The Private Canon: The "Vine Street" Demo

This post is part of a series.

You kind of know what you're going to get with Randy Newman, right? A piano shuffle, a muddy blues baritone, a character with an unexpected and/or offensive angle on life (or, if this happens to be a Pixar film, you'll get the shuffle, the voice, and a conventionally sympathetic angle). This caricature, though he's all too happy to play into it, sells him short both as a composer—songs like "Cowboy" or "The Great Nations of Europe" are stirring orchestral mini-suites, to give just two examples, and the two-song cycle that opens his album Land of Dreams takes that signature shuffle to new heights—and as a lyricist, as he is capable of spinning out the verbiage and narrative surprises when he's got a ripe tale (from "Back on My Feet Again" to "Sonny Boy") or doling out the words with aching simplicity when it's closer to the bone ("Same Girl," "I Miss You," "Ghosts").

By the time the 1998 compilation Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman came out, I pretty much thought I knew what to expect from him too. He had already taken the path of least resistance at a major career crossroads: Given the choice between the heavy lift of readying his flawed but promising Faust musical for Broadway, a seemingly natural destination for a writer with such a strong grasp of character, and the well-paying film scoring business that was his family's birthright, he chose the latter. And he hadn't yet put out Bad Love, a surprisingly strong late-career studio album that would make him worthy of a fresh look after 11 years out of the saddle. When I got Guilty as a Christmas gift the year it came out, it looked like Newman's best work was behind him, and I thought I had that work's number.

But then I heard "Vine Street," or rather his demo of it. I guess I knew the Nilsson version of it, but I hadn't really clocked it, and nothing prepared me for hearing Newman in the guise of sincere '60s troubadour, singing with sweet nostalgia about his time hanging out with musician friends in Hollywood. There is no dark, misanthropic twist lurking around the corner here (well, not exactly—read on), just a fleeting moment of warm, confused youthful camaraderie captured in musical amber as perfectly as in, say, "Bob Dylan's Dream" or Follies's "Waiting for the Girls Upstairs."

Of course, this being Randy Newman, there's more to uncover in and say about even such an ostensibly straightforward tune. He reportedly wrote the song for Van Dyke Parks, who premiered it on his 1967 album Song Cycle, a full year before Newman's own debut, and you can hear a sort of self-conscious classicism in its form, which finds over-the-top realization in Parks's mannered, Truman-Capote-pixie rendition, in which he does some channel-surfing orchestral filigree before the title line is sung, needlessly literalizes the "crack of the backbeat," and concludes with ear-crashing dissonances. Nilsson's version is much closer to Newman's conception, with Newman himself playing the quizzical piano chords under Nilsson's wry vocal delivery, but the layers of Beach Boy harmonies don't add much, other than fleshing out the ranks of the unnamed "we" the song is about.

But Newman's demo, shorn of such adornments, is all the more redolent and powerful for it. It starts cold with the apologetic, "That's a tape that we made," meant to follow a snippet of a half-baked track that "never made the grade" (in Parks's case, perversely, a needle drop on a bluegrass tune, "Black Jack Davy," by his friend Steve Young; in Nilsson's a needy pop boogie called "Anita"). This is already a strange convention, like a voiceover narration in a musical biopic, and though this tentative, free tempo opening is just a scene setter, not even a verse, it is rich with telling detail, such as the jump from the home key of E-flat to G on the words "third guitar," suggesting a slightly boastful emphasis ("That was me!"), before the unutterably sad drop-off on, "I wonder where the others are." And if that's not enough of a kiss-off, his demo has a bit that Nilsson cut, in which the narrator sings, "Sold the guitar today/Never could play much anyway." Parks kept this but delivered it as a silly, sing-song joke, rather than the cut-my-losses-whaddaya-gonna-do shrug of Newman's original.

Newman and Nilsson.

And then the lyric is just a grand delivery of the title, "Vine Street," a declaration as blunt as a title card, and we're off down memory lane to a scene with a gang of musicians living in an apartment building where someone made off-market perfume in a back room—maybe a landlady, or just someone they wanted to please, as our narrator was among those who'd "sit out on the stoop" (a rather exotic amenity for a Hollywood apartment, but I digress) and "play for her the songs she liked best to have us play," with a piano part suggesting our perfume-maker was a fan of both ragtime and Beethoven's Ninth (how they could have played these for her on guitar, on a stoop, we're not supposed to ask). Already this feels atypical for Newman: Though he has a few songs about musicians and performers ("The Blues," "Simon Smith"), it's odd to hear him take such a passively benign tone on the subject, as if to say: Yeah, we played what she liked, there was neither glory nor shame in it, it was just nice.

There's not much left to the song but what there is is so much. The casual mention of a backbeat on the street evokes music he doesn't even try to capture but he finds worth including in the scene—so is that the song on whose wings he and his friends are "swingin' along," as his own song rises in an irresistible swell of emotion? He's clearly not talking about any particular song but conjuring a more general sense of something alive in the air, of city nights with music blaring, the Sunset Strip, the Troubadour—I can see the world of this song, and feel the late-night laughter of it, like few others I know.

And then out comes the Newman rapier, a quick cut but a deep one: He and his friends were "lyin' secure/Self-righteous and sure/Why, we'd things to say/That the people would pay to hear us play." This is more than just a dig at '60s radicals who thought they could change the world with music, though it's definitely that; note his evident pride in the notion that people would pay to be preached to. Those were the days, I tell ya what! (The old-man diction of "Why, we'd things to say," from a 24-year-old songwriter—priceless.) The Nilsson version changes only a few words, but check the conditional that makes it all a bit more mercenary: "Why, we'd things to say/If the people would pay to have us play." (Lulu's cover, clearly based on Nilsson's, isn't great but is fascinating: She's cast herself as the lead singer and as the perfume maker.)

Newman's demo closes with some psuedo-classical noodling rather than a neat closure, but it's otherwise a perfect snapshot, an evocative postcard of the fertile L.A. scene he would always stand at an angle from but which, as this song's embrace shows, he clearly and dearly loved. Clear and dear love are maybe not what anyone goes to the gimlet-eyed cynic who wrote "You Can Leave Your Hat On" for, but now that I've basked in the glow of "Vine Street"—a sort of Randy Newman ur-text, the Enigma theme that informs all his variations—its warmth suffuses all his capacious catalogue for me.