Ry Cooder Election Special (4.5*)
At the start of Randolph Stow’s Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy the recently orphaned protagonist is sitting outside the house, whittling sticks and forgetting to cook his supper when his Siamese cat, Khat, takes things into his own hands (or, I guess, paws) and starts talking in an attempt to get things straightened out in the tucker department. Asked to explain this unexpected development (you never talked before) he answered there was nothing to talk about.
You might think I’m stretching things a bit by suggesting a correlation between Midnite and Ry Cooder, but consider the stats. Eleven studio albums between late 1970 and 1987 with a handful of tracks that weren’t covers. That situation is reversed in the batch of recordings that followed 2005’s Chavez Ravine, where Ryland had to cast around a bit to find a narrative that matched the theme of a Mexican-American community demolished to make way for public housing, a project that was subverted and turned into a baseball stadium.
That was followed by My Name is Buddy’s folkie exploration of Depression era issues straight out of Grapes of Wrath territory involving labour agitators, strikes, company cops and skid row hobos, I Flathead’s beatniks, salt-flat hot rod racers and pedal steel-playing country musicians (the post-war children of the Depression era Okies, or at least that’s the way I interpret it) and the Los Angeles Stories collection of prose about the city and the era he grew up in, covering some of the same territory.
Not bad going. Six years, three storytelling albums and a collection of prose by a bloke whose original material had landed almost exclusively on the fifteen movie soundtracks he compiled between The Long Riders in 1980 and 1998’s Primary Colours.
So he could write, if he wanted to. He just needed something to write about.
There’s a fairly obvious left wing social democratic mindset evident from Chavez Ravine onwards, something that shouldn’t come as a surprise given the presence of Woody Guthrie’s Do Re Mi and Alfred Reed’s How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live on his first album forty-two years ago.
Election Special kicks off in scathing style with Mutt Romney Blues as Cooder assumes the identity of the Republican Party candidate’s faithful hound, lashed to the roof of the vehicle as the family heads off on vacation (Boss Mitt Romney went for a ride/Pulled up on the highway side/Tied me down up on the roof/Boss I hollered woof woof woof), and follows it with a visit to the crossroads in Brother Is Gone, where oil tycoon Charles Koch and his brother David make a deal with the Devil, chasing political power and riches rather than musical prowess and fame. In this version, Robert Johnson’s crossroads have been shifted to Wichita, the brothers lay waste to the land and its people, but Satan turns up looking for the payment for his side of the bargain.
The Wall Street Part of Town dates back to the Pull Up Some Dust sessions but didn’t make the cut for that album. It’s a natural fit for the more pointedly political material this time around and while topical material attending a political agenda can get old pretty quickly, one suspects The Wall Street Part of Town and Guantanamo, regardless of the political content rocks along very nicely, thank you and will be kicking around the fringes of Hughesy’s Top 1500 Most Played for a while.
Pull Up Some Dust’s John Lee Hooker for President gets reincarnated as Cold Cold Feeling, a bluesman’s lament supposedly delivered by a sleepless Obama as he makes his way through the White House corridors in the wee small hours. Seems the Republicans are out to resegregate the White House and the incumbent’ll have to go in through the kitchen door.
Still on the subject of the Republicans Going to Tampa has one of the delegates bidding his wife goodbye as he heads off to get my ashes hauled. Never mind the family values, here’s the change to get your rocks off in an environment where Sarah Palin calls me honey. Given the string band country hoedown in the musical department this one’s another keeper that could well be around my playlist long after the 2012 election is done and dusted.
Delta-style blues get a guernsey on Kool-Aid, which deals with those who drank from the poisoned chalice of tax cuts for the rich. The protagonist (and, remember, on the tracks where there’s an obvious protagonist he’s not necessarily a good guy) the Bush administration’s propaganda, enlists in the military and heads off to Iraq or Afghanistan and returns to find his job gone.
Themes from the Occupy movement come to the fore in The 90 and the 9, which is firmly in the Woody Guthrie/Joe Hill tradition, a workers’ song that stresses the belief that this may be the last time for the 99 percent of the population that includes America’s besieged unionists.
Election Special needs to finish on a strong note, and it arrives in the form of a militant blues, a snarling demand that the right wing ideologues Take Your Hands Off It, it being the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, though the final chorus extends things a tad (Get your bloody hands off the peoples of the world/And your war machine and your corporation thieves/That lets you keep your job and pays your dirty salary/Take your hands off us, you know we don’t belong to you).
Strong stuff, but stuff that reflects concerns that run right back through Cooder’s career. As son of liberal folkies, brought up on a diet of Woody Guthrie records, (Cooder: I’m 65; I’ve been listening to this shit all my life, and playing it, since I was a little tiny kid, startin’ with Woody at age five. Sourced here).
From there, once he’s figured out something he wants to say, it’s a fairly straightforward exercise to find an appropriate genre (or rather sub-genre) to deliver the message, and regardless of the perishability of topical song Cooder’s scholarly knowledge of a variety of styles and his proven ability to play them should allow him to continue to produce recordings of this calibre through the foreseeable future.
Much as some of us might want them to, you can’t help suspecting the issues that have attracted Ryland’s attention are going to disappear overnight.