If Good Old Boys came out today, the nature of the criticism would, doubtless, be quite the opposite. “He made it clear that the song was a joke, that the people were jokes, that their predicament was something those smart enough to buy tickets to his concert could take as a sideshow staged for their personal amusement,” Marcus wrote in The Village Voice, excoriating the tittering, cocktail-sipping Manhattan crowd.
With his stage banter and rave-up delivery, Marcus felt that Newman was lampooning the morally compromised but disenfranchised characters who populated his album of the previous year, Good Old Boys, which was written largely from the perspective of a bigoted Southern steel worker. For one critic-Greil Marcus-a February ’75 Newman show proved toxic, threatening to overturn his reverent opinion of the Los Angeles singer-songwriter. His sense of humor, even outside of his caustically funny songs, can be polarizing.
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