RFI: Randy Newman's Faust reissue

Those demos for Good Ol' Boys (Johnny Cutler's Birthday?) were fan-fucking-tastic.

anyone want to stick up for faust? john d.?

anyone?

i find the production just, well, awful. but it has some good tunes.

i haven't listened to it a whole lot but i've liked it more with each listen. maybe i'll put headphones on and listen next time to try and hear what yr talkin' 'bout. i do think Randy casting JT as god and Don Henley as Faust is some kinda genius.

conceptually it's a good move, but i have a hard time listening to james taylor on these particular songs.

I actually heard this in full for the first time, and I think it's surprisingly good. I don't listen to a whole lot of music theater either - beyond what gets re-interpreted in jazz and what's successfully adapted into a film (all of which tends to be 50+ years old, especially when it comes to film musicals), I've never been that taken with musical theater, but this surprisingly worked for me. It's as if Disney said "hey, why don't we let the Pixar guy make a musical? He's been good to us!" and Newman musically delivers (most of) the same but at the service of material that throws them into a panic. Taylor as God as an unctuous and thoroughly dishonest politician hits the mark in the wake Mikes Pence and Johnson.

I will say the last song (really the whole joke about heading to Vegas) falls flat as an ending. I wasn't listening to the deluxe edition, but I noticed "Basin Street Blues" as the last track on the bonus disc of demos, and it indeed was demoed for the "final scene" - I think I would've preferred that instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Ef89WwPhQ

Ending aside, the whole thing does need a "book" to come together, and the album's liner notes do work as a substitute, but from what I can tell from the retrospective assessments I've seen, when they staged this as a full-blown musical, it was clear that the book still needed a lot of work and it never quite got there even after significant revisions. A shame, it would've been great to see a fully-realized version make it big on Broadway.

I didn't realize this but apparently the two-disc reissue that started this thread sold a grand total of 500 measly copies, horrendous by 2003 standards, which was enough to kill off plans for anymore Newman remasters with bonus tracks.

"Feels Like Home" is a hell of a song, and I feel like it's the enduring part of this.

It's the only song that really works outside of the musical/album, though it's kind of hilarious that it wasn't originally meant to be sincere - in the context of the musical, Raitt's character is pulling a fast one on Newman's. But Newman wrote something that would be convincing (i.e. good enough to fool his character), so naturally it's worked great as a standard.