Ry Cooder - Election Special

Ry Cooder has had a long, distinguished career as a guitar player.  He played with Captain Beefheart, Taj Mahal, and Randy Newman.  He recorded with the Rolling Stones [the slide on Sticky Fingers’ Sister Morphine is his].  In the 1970s, he was content to record other peoples’ songs.  He recorded music from the likes of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie Johnson, and other songs that are in the public domain.  In the 1980s he began to compose music for movies [Paris, Texas, The Long Riders, Alamo Bay, and many others].  In the 1990s he’d moved on from film music to work with musicians from other countries [Ali Farka Toure, Vishna Mohann Bhatt, and the Buena Vista Social Club].  He also worked with John Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner on two albums – John Hiatt’s Bring the Family and the only album they recorded under a group name – Little Village.  In 2005, he started to write and record his own material.  In a trilogy of albums about California [Chavez Ravine, My Name is Buddy, I, Flathead] he told stories of the Mexican neighborhood that used to be where Dodger Stadium is now, stories of the adventures of a cat named Buddy and his friends during the times of anti-Communist and anti-labor feeling, and stories of a guy who drag-raced cars on salt flats.

All of this previous work has given Ry Cooder the label of a pre-eminent musicologist.  He’s well-versed in blues, Tex-Mex, rock, folk, gospel, soul, and old-timey string music.  After his California trilogy he turned his musical concerns to contemporary events.  On 2011’s Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down, Ry Cooder discovered his inner Pete Seeger and became a latter-day populist.  He railed against Wall Street bankers [No Banker Left Behind], George W. Bush [Christmas Time This Year], Republicans in general [I Want My Crown, If There is a God], and rich people [Dirty Chateau].  He wished Jesse James would return from the dead and open a can of whoop-ass on Wall Street [El Corrido Jesse James], addressed the plight of Mexicans crossing into Arizona [Quick Sand], and he imagined a world where John Lee Hooker was president.  This year he continues in that vein, and this being an election year, Ry Cooder sharpens his focus with Election Special. 

One thing Ry Cooder makes very clear on Election Special – he doesn’t like Republicans.  The opening song, Mutt Romney’s Blues, is told from the point of view of the unfortunate Seamus, the family dog who used to travel with the Romney family while trapped in a dog carrier strapped to the roof of their car.  On one particular trip, Seamus literally got the crap scared out of him, and when the Romneys reached their vacation destination, Seamus ran away, never to be seen again [poor doggie].  In Ry Cooder’s world, Republicans are depicted as “evil” [he uses that word to describe the Koch brothers on Brother Is Gone].  They will take away your voting and reproductive rights [Take Your Hands Off It], re-introduce Jim Crow laws if they defeat Barack Obama at the ballot box [Cold Cold Feeling, Brother Is Gone], screw the “99 percent” [The 90 And The 9], bring back state’s rights, bring back Willie Horton and blame everything on Mexico [Going to Tampa].  There’s a song protesting the existence Guantánamo, and another about Wall Street that would have fit right in on Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down [The Wall Street Part of Town].  This album is a lot like Neil Young’s indictment of George W. Bush, Living With War.

As always, Ry Cooder’s playing is top-notch.  He’s pared the instruments down to guitar, mandolin and bass, with son Joachim playing the drums and other percussion.  There’s more mandolin playing than I’ve heard from him in a long time.  His guitar playing is still the envy of many.  His “singing” [and I use that term loosely] is an acquired taste, but I don’t buy Ry Cooder albums for his singing.  I buy them for the musicianship.  If you’re a Republican who is easily offended, this is not the album for you.  To those folks, Ry Cooder will come across as a crotchety old-blowhard know-it-all.  If you’re a Democrat, you are the choir to whom he preaches. 

Bob Dylan once said of his contemporary Phil Ochs “You're not a folk singer, you're a journalist.”  With Election Special, Dylan might say the same about Ry Cooder.

Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down

Ry Cooder’s most recent works have looked back in the past.  There’s his “California trilogy” – Chávez Ravine [2005], My Name Is Buddy [2007], and I, Flathead [2008].  These albums serve as an alternative history of California one won’t find in the text book.  Chávez Ravine dealt with the Los Angeles Hispanic neighborhood that “disappeared” [it was bulldozed in the name of “progress”] to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium.  My Name Is Buddy chronicles the travels of a red cat named Buddy and some of his animal friends as they encounter dust bowl refugees, union organizers, union busters, anti-Communists, and a country music singer named Kash Buk.  Kash Buk reappears in I, Flathead, with its tales of drag-racing aliens, hot rods, honky tonks, hot blondes, his dog [his “homeland security”] Spayed Cooley, and 5000 country songs nobody wants to sing.  Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down doesn’t have an underlying them like the aforementioned trilogy.  Here, Ry Cooder channels his inner Woody Guthrie, and boy is he pissed.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down finds Ry Cooder commenting on current events.  He has a well-earned reputation of being a renowned Americana musicologist, and he puts that expertise to work on this CD.  Here he mixes blues, folk, ragtime, norteño, rock, and country.  Some of Ry Cooder’s usual suspects appear here – son Joachim [drums], Flaco Jimenez [accordion], Terry Evans, Willie Green and Juliette Commagere [vocals], Rene Camacho [bass].  Ry has the rest of the instruments covered – guitars, banjo, mandola, bajo sexton, bass, marimba.  Like Tom Waits he skewers those bankers who received financial bailouts from the government in 2008 in No Banker Left Behind.  In El Corrido Jesse James the outlaw asks God for his guns back so he can dispense some frontier-style justice on Wall Street.  In Quicksand a Mexican man describes a border crossing during which the guide for his group leaves in the middle of the night, and the man who takes over dies the next day in the sun.  He shows his disgust for Republicans in I Want My Crown [Republicans changed the lock on the heavenly door / keys to the kingdom don’t fit no more…]. Christmas Time This Year is Ry Cooder’s scathing indictment of America’s involvement in wars overseas set to a Mexican polka.  But there’s humor here as well.  John Lee Hooker for President imagines a world where all the Supreme Court justices are “fine looking women,” and if you’re nice you’ll have one bourbon, one scotch and one beer three times a day.  The children get milk, cream and alcohol if they stay in school.  If only… 

Manuel Galbán - RIP

Manuel Galbán passed away last week at the age of 80, the victim of a heart attack.  Who was this guy?  He was an outstanding guitar player from Cuba.  His first claim to fame was as the musical director of the Cuban vocal group Los Zafiros, which combined traditional filín movement with other music styles such as bolero, doo-wop, calypso music, bossa nova and rock.  He had a distinctive, twangy style that made him sound at times like Duane Eddy.  One writer from No Depression described Galbán as “a big man with thick hands who uses guitar strings heavy enough to tether a boat in a storm.” He learned to play on the traditional, three-stringed tres [that unique-sounding instrument Jorge Calderón plays on Warren Zevon’s Keep Me In Your Heart], and you can hear that in his bright, rhythmic runs on the electric guitar.  His axe of choice was the Fender Telecaster.  

Not only did he play guitar, but he was a pretty good pianist too.  But most people associate Manuel Galbán with the Buena Vista Social Club.   Many obituaries claimed he was part of the Buena Vista Social Club, but he was not [I have their album – he’s not on it].  However, he did play with many of the musicians who did participate in that project, and recorded with two of the vocalists, Ibrahim Ferrer [Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer, Buenos Hermanos, Mi Sueño] and Omara Portuondo [Buena Vista Social Club Presents Omara Portuondo].  In 1998, Galbán toured and recorded with the traditional Cuban group Vieja Trova Santiaguera [note to self – must get that CD].  He can also be heard on solo albums by Buena Vista's virtuoso bass player Orlando “Cachaíto” Lopez [Cachaíto , 2001], and the trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabel [Buena Vista Social Club Presents, 2004].

Ry Cooder produced Buena Vista Social Club [1997], and while working with the aforementioned vocalists he decided he had to include Manuel Galbán. In an interview with Cuba’s Granma newspaper, he said:

“My arrival in Buena Vista Social Club is owed to Ry Cooder’s surprise at the way I play guitar, very similar to the legendary guitarist Duane Eddy. So Ry said, "Find Galbán," he called me the "guitar wizard," gave me a Fender guitar and asked me to do a recording with him.”

In that same interview, Galbán described his playing:

I combine fast passages with arpeggios, while making appropriate use of the bass strings, in that way I give the sensation that more than one musician is playing. I set about synchronizing and fading the strings with the other hand, a trick that I learned backing Kike’s singing in Los Zafiros.

After recording with Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Fortuondo and Vieja Trova Santiaguera, he recorded a duo album with Ry Cooder, titled Mambo Sinuendo.  How does one tell the difference between the tones of Manuel Galbán and Ry Cooder?  Galbán’s tone sounds like “Cuban surf music.”  It’s an excellent album. The Grammy® folks liked it too.  Mambo Sinuendo earned the award for Best Pop Instrumental Album in 2004. I picked it up shortly after I bought Ry Cooder’s Chávez Ravine.   According to Ry Cooder when asked about the making of Mambo Sinuendo:

Galbán and I felt that there was a sound that had not been explored a Cuban electric-guitar band that could re-interpret the atmosphere of the 1950s with beauty, agility, and simplicity. We decided on two electrics, two drum sets, congas and bass: a sexteto that could swing like a big band and penetrate the mysteries of the classic tunes. This music is powerful, lyrical, and funny; what more could you ask? Mambo Sinuendo is Cuban soul and high-performance.

Both Cooder and Galbán created a sound that evokes old-tech, pre-Castro Cuba of the 1950s.  One of the songs [Los Twangueros] is a tip of the hat to Galbán’s twangy sound.  Galbán's guitar duets with Cooder were matched against two drum sets, congas and bass from Lopez, and even a burst of trumpet from Herb Alpert.   The leadoff track [Drume Negrita] is the one I like best.  The last is a delicate electric guitar duet on the Doris Day song Secret Love.  It’s all good – get it!

What a shame people my age didn’t get to hear Galbán’s work earlier.  RIP.

Ry Cooder’s California Trilogy

Guitarist Ry Cooder has done it all. He started off playing with bluesman Taj Mahal in the Rising Suns and almost replaced Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones. Many of his best albums are movie scores, including the folk-culture clash of 1985's Alamo Bay and the purple-prairie atmospheres of 1989's Paris, Texas. My favorite is the score he did for the western The Long Riders. A lot of his movie music can be found on the double CD Music by Ry Cooder. Having explored North American music — blues, country, rockabilly, R&B, gospel, minstrelsy, Hawaiian, folk, Tex-Mex, Cuban — over four-plus decades, and with numerous awards and accolades under his belt for boundary-crossing collaborations with global legends like the late Ali Farka Toure, Manuel Galbán and Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club, Cooder is an authority on how music has been able to transcend diverse cultures.

Add to his legacy his “California Trilogy.” In this day of the music business trying to get you to buy music on the Internet one song at a time, Ry Cooder has done three (!) concept albums over the last four years. The first part of the trilogy, Chávez Ravine, is a tribute to the long-gone Los Angeles Latino enclave in the late 1940/early 1950s. This is the story of a hillside Chicano community whose poor inhabitants were paid or forced to leave their community in a failed property development in the '50s. This community was eventually bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium. Sung in both English and Spanish, there are short tales of head-busting GIs, boxing matches, UFOs, red scares, cool cats, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Part Two of the trilogy is My Name Is Buddy. This is the story of workers who left the “dust bowl” in the 1930s for what was thought to be the “Promised Land” – California. The story is seen through the eyes of three fictional characters; Lefty, a left-wing mouse who's looking for a socialist utopia; blind Tom Toad, who has lost his religious faith, but is 'looking for a way out of darkness'; and Buddy himself, who 'being a cat, is looking for his next meal.' During their journey to California, they encounter the Klan, unions, big boss union busters, company cops, hobos, strikes, voter fraud and trains. J. Edgar Hoover makes another appearance in the form of a pig (get it?) that used to be on the farm where Buddy the Cat lived. During his travels, Buddy encounters Kash Buk, a country musician who almost went on tour with Ray Price but decided not to. Buddy sits in with Kash’s band to sing a song called Three Chords and the Truth. There’s never a dull moment with Buddy, Lefty and Tom Toad.

The third and final part of the California trilogy was released this week. Its title: I, Flathead: The Songs of Kash Buk and the Klowns. Not only is Kash Buk a country musician, he also races souped-up cars on salt flats [hence the title]. In this part of Ry Cooder’s tale set in the 1950s, Kash Buk [the same Kash Buk with whom Buddy the Cat sang] encounters circus freaks, meat packers, drag racers, and an alien named Shakey who cruises the desert in his flying saucer when he isn’t making chewing gum, glue, or making cars go faster. Kash Buk pays homage to Johnny Cash, laments how he’s written 5,000 country songs that no one has recorded, and sings of dancing the “Pink-O Boogie.”

As one can surmise, the creator of this trilogy has a more-than-slightly left of center tilt in his politics. That doesn’t detract from this work being fine entertainment that’s done with tongue planted firmly in cheek. It's all just a little bit weird, but this trilogy appeals to my warped sense of humor.