Pages tagged “ry cooder”

I, Flathead, being billed as the final album in Ry Cooder’s California trilogy that also includes Chavez Ravine and My Name Is Buddy, has a concept worthy of a Hunter Thompson fever dream about the 1950s. It features 14 songs “by” the fictional Kash Buk and the Clowns, a batch of pre-pop culture California wild boys who drank hard, played country boogie, raced cars on salt flats, and had a weak spot for circus sideshows, Communists and easy women. Kash also has a relationship with an alien named Shakey—or so we’re told in the hardbound book that is part of this CD’s deluxe edition.

Master songwriter and storyteller Ry Cooder will release a new record, I, Flathead, and an accompanying novella June 24 on Nonesuch/Perro Verde Records.

Flathead is the final chapter in Cooder’s California Trilogy, which began with 2005’s Chavez Ravine and continued with 2007’s My Name is Buddy. The new album contains the purported recordings of fictitious musician Kash Buk and his band the Klowns. The 95-page companion novella follows Buk and his alien friend Shakey as they trek across rural California, meeting a host of colorful characters along the way.

Cooder produced the album and wrote or co-wrote all of its 14 tracks. In a recent statement, he said the characters from I, Flathead exist in a world “where strange people are the norm,” inspired by country music, Popular Mechanics magazines and science-fiction films.

Cooder adopted the persona of his character Kash Buk to talk about the upcoming album. "You got your hard times, your good times, a dog story for you animal lovers, and a forbidden-race-love song, which every record ought to have at least one of,” he writes. “You're going to meet the ghost of Dick Nixon the drag racer, plus a bonus Red-Scare speciality for all you politically-minded hi-brow foot-stompers out there. I felt it was important to include a circus story since most people agree the circus is a mirror for 'life itself.'

"And you can't say you got a record album unless there is a selection of honky-tonk heart-ache ballats, so I took care of the ballat chores for you. And I spatially wanted to pay o-mage to the steel guitar legends of yore. It has been my privilege to know quite a few. That's a hard-bitten, un-sung fraternity, and I figured if I remember them, some body might remember me some day and raise a glass some where and put a nickel in the juke-box."

I, Flathead tracklist:

1. Drive Like I Never Been Hurt
2. Waitin' For Some Girl
3. Johnny Cash
4. Can I Smoke In Here?
5. Steel Guitar Heaven
6. Ridin' With The Blues
7. Pink-O Boogie
8. Fernando Sez
9. Spayed Kooley
10. Filipino Dance Hall Girl
11. My Dwarf Is Getting Tired
12. Flathead One More Time
13. 5000 Country Music Songs
14. Little Trona Girl

Related links:
Ry Cooder on Nonesuch
NPR: Ry Cooder: Telling America’s Story
News: Norah, Cat Power appear on My Blueberry Nights soundtrack

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Just because Ry Cooder has released albums in each of the last four decades doesn't mean he's not open to new technology.

According to an article in The New York Times, Cooder was unhappy with the sound on his upcoming record, My Name Is Buddy: Another Record by Ry Cooder, claiming it sounded too processed. Leaving the studio, he burned the album using iTunes and noticed an improvement in the record's sound on the new copy. He learned that the better sound quality was attributed to iTunes default "sound enhancer."

In fact, he was so happy with the sound that he decided to forego a traditional mastering process and let the iTunes enhanced version become the final mix for the album.

My Name Is Buddy, out March 6 on Nonesuch Records, is the story of a cat named Buddy and his travels and encounters with such characters as Lefty the Mouse and Reverend Tom Toad. It is Cooder’s first record since 2005’s Chavez Ravine.

Related links:
Nonesuch Records’ Ry Cooder site
Ry Cooder Fansite
Ry Cooder on Wikipedia

After his 2005 Grammy-nominated LP Chávez Ravine, a tribute to a vanished Latino community in L.A., slide guitarist Ry Cooder dramatically shifted his focus. My Name Is Buddy, slated for a February 27 release on Nonesuch Records, tells the story of Buddy Red Cat and his journey from the comforts of home to the troubles of the outside world.

A handful of familiar faces round out Cooder's all-star cast of accompanying musicians on My Name Is Buddy, including Roland White, Van Dyke Parks, Joachim Cooder and banjo legend Mike Seeger. Each of the record's 17 songs, many written by Cooder himself, comes with a vignette penned by Cooder and a drawing by artist Vincent Valdez.

My Name is Buddy tracklist:

1. Suitcase in My Hand
2. Cat and Mouse
3. Strike!
4. J. Edgar
5. Footprints in the Snow
6. Sundown Town (The Reverend Tom Toad)
7. Green Dog
8. The Dying Truck Driver
9. Christmas in Southgate
10. Hank Williams
11. Red Cat till I Die
12. Three Chords and the Truth
13. My Name Is Buddy
14. One Cat, One Vote, One Beer
15. Cardboard Avenue
16. Farm Girl
17. There's a Bright Side Somewhere

For album art or more information about My Name Is Buddy, visit the Nonesuch Records website.

Buena Vista Social Clubber delivers an arresting feat of social and musical archeology

Field recordings of plantation blues or even doo-wop records from studios long shuttered always carry with them some patina of place and time, a certain sizzle in the analog static or a warm heat from adobe walls that seeps into a fretboard. When you hear it out of context, as some orphan on the radio airwaves, you can’t quite figure out the story of what this stuff is or where it came from, but on some more subliminal wavelength, it tells you something about itself. Ry Cooder’s genius is that he takes these cues as a challenge to explicate, lay bare—and, at his best, recapture—some of the meaning just outside the frame of three-minute 45s long lost to legend. The plot only gets thicker with a story like that of Chávez Ravine, a neighborhood lost to history, much like Cape Town’s District Six. Chávez Ravine’s story is not just one of social displacement, but the hint of the layers that sit, often invisibly, beneath our feet in every modern city.

Cooder’s Chávez Ravine could’ve been a long, dry, pedantic history lesson but instead it’s the kind of exploration that’s both satisfying and scholarly in its ability to bring to life stories, times and places that are literally underfoot but dangerously close to being forgotten. Imagining the world of Los Angeles at the dawn of the 1950s, the protagonist alien (the spaceship kind, allowing for the obvious metaphor of course) hears an old Little Julian Herrera recording and goes looking for the scene, only to find that the neighborhood he seeks was bulldozed to build Dodger Stadium. Lovingly packaged with the photos used by Don Normark (whose book remains the definitive history of the vanished neighborhood) and a running commentary from Cooder, Chávez Ravine is as weighty as it looks and feels.

What makes the album so amazing is its ability to balance poignancy and fun. While there are still heroes and villains in the story (most obviously laid out in the point/counterpoint “Don’t Call Me Red” and “In My Town”), Cooder pauses to consider those caught in the crossfire, the hapless bulldozer operator in “It’s Just Work For Me,” or the guy parking cars in the Stadium parking lot remembering his old house that now sits below “3rd Base, Dodger Stadium.” Interspersed are moments of vintage genre exploration like the hypnotic “Chinito, Chinito,” or the slinky “3 Cool Cats.” Collectively, the songs here give you both the literal story and the feel of the thing—the hot summer nights in the dance club, the dull thud of shoes on the dirt roads between ragged but dignified shanties. When it’s all over, it’s as good as any monument, and the taste and skill with which Cooder executes this tender tribute is nothing short of breathtaking.