Ry Cooder ,dob 15th march 1947

Yip,
the greatest slide guitar player was born 60 years ago, Ry Cooder has also just released a cd , of his own work which is a rarity.

All the very best Ry, and many more of 'em.

adios,
Lovat

March 4, 2007

SECTION: OBSERVER REVIEW FEATURES PAGES; Pg. 6

LENGTH: 1830 words

HEADLINE: Review: People: THE INTERVIEW: Having
brought the best out of bands from the Rolling Stones to Buena Vista Social Club,there's not much Ry Cooder doesn't know about contemporary popular song. As he turns 60, Caspar Llewellyn Smith finds him on cranky form in his Santa Monica hangar, taking inspiration from the Dust Bowl - and his cat.

BYLINE: Caspar Llewellyn Smith

BODY:

If Ry Cooder were English, it's near certainty that he'd have a sizeable shed at the bottom of his garden in which to potter about.
As it is, the 59-year-old singer, guitarist and producer - he celebrates his
60th birthday later this month - has lived most of his life in Santa Monica,
California, and a few years back took possession of a small hangar at the local airfield in which to potter about. It is where 'Okies and Arkies' - migrant workers from Oklahoma and Arkansas - flocked during the Second World War to build Douglas fighter jets, but now it more suggests tumbleweed.

The taxi driver ferrying me from west Hollywood, near where Cooder briefly experimented putting down roots when he married (later
writing the funky 'Down in Hollywood': 'You better hope that you don't run out of gas!'), certainly has no clue where he's going. But when we eventually find the site, there's a weathered figure, in a red, zip-up corduroy jacket, blinking in the early spring sunshine, already waiting. Cooder leads me into the small, dark room, perches himself on the leather sofa and starts talking.

Cooder doesn't like to dwell on the past, can be cranky, cantankerous even;on the walls, there is nothing to suggest that this is one of the most
influential figures in the history of contemporary popular song. No old
photographs posing with Captain Beefheart or the Rolling Stones (Cooder played on Let it Bleed , but fell into a dispute with Keith
Richards, who confessed he took him 'for all that he knew', over ownership of the 'Honky Tonk Woman' riff); no gold discs commemorating his string of classic Seventies solo albums such as Chicken Skin Music ; no framed guitar from the soundtrack sessions for the Wim Wenders movie Paris, Texas , the most feted of several film scores he wrote in the Eighties; nothing to mark his ground-breaking collaborations with Malian bluesman Ali Farka Toure or Hindustani musician VM Bhatt in the 1990s, never
mind his work with Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club, whom he helped rediscover and produce. Put it to Cooder that he's nothing if not
versatile and he says genially: 'Well, I'm sort of an osmotic fellow.'

On the walls, instead, there are photographs of greater Los Angeles in the
1940s-50s. What's happened to the city and the rest of the country since then forms a steady refrain. 'Consumerism was the Trojan horse, it really was,' he rails. 'Very smart, these people. . . they co-opted everything.' Such outbursts can make him seem embittered. 'You don't want to
identify yourself with any kind of class struggle,' he parodies. 'You want to have an SUV and shop and wear a Lakers shirt and eat cheeseburgers .'

If anything tempers his ire, it is his increasingly quixotic work. Two years
ago, Cooder received some of the best reviews of his career for his heavily researched Chavez Ravine , an ambitious concept album
telling the story of a Mexican-American community demolished in the 1950s in order to make way for the arrival in LA of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team.

Not the easiest of concepts, it turned into one of his bestselling records
and although he blanches at that idea - 'It's a niche thing, make no mistake' - he takes grudging pleasure. 'I don't understand the
public,' he says, 'but I do believe the public is oversold and underrated every day. Give the people something interesting, something to chew on, I say.'

In fact, with Chavez Ravine , Cooder found himself operating at a level only a few of his peers attain: Springsteen, Dylan, Tom Waits, perhaps - those other grizzled critters.

In the thick of recording, he received a strange postcard from an old friend
which sparked the idea for a sequel: there was a picture of Leadbelly, the blues musician, but in place of his face was a photoshopped image of a red tom cat. '
Chavez was hard work. But by the time I'd done with it, I could see the method and Buddy seemed so obvious. I just whipped right through it.'

The subject of the new album, My Name Is Buddy , would be those blue-collar workers who fled the Midwest in the 1930s. It would
mirror the earlier story, only this time, the characters would be fictional:
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,' Cooder says with a laugh. The three embark on a journey to California, riding out run-ins with the Klan, union busters and more.

Cooder found further inspiration in Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time , a brilliant account of the Dust Bowl that wiped out life on the great American plains in the 1930s; in a Deborah Kerr movie Heaven Knows, Mr Allison ; in the shape of an old Irish tune; and in his own pet's misfortunes.

'I was sitting in the veterinarian's with my old cat, who has all sorts of
exotic problems, waiting for the doc to come out, and I'm spacing out, thinking, "Red cat 'til I die. . . that's good. Now what would come next?"'

Nick Gold of World Circuit Records, who conceived the Buena Vista project
with Cooder says: 'The themes go right back. I suspect they've been germinating in him for some time.'

'I used to take the train up to Santa Barbara to see my grandparents,' says Cooder, who grew up a block away from the airfield we're on, and has lived with his wife, photographer Susan Titelman, just a mile or
so down the road since 1972. 'You'd look off and there'd be a little hobo
jungle right in the trees by the railway tracks,' he continues. 'They used to
fascinate me. "Who are those people?" "Hobos." "What are they doing there?" "Well, somebody left the land to them so they'd have a place to rest." These little cardboard boxes. . . these lean-to shacks.' Cooder's parents were politically minded but they told him: '"Oh, you don't want to mess about with people like that." But my grandmother would always feed them. They'd come to that back door, and knock, and she'd give 'em what she could.

'It was those kind of people who built the country. Billionaires don't make
countries - all they do is make money.' Such aphorisms trip off his tongue. 'But they created a kind of society that is disappearing. It's all still relevant .History is continuous.'

Right from the start, Cooder was interested in the old-time music and
politics - his eponymous debut in 1970 featured covers of songs such as Blind Alfred Reed's 'How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and
Live?'; even in interviews 30 years ago, he talked about the Dust
Bowl. 'Rock as it is known today just doesn't interest me at all,' he said back then and nothing has changed. 'I hate commercial music,' he tells me. 'If I hear that money in it, all that winking and nodding. . . It kills me.'

The cast Cooder flew in for My Name Is Buddy included Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains (playing tin whistle: 'like gold dust'); arranger Van Dyke Parks and long-standing collaborators Jim Keltner on drums and
accordion player Flaco Jimenez; his 29-year-old son Joachim on percussion; and folklorist and musician Mike Seeger ('the exalted master of this form; the old-time music rests with him') as well as his half-brother Pete. As a teenage guitar prodigy, Cooder studied at the feet of the Seegers and acts such as Sleepy John Estes at the Ash Grove and other LA folk clubs.

'We're the old-time cats,' Cooder says. 'All that white hair. I thought,
"Jeez! It's come to this." This is lifetime achievement stuff, make no mistake. You're hearing really good knowledge there; you are
hearing really good experience. What used to bother me about recording,
doesn't bother me any more. I used to think, "I'm just not getting there." It's there now. I can hear it.

'Look at anyone who's been in it all their life. .. if they've got their
health, if they've been lucky enough, then that's when you begin to hear
something really good. Sure, you can always hear when someone's singing, "I'm happening, I'm young, I'm strong, I've got the
thing", but [when people are older] you can also hear this weird transcendence. In one note.'

It is no surprise that someone who thinks music took a wrong turn with the
advent of the Beatles - just as his own story started - should place such value on a lifetime's knowledge. He talks fondly about the Buena Vista gang, describing his time with them as 'like going to school'. Cooder broke the Trading with the Enemy Act to record in Cuba and was prosecuted and fined $25,000. Only through an act of clemency invoked by President Clinton on his last day in office was he allowed back into the
country with a one-year licence to carry out more recordings.

'Yeah, Clinton did good,' he says. 'But he also ushered in the era of Nafta,
the North American Free Trade Area, which made Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world, with women raped for their pay
cheques. That was another nail in the coffin of workers' lives.'

Never mind the 'RepubliKlans' - the Democrats today are 'a bunch of cowards, chickenshit,' he says.

The antithesis of most rock stars, Cooder has always shunned the limelight
and after the release of his Get Rhythm album in 1987, it had seemed he would never make a record under his own name again. 'That's
the thing that surprises me about these two new albums,' says Nick Gold. 'Not that he made them, but that he's singing on them, exposing himself in that way.'

'Well, goddam it!' says Cooder testily. 'I know who Buddy is. Nobody else
does but me.' Sweetly, he frets about the fate of his creations. 'Could I have made these records 10 years ago?' he wonders. 'I suppose not. I didn't know how.'

It is only discussing the future of music that he sounds reactionary. 'To me, the internet is a big scam,' he says, mourning the demise of the record industry. 'You think [music now is] going to be free? It's not. You think it's going to stretch? It's going to shrink. Too much control! Look at the potential for money!'

He says he's stopped reading the morning papers because they make him too angry. 'Instead, first thing in the morning, I get a song started.' He's already embarked upon a new record to complete what he sees as
a trilogy. 'It's about a guy called Cash Buckley. Not a very nice man, but I
like him. It's very interesting. Useless, I suppose. But fun.'

As I leave, I give Cooder a book called Bound for Glory featuring colour
photographs of America taken by the Farm Security Administration between 1939 and 1943.

'Jesus, look at this,' he says. 'What a beautiful country. It could have been
great.' But it's a mistake to misconstrue his despair as defeatism. 'You can't just dismiss the world,' he told me earlier. 'You have
to say, "Well, I'm in it. Now I have to make sense of it."'

What accounts for the late-flowering of Ry Cooder? 'I keep my mind on track and I don't get mad and I don't get frustrated,' he says, opening the door to the sunshine again. 'Well, I do. . . but creative work, it's a way of
controlling all that.'

My Name Is Buddy (Nonesuch) is released tomorrow