Holy crap, was Randy Newman ever kick-ass

I would never ever have bought tickets to a Randy Newman show before seeing him last night. I considered it up there with going to see Jimmy Buffet; adult-contempo at best, novelty at worst. But he was funny, he was smart, and he was really engaging (unlike the shut-up-and-watch-me-perform styling of Bob Dylan). I would totally see him again and I would recommend him to pretty much anybody. Going in, I had this clip from the Family Guy pretty firmly entrenched in my head, and I think I sniggered through the first two songs, but then I was hooked. He’s got great stage patter: “This next song sums up the last 400 years of Western Civilization in two and a half minutes.” “A friend of mine had three sons and then a daughter. He told me once, ‘Randy, if we’d had the girl first, I would have thought the boys were retarded.’” He’s also, obviously, a pretty talented songwriter. There’s a darkly comic side to some of his stuff that I hadn’t heard until last night, “Political Science” and “Great Nations of Europe” are good examples of that. Another of our favourites was “A Few Words in Defence of My Country,” and thanks to youtubery magic, you can see that here.

Once Randy was through, we caught about four and a half minutes of George Clinton and The P-Funk Allstars before deciding that we had not the funk, nor could we bring out the funk. We ran over to the River Stage to see Los Lobos (in English, that’s ‘The Lobos’), but either Los Lobos was replaced with a mediocre blues band, or they were doing their best impression of a mediocre blues band, or they are, in fact, a mediocre blues band. After this, we had one last stop—at the Black Sheep stage to see Alejandro Escovedo. Sarah had read excellent things about his band. The band itself and the music were phenomenal, but Alejandro’s got a pretty mediocre voice. He’s like Greg Kellor from Blue Rodeo but without any twang or rasp. After about three songs, we hit the bricks. On the way home, we caught the Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill, which is something we’ve been meaning to do for a while. You know what else was mediocre? The Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill.