Who Is Randy Newman?

The name of Randy Newman kept cropping up in the interviews I wrote for Beat Instrumental. First of all it was Keith Reid who claimed that he was the best lyricist around and then it was Marc Bolan who was raving about a performance he'd seen at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. I thought I'd already got a pretty extensive knowledge of Mr. Newman so I didn't really need to go to all the trouble of listening through his albums. I mean — I knew where he was at. Hadn't I, after all, listened to ‘Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear’? Didn't I know that he was the man behind the creation of ‘Mama Told Me Not To Come.’ Oh yes, I knew all about Randy Newman.