RANDY NEWMAN Good Old Boys (Reprise)

John Cale once stopped here for an interview, visiting us briefly when CREEM was still put out from a farm. It wasn’t a very productive dialogue, but I did happen to ask him in passing what he thought of Randy Newman.

“Not much,” he replied, “All he’s really got going for him is irony, and irony will only take you so far.”

Well, so far Randy Newman’s irony hasn’t taken him to the pinnacle of mass acceptance, but it, along with a corrosive sense of humor and a good deal of (often masked) compassion, has made him one of the most selfsustaining musical lits around. He does not use scenes, ostentatious compulsions or the concoction of I’ll-vibe-you-out-motherfucker mystique to prop himself up; the 12 Songs album bore an insert with a photo of him and his wife shopping for wine at the Hollywood Ranch Market. He is suburban, outwardly middleclass, and unashamed - in fact he seefns to use his suburban semi-reclusiveness as a tactic, protective coloration from under which he can reach out and strike at the heart of what’s grange and wrong in our social mores.