In 1960, sixteen year-old Randy was urged by his childhood friend (and future producer) Lenny Waronker to get a job writing songs ("He didn't want to see all this musical education go to waste without a practical result"). Lenny, whose father, Simon Waronker, was founder and then board chairman at Liberty Records (and the inspiration for the Chipmunks character Simon) steered Randy to a contact at Metric Music, Liberty's publishing house in Hollywood. "And he signed me up," Newman recalls. "There was no real 'grinding away'. I mean, he signed me up for, like, $100 a month..."
His first impressions were intimidating. As Newman recalled to Chuck Marshall in 1978: "I was amazed. Jackie DeShannon and Leon Russell were there. Leon was a musician...(David) Gates would do arrangements for demos. I remember hearing a Jackie DeShannon song on a demo they'd made and I thought 'Jeez, I could never do that'. It sounded so...polished." Never-theless, he was soon at work hammering out tunes, hoping to score a hit for one of the teen dreams of the day.
Success was slow coming. "We didn't do well..we'd try and write follow-ups for people who had hits, like Bobby Vee or Gene McDaniels. And always fail..we never got the records. I mean, Carole King and them got the records...doing better at it, writing better stuff for these people."
It wasn't until 1962 that Randy saw his first writing credit for the fluffy "They Tell Me It's Summer", B-side to the Fleetwoods' "Lovers by Night, Strangers By Day" (Dolton 62). The lyrics dealt with what would prove to be a recurring theme throughout Newman's Metric work: unrequited love, as viewed by a lonely teenager. While hardly an embarassment (the record reached #32 on the Cash Box Top 100), the dreamy tune held little clue to the writer's true talents.
In much of his early writing at Metric, Newman became accustomed to churning out the softer pop melodies his publishers preferred. Even so, Randy's dark sense of humor and unusual chord structures would often catch them off guard: "I'd think 'This is a great follow-up for, oh, "100 Pounds Of Clay.".they never thought so. It was too..'far out' or something." Another factor may have been his singing. Newman freely admits: "My voice was widely ridiculed" (reviewing a 1970 show at the Troubadour, Variety critic William Tusher likened it to "a frightened bison"). It was totally unexpected then, when some vocal support came from a patient of Randy's father -- one Pat Boone, top artist for Dot Records.