In early February 1973, Russ Titleman sat in as producer on some informal piano-and-vocal demo sessions for Newman's album-in-progress. A thirteen-song tape evolved from the sessions, with Randy providing Russ with the storyline (and occasional asides) between cuts. Provisionally titled "Johnny Cutler's Birthday," the song cycle -- centering on a Birmingham, Alabama steelworker and his family -- marked Newman's first deliberate attempt at creating a thematically-linked concept album, what would eventually become 1974's Good Old Boys LP (Warner Bros MS 2193).
Randy sets up the opening scene in a small Southern town park: "This begins with the sound of children playing, possibly some boys playing football...and in the distance a park band concert. Johnny Cutler and his daughter are at the park, presumably sitting on a bench. Some desultory conversation: 'Why don't you go play with those kids,' she whines a bit. It would be nice if it could be Red Mountain Park, where that giant statue is..so they can mention that big vulcan of steel. Anyway, ultimately, after he loses his temper, she goes off and he quiets. The kids fade. And he sings: 'Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a T.V. show/With some smart-ass New York Jew/And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox/And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too..'"
This intro sets up one of the most deliberately provocative songs ever written by an American songwriter, "Rednecks." Newman softens no words in his savaging of stereotypes: "We talk real funny down here/We drink too much and we laugh too loud/We're too dumb to make it in no Northern town/And we're keeping the niggers down." Randy's unflinching (and repeated) use of the term "nigger" throughout the song (combined with the equally radio-friendly chorus "and we don't know our ass from a hole in the ground") caused instant condemnation of the song and artist in some quarters, blindsiding potential listeners to the vicious ironies of the final two verses: "Now your Northern nigger's a Negro/You see he's got his dignity/Down here we're to ignorant to realize/That the North has set the nigger free..Free to be put in a cage in Harlem../..In East St. Louis/.. In Roxbury in Boston.." The list rolls on. Framed by the starkness of Newman's solo piano and vocal, this demo capably holds its own against the powerful studio version on Good Old Boys.
As the song fades, Newman pans over to the town church for the next song, the gospel-flavored "If We Didn't have Jesus" ("..Wouldn't have no one at all/God gonna set this world on fire/One of these days..") before heading back to the park where Johnny launches into the autobiographical "Birmingham": "My daddy was a barber..a most unsightly man/He was born in Tuscaloosa..died right here in Birmingham." The weak final verse of the song demo here (concerning a group road trip to a Seattle fair) was replaced on the album by the more modestly inspired closing: "Got a big black dog/And his name is Dan..The meanest dog in Alabam'/..Get 'em Dan." A brief reprise of this song appears later in the demo narrative.
After spoken misgivings about context, Newman segues into an unreleased song from 1966, "A Joke On Cecil Baker (Told at the Jones County Country Store, Greencreek, Georgia, Summer 1959)," a Tortoise-and-the-Hare-styled shaggy dog story that ends complete with non-sequitur moral ("..Cause no one likes to see a rabbit smile"). This unusual song was originally considered for Sail Away, but was dropped early in album track selection.
Written with some of Newman's most frugal lyrics, "Louisiana 1927," sketches in images of a great pre-Depression flood that swept through much of that state: "What has happened down here is the wind has changed..," and a theme than sounded out, for better or worse, throughout the album: "Some people got lost in the flood/Some people got away alright." Despite Newman's blatant self-plagarism of his memorable piano riff from "Sail Away," the song ranks as one of his classics. Newman's fading cadences of the final lines "They're trying to wash us away, tryin' to wash us away.." stand among his most felt vocals.
At a drunken celebration on the eve of Johnny's 30th birthday ("Seeing that all my fucking friends are assembled here to greet me/Happy birthday to me"), the storyline leads into "Happy Birthday Dixie Howell," a song about an actual southern pro football player that slows for a reminiscence: "When I was born/Daddy put a football in my cradle/Later on he put a football helmet in my bed/When he died I put a razor in his coffin/And poured vaseline all over his head/Magnolias, magnolias, magnolias, Daddy...Don't you wish it was me laying there instead/But tomorrow I will be sober, Daddy/And you will still be dead." A weird, regrettable loss to the archives.
Set to a eerie unresolved melody, "Shining" sees Johnny looking back at his sixteenth year ("Some cold winter morning outside the school/The bell hadn't rung just yet/We'd stand outside the gate/Smoke a cigarette/Brush the snow of our clothes/And lean against the wall/Shinin'..." ) from the claustrophobic present ("And there wasn't no baby cryin'/And there wasn't no laundry waitin' for me on the line/If I didn't want to be alone, I didn't have to be alone/All I had to do was shine../Shinin'..."). Another melancholy loss.
Stumbling home late, Johnny offers a blurred song of apology to his wife: "I'm drunk right now baby/But I've got to be/Or I could never tell you what you mean to me.." One of Newman's most affecting ballads, "Marie" has aged gracefully. "..And I don't listen to a word you say/..when you're in trouble I turn away/But I love you/And I loved you the first time I saw you/And I always will love you, Marie."
Over breakfast, Marie sings the song "Good Morning" to her daughter as still-hungover Johnny groggly interjects his thoughts: "Now, Daddy may not spend much time with us," (Johnny: 'Fuck off')/"But I'm sure that he loves you a lot/Suzie, sing 'Happy Birthday' to Daddy/He's the only Daddy you've got ('Fuck off')..." The song's unrelenting (and nicely syncopated) profanity was undoubtably a major reason this otherwise hilarious song never made it past the tape demo.
After a brief reprise of "Birmingham" (featuring significantly different verses), "Doctor! Doctor!" offers an early pass at the Good Old Boys track "Back On My Feet Again," here concerning Johnny's mentally unstable brother, prior to its evolving into a white-man-disguised-as-Negro fable on the final album.
Switching to the Cutler living room, the family watches as the West Point Glee Club sings the Albanian National Anthem: "The white moon shines on the goatherd/And the snow lies yet on the ground/In the forest deep/Where the grey wolf sleeps/Comes a wonderful, wonderful sound/Albania, Albania.." This song was once related to another unreleased track, "Albanian Wedding Song," which, after losing its "Congratulations/Congratulations.." intro, evolved into "A Wedding In Cherokee County" on Good Old Boys. On album, the song's narrator details his marriage to a mute backwoods bride ("I will attempt to spend my love within her../And though I try with all my might/ She will laugh at my mighty sword/Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword?") as "all the freaks she knows" gather to watch.
As in much of the album, Newman's lyrics here were read by some critics as needlessly inflammatory (in his album summary from 1983's Rolling Stone Record Guide, Dave Marsh remarks "the humor is exploitative of a region and people Newman comprehends less than well"), although others saw a certain method behind the manipulation of stereotypes. Robert Christgau credits Newman with granting his "psychotic and exhibitionist and moron" some"dignity and imagination" -- even inbuing his rednecks "with ironic distance, a smart- asses' kindest cut of all" -- before noting: "There is, natcherly, a darker irony: no matter how smart they are about how dumb they are, they still can't think of anything better to do than keep the niggers down."
The tape demo leads next into a spoken segment, another shaggy dog story explaining how Johnny's now allegedly insane brother was arrested for stealing a purse in the nude (he claims that he had been forced to run naked from a woman's home when her husband came home and was waiting for a crosstown bus when another naked man ran up to him and gave him the purse). After some liberal editing and upbeat backing was added, this tale (reputedly based on an actual incident) appeared on Good Old Boys as the song "Naked Man."
Newman's on-tape admission "I don't know how to end this thing..." lends an intriguing (and perverse) "song cycle" quality to the recording: one can imagine the whole day-in-the-life process repeating itself to death, as it may no doubt have done. Both the working tape and the album itself close with "Rollin'," which Newman summarized as "a song about drinking -- what it does, how it lets you out -- and the whole five o'clock thing about drinking.." While a fine closer to the album, Newman eclipses it on side one of the Good Old Boys LP with his glorious blues classic, "Guilty" ("You know how it is with me baby/You know I can't stand myself.../And it takes a whole lot of medicine/For me to pretend that I'm somebody else"). Bonnie Raitt's transcendent cover (on her Warners album Takin' My Time ) has long been a favorite of Newman's; his piano also graces Joe Cocker's fine cover on his A&M album I Can Stand A Little Rain.
What began life on tape as a loose set of vignettes strung together by Newman's narrative took on a broader scope on the Good Old Boys record: every song referring to Cutler by name was dropped (although the self-referential "Rednecks" and "Birmingham" escaped) and a grand set of songs about Louisiana's notorious depression-era governor Huey P. Long, "The Kingfish," was added ("Who looks after the shitkickers like you?/The Kingfish do"). While the finished album was more ambitious in scope and majestic in orchestration (garnering a Stereo Review "Best of the Decade" award), the intriguing character studies and intimate scale of "Johnny Cutler's Birthday" arguably makes it a more cohesive "concept" album -- and a worthy companion piece to the superb Good Old Boys. Should Warners ever consider compiling a Newman rarities CD set, this long-believed lost tape merits inclusion.
In the summer of 1974, Newman appeared on a "semi-religious" program on BBC 1 in Britain called See You On Sunday ; critics noted that he sang "Simon Smith," "Political Science" and "God's Song" in a "desperate attempt to get Christianity swinging." Evidently no piano was available, leaving Randy to "mime in mid-air." He also appeared on the celebrated U.K. radio show, The Old Grey Whistle Test, in June. In December 1974, PBS aired a Newman retrospective on Soundstage, with Randy conducting a 19-piece orchestra. Lenny Waronker contributes some stories and joins in a classic segment in which Newman attempts (in vain) to perform the Metric-period oldies "They Tell Me It's Summer," "I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore" and "Just One Smile" from memory.