Native son
Ry Cooder caps his ambitious “California trilogy” with the good-natured “I, Flathead,” a juicy celebration of hot rods, desert rats, sci-fi and So Cal culture
By Bliss 06/26/2008
Ry Cooder’s one of a threatened species: a bona fide Los Angeleno. That native status has doubtless fueled his passion for local culture and history — a passion he provocatively indulged on three albums he dubbed his “California trilogy,” and through his work with contemporaries like East LA’s Ersi Arvizu, who sang with the Sisters and El Chicano in the mid-1970s and whose recently issued “Friend for Life” he produced. This Friday Cooder supports Arvizu in concert, while Nonesuch releases
“I, Flathead,” the capper to his trilogy.
“Flathead” purportedly chronicles the larger-than-life misadventures of a musician named Kash Buk. It’s as handy a storyline as any for multi-instrumentalist Cooder’s juicy celebration of hot rod hounds, desert rat weirdos, sci-fi, roadhouse honky-tonk, “Johnny Cash,” swing king-turned-wife-murderer Spade Cooley, “Ridin’ With the Blues” and California’s multi-ethnic culture. The 14-track song cycle concludes an ambitious effort that began with 2005’s outstanding “Chavez Ravine” and continued through last year’s earnestly intentioned “My Name is Buddy.”
Numerous grooves and backing musicians (including son Joachim Cooder, drummer Jim Keltner, accordionist Flaco Jimenez and bassist Rene Camacho) thread together those three albums and Cooder classics like 1974’s “Paradise and Lunch” and 1987’s “Get Rhythm.”
The real value of “Flathead” is in how its often playfully amusing content thrives on truthful context; Cooder’s an avid historian of California’s constantly rewritten past, and few peers exhibit surer grasp of the myriad musical forms — country, Tex-Mex, blues, R&B, rockabilly, low-rider Chicano rock — that have recorded its cultural evolution. As he did so masterfully in the more Latin-sounding “Chavez Ravine,” in the sounds and scenarios of “Flathead” he gets it right: Bakersfield-style twang, dirty blues guitar, lighthearted Western swing, mariachi’s romantic harmonies (courtesy of Mariachi Los Camperos), the lovable kitschiness of midcentury rock ’n’ roll style, and — in his characters — the conspiracy theory-loving trailer park cranks and hard-headed hot rod and honky-tonk purists who insist their blinkered vision anoints them natural arbiters of what is and is not “good” or “cool” or “real.”
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 and Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club, Cooder’s ideally situated to comment on how those musical traditions have been distilled within our dynamic culture. The world he recreates in his trilogy is California. As is Arvizu’s sepia-toned “Friend for Life.” Awash in ranchera, bolero, salsa and R&B-drenched memories, her recreation of 1960s-era East LA is spiritual kin to “Flathead” and especially “Chavez Ravine.”
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