Ry Cooder: Conclusion
(for context: the introduction)
Well y’all, we’ve finally reached the end of this journey. I promised you one more to wrap things up and I promised it’d come in 2018 and I always keep my promises. Let me begin by saying that this trip has been all I hoped it would be and more. It was entertaining; it was educational; it was, at times, a bit of a pain in my ass. I got to revisit some great music that I hadn’t spent time with in awhile, and I got to dig into some new jams that I never knew I was missing. And beyond all that, this undertaking incited some correspondence with old friends that turned out to be some mighty fine icing on a pretty damn tasty cake.
All in all, we sampled 34 albums in 32 “weeks” (in actuality it has been exactly 298 days since I sent the first dispatch on March 3rd). A few months ago I stumbled across this paragraph on Ry’s wiki page:
Cooder first attracted attention playing with Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, notably on the 1967 album Safe As Milk… At a vital “warm-up” performance at the Mt. Tamalpais Festival (1967–06–10/11) shortly before the scheduled Monterey Pop Festival (1967–06–16/18), the band began to play “Electricity” and Don Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the 10 ft (3.0 m) stage and landed on manager Bob Krasnow. He later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth.[9] This aborted any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey, as Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet,[10] effectively quitting both the event and the band on the spot.
Classic rock and roll story. At the time, it struck me as a poetic way to end this voyage; the last song Ry played for his first big gig:
It’s a pretty weird song from a pretty weird album. That should be no surprise to anyone who follows Mr Van Vliet’s work, but it is somewhat eludicating to realize that this is where Ry started his career. It’s a bit analogous to learning that Lowell George played in the Zappa’s Mothers of Invention before founding Little Feat.
Which brings me to the first point I wanted to make in summarizing this whole thing: I love artists who create their own idiosyncratic genre, especially if they end up being the only practitioner of that genre. Bands that were ahead of a time that never quite came. It’s why I love Little Feat, but I don’t have much time for someone like The Faces. It’s why I’m obsessed with D’Angelo, but I could really take or leave John Legend. 90’s Beck is another example, and perhaps the first to beguile my young heart and point me down this wandering path.
Ry takes this ethos to it’s logical extent. There are individual songs which I’ve already accused of being the sole member of a genre distinct to themselves. His stated goal with all the Cuban collaborations (paraphrased by his son later) was to create some “weird band that never existed.” As in, to take the tradition, and to warp it into something new; something different; something that sounds familiar, but that in fact, never existed. I love it.
Speaking of Cuban music, I will introduce the second theme I’d like to reiterate by quoting a passage from my July 22nd missive introducing Ry’s Cuban period and the album that is still his biggest hit:
If I could articulate two principles that have guided Ry’s artistry throughout, they would be 1) a fascination with the intersection of “folk” music and “pop” music and 2) an unabashed love for great musicianship.
That tells the story pretty well. That intersection between folk and pop has always been fecund ground, but Ry is particularly good at focusing in on the territory where the line actually gets blurry. In so many ways, these are the opposing poles of modern music. But you really start to get to the heart of things when you realize that neither is as pure as they may first appear. Any folk music that has been recorded is by definition a performance, and the vast majority of it is thinking as much or more about impressing its audience than it is about preserving some tradition. And even the most shameless pop tunes, at least the good ones, have a touch of that ageless, bloody, contradictory wisdom and glory that is the lifeblood of folk music.
And then we come to musicianship. Ry is first and foremost a player. Beyond that, he first and foremost respects, and is drawn to, musicians who take their craft seriously. This is why he can collaborate with top notch musicians from around the world. It is also why we have been able to feature tunes from across the spectrum of 20th Century American music: blues and folk, funk and conjunto, gospel and gunslingers, the list goes on… In general, Ry has an “if you build it, they will come” mentality about making music: if you put good musicians together in a room, there is at least fighting chance they’ll make some good music.
My final point I hesitate to repeat because I’ve already beaten it into the ground a bit too much already. That said, it’s really at the heart of why I think this was a worthwhile undertaking in the first place. And that point is: Ry’s ability is dig deep into tradition, without lapsing into imitation.
There is a chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book Outliers where he talks about the “10,000 Hour Rule” and how one of the reasons The Beatles were the greatest band in rock and roll history is because (primarily due to their Hamburg residency) they played and practiced a shitload. In his words, as quoted by The Guardian*:
By the time [The Beatles] had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don’t perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.
It’s a compelling point, but there’s an obvious flaw: The Beatles in Hamburg were a bar band playing covers of popular songs for 5 or 6 hours a night to drunk people in shitty clubs. There are a lot of bands who have done the same thing. I would wager that literally thousands of bands have done that same thing for literally decades, as compared to the roughly 2 years The Beatles did it for. None of them turned into the greatest rock band of all time.
This is because what sets The Beatles apart is the same thing that sets Ry apart. Sure, they went to bootcamp in Hamburg and learned the chord changes and melodies and lyrics to hundreds of pop songs in only a couple of years. But they didn’t just continue imitating those songs. They took brilliant little pieces out of each one, dredged down deep in the celestial void and came up with some true originality, and made some amazing music that was steeped in tradition but looked boldy and unflinchingly into the future.
It’s a lesson that I think we all stand to gain from and, for me at least, Ry is one of the grand prophets of it. If you gained nothing else from this extended public diary, I hope that one sticks somewhere in some grimy corner of your brain and never leaves. And on top of that, I sincerely hope I introduced you to some music that you enjoyed.
Just another traveller on that road,
Seth
* — disclaimer: I haven’t read Outliers, so maybe I’m missing the point. I’ve just heard this basic line of reasoning, as outlined in the Guardian article, presented countless times and almost always attributed to Gladwell.
— — — — Links — — — —
Ry Cooder Part 1: The Irreverent Archaelogist
