). Newman's debut remains one of his poorest selling and best-crafted efforts.