A few months ago, I was at a benefit fund-raiser for an artist whose studio had burned down. The place was packed and the cocktails were sloshing when the excellent D.J. (Eddie Ruscha—if you live in L.A. and need a D.J., he's the guy) cranked up "Memo to Turner," the fantastic Stones song featured in the 1970 Nicholas Roeg/ Donald Cammell film Performance. The thing that makes this diabolically hip song (originally recorded by the Stones, though credited to Mick Jagger alone on the soundtrack) such a killer is the slide guitar hook provided by Ry Cooder—this song is all about that sharp, sleek slide guitar sound, and I've loved it for decades.
A few minutes later, I was winding my way through the crowd when all of a sudden, there he was—Ry Cooder! I couldn't stop myself from blurting out, "Hey! They just played one of your great songs!" He replied "yeah, I was 19 years old," then continued moving through the crowd. (Having interviewed Cooder a few times, I can testify that he's not what you'd call a loquacious man).
A few weeks later, I was driving somewhere (everyone who lives in L.A. is always driving somewhere) when a track from Cooder's 1994 collaboration with Malian musician Ali Farka Toure, Talking Timbuktu, came on the air. It was track #9, to be specific, and it is absolutely mesmerizing. I arrived at my destination but couldn't get out of the car until the song was finished—Cooder's devastatingly potent slide guitar stopped me in my tracks.
So, Ry Cooder's been on my mind, as he has been, intermittently, for more than 30 years. The first time he crossed my mind was in the '70s, when I was in college. I was living in a big house I shared with half a dozen other students, all of whom played the guitar, and we had group jams on a daily basis. (This went on for about a year, then the two show-offs in the group started playing bluegrass and left the rest of us behind in the dust. Bluegrass separates the men from the boys when it comes to jamming).
Ry Cooder's first four solo albums, released during the years 1970 through 1974, were never far from the communal turntable in that house, and several songs from those early records were part of the standard repertoire of our hootenannies. I learned those Cooder songs inside out, and I now realize what an important part of my early musical education they were. Cooder's knowledge of American music has always been deep and wide, and he knows how to serve that history up in a remarkably palatable, contemporary way. With those early records he illustrated the importance and beauty of the simple, uncelebrated tunes of the past, and he revealed what many of those big acts that broke in the '60s—Dylan, the Byrds, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead—were building on. Cooder's first four albums were quiet, populist masterpieces that included everything from workingman tunes of the Roosevelt era and gospel, to Tin Pan Alley oddities and stunningly beautiful instrumentals—"Maria Elena," from Boomer's Story, for instance, or "Cherry Ball Blues" from the same album.
By the time Cooder cut those albums he'd already done session work with everyone from Pat Boone to Captain Beefheart, but he was still just at the beginning of what was to be an astonishingly prolific career. He's released nine more solo albums since the mid-'70s, but more importantly, because of his credibility in the world of popular culture, he's been able to bring audiences to dozens of gifted artists who otherwise would've fallen through the cracks of history. Thanks to Cooder we all know and love the members of the Buena Vista Social Club, but have you heard Gabby Pahinui yet? Or Shoukichi Kina & Champloose, Bobby King & Terry Evans, Flaco Jimenez, the Afro Cuban All Stars, or Manuel Galban? You'd do well to check them all out. If it's got the Cooder seal of approval, you know it's worth hearing.
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