Ry Cooder 1970-1987

It's been a while, over a year, since I last posted any thoughts on this blog. Maybe I haven't had any good or inspiring thoughts, maybe not.

I still have my weekly radio show on Pulse Community Radio (pulseonair.co.uk and 98.4FM) and I am discovering new, and new to me, traditional and acoustic music all the time.

The last Celtic Connections festival brought a chance to see the Stray Birds, you were very good, and a new band from Australia, the Mae Trio who were excellent.
I also caught Luke Plumb and James MacIntosh from Shooglenifty playing tunes from their CD A Splendid Notion; the world's only solo mandolin and percussion album, maybe?  

Anyway there has been good music in 2013 and good prospects for 2014 (the new Cahalen Morrison and Eli West CD, I'll swing my hammer with both my hands, is a doozy).



My favourite recent purchase is the wee box set shown above, Ry Cooder 1970-1987. The box set is just a box with the CDs in their original covers, text shrunk into virtual invisibility.  No extras, no big gushy accompanying book, just the music.  It's a great set.

I have to admit I have all the music in the original, long playing, vinyl versions tucked away in a cupboard, the spines cracked and torn by a cat we used to put up (accommodate, tolerate, adore) but in reality I listen to the Cooder music I have on my iPod or on CDs, the much later stuff, the soundtrack compilation (Music by Ry Cooder), the Rhino Records anthology (The UFO has landed - good extras, terrible cover), River Rescue (the very best...) and the latest proper albums: Chavez Ravine, My name is Buddy, I Flathead, Pull up some dust and sit down and Election Special. I quite like the later albums, the narratives, the histories, the rant against the Republicans, the economy, overseas conflicts and terrorism. They are vital, energetic, outspoken, a bit naive maybe, to European ears but more realistic and critical than some of his fellow artists (e.g. Steve Earle?).

But the music in the box set is crucial and essential and the original albums contain wee gems not found in the compilations.  The eleven albums are examples of great musicianship, raw and cultured musical settings and an examination and celebration of early american music. The collection defines americana, the inter-weaving of contrary musical threads, the gathering of folk, soul, R&B, jazz, tex-mex, hawaiian and more exotic influences into the mix. 

The Gems (one from each album)

Ry Cooder - Dark is the night
The template for Cooder's soundtrack style. Solo guitar playing at its best.

Into the Purple Valley - Denomination Blues
Wacky arrangement, weird singing but a brilliant, joyful sound, all about who is going to heaven when they die.

Boomer's Story- Comin' in on a wing and a prayer
Beautiful guitar arrangement to begin with, dynamic jazzy setting and a celebration of triumph over death.
(Complaint - the information sheet from inside the original album is omitted, there's no info on the cover)

Paradise and Lunch - I'm a fool for a cigarette / Feeling good
"When you've finished, choke it, 'cause I want to smoke it".  Not PC now but a great combination of songs; the guitar and mandolin playing is immaculate.  (But why is the track order on the sleeve different from the album?)  

Chicken Skin Music - The Bourgeois Blues
Rowdy music, turn it up loud! Great for cake-walking round the living room, the start of each verse just gets better as the song proceeds. But a grim tale of racism and segregation. The album cover art is terrible - skeleton sex?

Show time - School is out
The only studio track from a live album.  This is a juvenile song, holiday time from school. Although a tex-mex sound it is maybe the start of the smoother R&B sound that will dominate Cooder's live sound and later albums in the box set? 

Jazz - Face to face that I shall meet him
A Joseph Spence tune, this had me running to hear the original. Spence's music is much more chaotic and disorganised than this elaborate, almost churchy arrangement. Brilliant horns, guitar and cymbalum. More about Joseph Spence.

Bop till you drop - Go home, girl
The pop album. This track is a nice story song, about a girl and her boyfriend's best friend, a relationship that cannot be allowed to continue: he says "Girl you can't go out with me anymore, that's the way it has to be from now on". 

Borderline - Border Line
I love this album, all the way through. Quite poppy, high production, great songs and some new sounds for Cooder. Borderline is just sublime, a great instrumental, you can almost feel the heat from the sand, half texan shuffle, half mexican polka . 

The Slide Area - Blue Suede Shoes
In truth, the Slide Area isn't my favourite Cooder album, it's all a bit synthetic and formula-istic for me. This track has the energy, manic singing and playing and adds to the original (IMVHO).

Get Rhythm - Across the Borderline
This is perfection. Written by Cooder, John Hiatt and Jim Dickinson it also featured on the soundtrack of the 1982 film The Border, starring Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel. Superb playing (the guitar solo is ace), brilliant singing by Ry Cooder and Harry Dean Stanton.

Celtic Connections 2013: appropriate place or appropriate amplification?

Celtic Connections?  You're thinking Scottish and Irish music, maybe some from France, Wales, Spain?

Well, once upon a time.  Nowadays you need to think Winter Festival - a wee bit of folk music and every other genre of music you can think of lumped in.  If there is even a tenuous connection with Scots, Irish, Gaels, so much the better, but really it doesn't matter.  Diversity is good, full houses are better.  So we have Mongolian, Bulgarian, English, African musicians, loads of Americans in loads of guises, every type of music.

I spent some time at the festival and saw a few bands; Woody Pines and Petunia and the Vipers at the Old Fruitmarket, Duncan Chisholm at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Teetotallers at the Piping Centre, Old Crow Medicine Show at the Barrowlands and Little Feat at the ABC.  I like to go to different types of music and different venues.  What struck me was how each performer played in their venue and what atmosphere they created.

Woody Pines and Petunia and the Vipers at the Old Fruitmarket was a strange marriage.  The Old Fruimarket is a lovely barn of a place, a high stage and cabaret seating.  I love it when big loud bands play there (Salsa Celtica, Shooglenifty) but both these Americana bands' music struggled to fill the dead air.  I sat at the back and the mix was all wrong, indistinct when it needed to be sharp, too quiet when detail was needed.  Both good bands but in the wrong place.

Duncan Chisholm played with a band, a narrator, a string section and horns.  He featured instrumental music from his Strathglass Trilogy (see previous blog).  It sounded brilliant; intense and interesting, great textures and fine playing.  The support band, the Pride of New York, sounded good as well.  Unless someone tried to speak.  Then the mighty space and reverb of the Kelvingrove gobbled by the words and spat them out, making gibberish of jokes and comments.  But the music was grand and that's all that mattered.  Security guards roamed the halls off the performance area, checking for light-fingered opportunists with a Dali or a spitfire in their bags.  A great venue.

The Teetotallers are Irish, a trio of great players (Kevin Crawford, Martin Haynes and John Doyle) and they were the perfect match for the Piping Centre; close, complicated, comfortable music with a healthy dose of craic. 

They played music from Clare, and some songs.  Local music by local people (if a long way from here).  Simple acoustic music played with great skill, verve, humour and passion.  This was Celtic Connections music of old, part of the tradition, each tunes learned from a person, in a particular place.

They flew in, shook hands, played music and flew out.  International musical journeymen of the highest calibre but they played their tunes, lifted my heart and left a smile on my face.

I got caught out when I went into the Barrowlands; anticipating the metal detector I'd removed by penknife from my jacket, only to find they'd been removed.  Welcome to the 21st Century (although they still went through womens' handbags, maybe they're just nosey).   The Old Crow Medicine Show were superb, very professional and energetic and eager to please, maybe one of the best stringbands around.  Here they came across as American Pogues, suitably loud to suit the venue but maybe too loud to allow any subtlety in the music.  Rock me mama like a south-bound train.  I'd like to hear them in a small place (but maybe it's too late now).

Little Feat at the ABC was  a pilgrimage.  I've followed Little Feat since I was 18, buying a copy of Sailin' Shoes when I was signing on at the Employment Office in Cambuslang.  I have a lot of  Little Feat albums.  I loved Lowell George and I have also liked all the versions of the band since he died.  Nowadays they are a Jam Band.  The original songs are filleted and stuffed with instrumental "stuff", sing the first verse, solo / solo / solo and nothing lasts less than 20 minutes.  They are loud, very loud.  The singing isn't as good as I'd want but they are all getting on in years, suffering ill-health, and I will go and see them every time they play where I can get to.  Unlike OCMS, Little Feat need to be loud, and long winded, and a bit scatty.

Happy celtic connections.  Let's do it again next year.

Duncan Chisholm: The Strathglass Trilogy

The Strathglass Trilogy: Farrar, Canaich and Afffric

I have been listening to Duncan Chisholm's new album, called Affric.  It is a great selection of tunes.

I am a great fan of Duncan's music and regularly play his tracks on my weekly radio show, Acoustic and Eclectic, on Pulse Community Radio [available on 98.4FM where I stay, if there isn't a hill in the way, and www.pulseonair.co.uk everyway and everywhere]. 

He is a brilliant fiddler, a great exponent of Highland slow airs, and this album follows on from his previous releases; Redpoint, The Door of Saints, Farrar and Canaich. 

He is a good interpreter of others material [especially Phil Cunningham's slow pieces] and is developing as a composer, contributing 11 tunes to the last three albums and taking on a role as soundtrack artist on some recent TV projects.

However, [that word again], I struggle a bit with the idea that the last three albums [Farrar, Canaich and Affric] now constitute a trilogy; the Strathglass trilogy.

I understand that the artist "drew inspiration from one of the world's most beautiful wilderness areas" and "felt compelled to produce soundtracks to these places that I have loved all my life", as stated in the booklet for Affric.  I think these statements fit as well with the ideas expressed,or the recollections of a place in a single tune as much as a trilogy of CDs.  Each composition is that expression and an album might simply be a collection of such sentiments and emotional and intellectual expressions.


The three albums do share common design features; the same lower-case titling, the use of the same font throughout, the identical CD insert features; the pictures, track listings and credits. Another attempt at a unifying element is the use of quotations form the Neil Munro poem, To Exiles. 

To Exiles was written in 1899 and refers to Scots living abroad who might be missing the storms and rain of home.  Neil Munro, in a letter of 28th March 1902, states, " I was thinking particularly of some Fife towns I know (but it applies to any narrow straggling sea-side town) and they seemed to me really more the property of the sea than of the land - stoney billows, so to speak, cast upon the shore" [Bagpipe Ballads and Other Poems, 2010, Page 31].

The quote used in Farrar is correctly lifted from the poem:
Wild cries the winter, loud through all our valleys;
The midnights roar, the grey noons echo back.

The quote in Canaich is nearly right:
Let the torrents pour and the great winds rally
Let lightning strike the pine.
It should be:
Let torrents pour then, let the great winds rally
Snow-silence fall or lightning blast the pine;

The quote in Affric is a mish-mash of several lines:
Firstly,
The rains may thrash on us
The great mists blind us
and lightning rend the pine tree on the hill
Yet the morning shall find us
Children of tempest all unshaken still.

Should be:
Though rains may thrash on us, the great mist blind us
And lightning rend the pine-tree on the hill
Yet are we strong, yet shall the morning find us
Children of tempest unshaken still.

Then,
And exiled son of scotland
it is yours this rude country
where your fathers sleep
it is yours and you are ours for ever-more

This part is a mixture of unrelated lines.
Let torrents pour then, let the great winds rally
Snow-silence fall or lightning blast the pine;
That light of Home shines warmly in the valley
And, exiled son of Scotland, it is thine.
and
Far have you wandered over seas of longing,
And now you drowse, and now you may well weep,
When all the recollections come a-thronging,
Of this rude country where your fathers sleep
and later
Fond are our hearts although we do not bare them, -
They're yours, and you are ours for evermore.

To me, a poem of recollection, longing and nostalgia about a sea-side town does not quite tally with a set of tunes relating to and praising a remote Highland setting of lochs and glens.  The reconstruction of this poem is, in one respect, self-serving and lazy; in its proper form it is not a rallying call to arms as suggested.  It is not about the clans, of clearances, of the Highlands.  The unification of the albums around the words doesn't work.  In the last part of the trilogy the set of words are fractured and put together to form new and different ideas - they are not Munro's.

But... the music is brilliant in evoking these themes and sentiments.  The tunes, the playing, the sound, the arrangements.  They are perfect in themselves.  They just don't match with To Exiles.

New Music and New-to-me music: Chris Wood

I put Hollow Point up on a pedestal as one of my haunted-by-music songs.  Its impact on me was severe, profound, disturbing. 
I was not a fan of English folk music - I thought it lacked guts, was boring, exhibited no warmth nor personality.  And I don't suppose I thought Mr Wood was "an English folksinger" - in my mind he is a protest singer, and that sounds, and feels, a lot better.

However [how heavy that words weighs!], his songs are resounding and sounding around my head and I find myself stopping the iPod and listening again, and again, and again.  To the music and the lyrics, to the intent.
At the moment, One in a million and The Cottager's Reply are filling my head, being perfect examples of story songs; they have a compelling narrative and a perfect marriage of voice and simple instrumentation.
One in a million kidnapped me as I was taking a long wintry walk through the Renfrewshire countryside.  It is a romance, highly improbable and parochial and completely wonderful.  I walked hypnotised, awaiting the conclusion and outcome of a domestic love affair dodged by misunderstanding and shyness.
The Cottager's Reply is based on a poem by Frank Mansell and is a gem, a polite rebuttal of urban land-grabbers.  It is gentle and strong, sweet and stern.  It is happy and challenging, a rare mixture.
His version of English life is, for the first time to me, intriguing and interesting; he has a foot in the past and in the future and both need alteration and comment.  He is not British the same way I'm not British.  Our identity is built up from rich roots in family and a strong sense of place and belonging.  We don't deal with amalgamations - Britain, UK, Europe.  I live in Neilston [full stop].

So, I will work my way through the albums, immerse myself in his songs and tales.  I've missed a chance to see and hear him live at Celtic Connections - maybe next time.

Lipstick Sunset by John Hiatt

Lipstick Sunset is the fourth track on the Bring the Family album, released in 1987.  The album was Hiatt's first real commercial success and featured the best "house-band" ever; John Hiatt, Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner [later known as Little Village after recording their first, and only, album in 1992 - the band was not a great success].  The cover is wierd - a surreal family shot - and I think it was changed to the one below.

Lipstick Sunset is the perfect combination of Hiatt's voice and Cooder's slide guitar.  It is a simple song, a reflection on love, perhaps lost-love, perhaps  a song of regret.
There are four verses - three with words and one the guitar solo.
The lyrics are mournful, pointed and succinct; the slide guitar is soaring and, I think, more emotive than the words.
I'm not copying the words here - this song is one, complete package, one ride, one great emotional moment.

Seek it out.  Listen to this music.

I've heard this song live; by Little Village, by Hiatt himself.  It's good - but not as good as this.

Time for a wee break - when I get more ideas, more inspiration, I will post here again.

Passenger Seat by Death Cab for Cutie

Passenger Seat features  on the Death Cab for Cutie album Transatlanticism, their fourth album, released in October 2003.  It was written by the band's leader and singer Ben Gibbard.

To me, the song is a meditation.  Musically, it is based on a looping and haunting piano figure which cradles the vocal melody but never matches it.

The narrative is stated by either a lover, a loved one, or maybe a child, being driven home in the car and looking at the night stars.

I roll the window down 
And then begin to breathe in
The darkest country road
And the strong scent of evergreen
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home

Then looking upwards
I strain my eyes 
And try to tell the difference 
Between shooting stars and satellites
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home

"Do they collide?"
I ask and you smile
With my feet on the dash
The world doesn't matter

When you feel embarrassed then I'll be your pride
When you need directions then I'll be the guide
For all time
For all time

The song is about eternity and an eternal committment - "for all time" - between two people.
Musically it is simple and stunning.  I think it sounds unique [although my wife thinks it sounds like "Bridge over troubled waters";maybe not in melody but in mood and atmosphere].

It might be profound - but it doesn't try too hard.

Hollow Point by Chris Wood

Hollow Point is a track on the handmade life album by Chris Wood and it accounts the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22nd July 2005 by armed police or special forces on high alert following the London bombings of July 7th 2005 and some failed bombing attempts on July 21st.

The song is essentially in the ballad form, taking this traditional form and using it to tell a comtemporary story.  The accompaniment is mainly Wood's finger-style guitar, with percussive and tonal additions and flourishes as the song proceeds, at a slow and careful pace. 

This is wonderful storytelling - the progress of de Menezes from his flat, through the streets and into the Tube - in modern language and archaic form.  Its start and end acts as a traditional shell or bookends:

Awake arise you drowsy sleeper
Awake arise it’s almost day.
No time to lie, no time to slumber,
No time to dream your life away.

It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day.

Tension builds as his journey continues; the mundane is misinterpreted.  He is caught in a situation of mistaken identity and he and the police are both on track to an inevitable conclusion:

Now he’s on their cameras, he’s on their radar,
He’s on their crackling radios,
His Oyster Card is in his pocket,
At 10am through the gates he goes.

And down and down dropped the moving staircase,
Deeper down go the others too.
And through the hour glass the sand is falling -
There is nothing they can do ….

Chris Wood's performance is wonderful, understated and honest, his vocal flurries copying his guitar playing, his plain English accent recounting the fateful tale.  The killing is not reported, just the conclusion of the official investigation:

If he’d have stopped, if he’d have listened …
Commissioner said that it was no good -
He said they gave him no instructions
That an innocent man could have understood.

Just a Brazilian electrician -
Christ only knows what he came here for.
The hollow point was the ammunition.
Now it’s our turn now for some shock and awe….

Chris Wood takes his time to tell his tale, the songs is over seven and a half minutes long, but no second is wasted.  This is the best modern / traditional / protest song I have heard. It gets to the heart of the misunderstanding in the incident, the assumptions made, the rush or pressure to do something.