RY COODER

POLITICAL PARTY

Ry Cooder has some bluesy fun with current events on his new 'Election Special'

By: MATT ASHARE |  

Published: August 22, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/music/

 

RHYTHM & NEWS: Cooder isn't shy about sharing his political views.

If there were something equivalent to a vetting process for rock musicians, it's hard to imagine anyone putting forth a stronger, more laudable resume than Ry Cooder. A guitarist by trade, Cooder's got far too many impressive credits to list here. He cut his teeth as a sideman in the ’60s, playing alongside out-there psychedelic cult classicist Captain Beefheart and celebrated bluesman Taj Mahal. He was the guitarist on 12 Songs, Randy Newman's landmark 1970 solo album. And he was one of the few artists who came through unscathed after hanging with the Stones when they were peaking artistically and narcotically on Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers, adding soulful slide guitar to "Sister Morphine" and ringing mandolin to their reworked version of the blues standard "Love In Vain."

       Having established himself as something quantifiably more than just your average session dude, he went on to work with artists as diverse as Neil Young, Van Morrison, and Judy Collins. He's been the main man behind nearly a dozen solid soundtracks, including the haunting score to Wim Wenders' darkly romantic Paris, Texas and, perhaps most impressively, the Robert Johnson biopic Crossroads, on which he recreated the blues legend's masterful slide riffs. And, in the past two decades, he's become a major player in the realm of world music.

       Cooder's 1994 collaboration with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, Talking Timbuktu, not only won a Grammy, but it also helped pave the way for an explosion of interest in African music. But his biggest and, in many ways, visionary achievement came in 1997 with the release of Buena Vista Social Club. A breakthrough collaborative album, Buena Vista introduced the world to dozens of overlooked Cuban musicians, many of whom have gone on to establish themselves as major players on the world music scene.

       For the most part, that's been Cooder's basic m.o. Although he hasn't actively shunned the spotlight — he did bring Wim Wenders along to Cuba to film what would become an Oscar-nominated documentary about the Buena Vista project in 1999 — he's largely stuck to the sidelines, working as a beneficent enabler who's seemed perfectly happy to let the music and his guitar do the bulk of the talking. Cooder has earned plenty of accolades in his expansive career: in 2003 Rolling Stone placed him at number eight in the magazine's list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. But he's savvily avoided taking on the baggage that comes with being a full-on star in our celebrity-obsessed culture.

       Through it all, Cooder has continued to steadily record and release his own work every several years. But his livelihood had never really depended on how his solo albums have performed commercially. And that has pretty much freed him up to do whatever he chooses whenever he sequesters himself in the studio. He's used that artistic license to explore everything from jazz, country, gospel, and blues, to classical Indian and African folk musics.

       Cooder's also never been particularly shy about embracing social causes: in 1995 he performed and recorded his take on The Wizard of Oz at Lincoln Center to raise money and awareness for the Children's Defense Fund, and ten years later he paid tribute to the culture of LA's Latino community on Chavez Ravine. But over the past couple of years, he's come out of his shell politically and committed himself to raging against the machine in his own subtly skewed, wryly witty manner. Last year, he convened a full complement of over twenty musicians to record Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down, his first overtly politicized album, replete with telling titles like the bitterly sarcastic "No Banker Left Behind" and the more amusing "John Lee Hooker for President."

Ry Cooder, Election Special (Nonesuch)

       That was just a harbinger of things to come because Cooder, with just his son Joachim accompanying him on percussion, went straight back into the studio to launch an even more potently pointed and unabashedly partisan salvo at the forces he blames for the problems this country is currently facing. His timely and painstakingly topical new album, Election Special, is a rootsy, freewheeling blues and country romp that doesn't pull any punches when it comes to where Cooder stands on the issues. Indeed, the opening track, a gritty acoustic shuffle set to a stuttering backbeat, takes dead-center aim at the presumed Republican presidential nominee.

       Cooder may be pissed, but he hasn't lost his sense of humor. Instead of taking Romney to task for his turnabouts on health care reform, reproductive rights, the cat-and-mouse games he’s been playing with his tax returns, or his troubling tenure at the helm of Bain Capital, he has a little fun with a little story about a little dog in "Mutt Romney Blues." Singing from the perspective of the unfortunate canine, who was apparently caged and strapped to the top of the Romney clan's car on a cross-country trip, Cooder playfully pleads for more humane treatment, promising in return that he "won't spread the story around" or "blow the whistle" on the "mean things" that Mitt's gonna try to do.

       Things gets a bit more personal in "Brother Is Gone," a folky mandolin-based tune that places the notoriously conservative SuperPAC brothers Charles and David Koch at the mythical crossroads, making their own deal with the devil. "Immigration bills and foreclosed homes," Cooder sings with a sadness that's both genuine and feigned. "States rights we proclaim/Like those good old Jim Crow days/Our highest aim/Was to take your vote away." The tune ends on a wistful note, with Cooder taking a tasteful mandolin solo that's far too short.

       There are places on Election Special – the Stonesy "Guantanamo" being one of them – where you kinda want Cooder to cut loose with searing slide solo. But showboating has never been his style. He's always had the gift of sweet restraint. And, as openly partisan as Election Special is, that also applies to his politicking. Cooder may go "looking for the Wall Street part of town" in Tom Waitsian fashion; put himself in the sitting President's worn down shoes as "stray dog Republicans" nip at his heels in the chilly "Cold Cold Feeling"; and imagine an unholy coupling between "an NRA woman" and "a Tea Party man" at the Republican National Convention in the jaunty, countrified "Going to Tampa." But he never does so at the expense of the song, the riff, or the groove he and his son lock into.

       Cooder doesn't make any pretense of being fair and/or balanced, to borrow a soundbite from Fox News. But he's too much of a bred-in-the-bone bluesman to succumb to self-righteous superiority or egotistic elitism. He knows he's playing, not preaching, to the converted. And he does so from down in the trenches, where the culture wars are being fought, not from some lofty tower in the sky. It's just the sort of role that Cooder, rock's equivalent of a time-tested character actor, was born to play. And, quite frankly, he appears to be having a great time playing it here.