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Ry CooderAmerican blues guitarist
Date of Birth: 15.03.1947
Country:  USA |
Content:
- The Legendary Ry Cooder
- The Rise of a Musical Prodigy
- Hollywood's Musical Maestro
- Film Scores and Innovative Collaborations
- An American Artist
- A Musical Explorer
- Early Influences and Career Milestones
- Collaborations and Side Projects
- The legacy of the 1970
The Legendary Ry Cooder
A quarter of a century ago, _Rolling Stone_magazine printed this accolade, which still holds true today: "Ry Cooder is the most eloquent and the most beautiful player of the slide guitar alive."
Among the bottleneck slingers, he stands as a master stylist and the premier interpreter of hundreds of American folk threads, unafraid to weave the jangling Hawaiian ukulele and the Tex-Mex accordion into, say, a gospel harmony.
The Rise of a Musical Prodigy
Making his first solo foray in 1970, by the early 80s, he had assembled a rich tapestry of rural blues, street soul, dusty ballads, calypso, and other folk gems, forging them into a sizzling, contemporary American vaudeville.
And while America may have scorned his polyester-clad Mexican ensemble, all of Europe was smitten by Cooder's hootchy-kootchy humor and his motley crew's ability to make thousands of people holler, sweat, and even weep—for a couple of hours.
But not everything was rosy. While Cooder's concerts had become legendary, they were draining him financially. His 1982 album, _Slide Area_, suggested that his style was becoming formulaic, and poor critical reception and paltry sales only added to his disillusionment.
He abruptly pulled the plug, disbanded his ensemble, and retreated to his longtime home in Santa Monica. He was forty at the time.
His adrift didn't last long, and one day, Cooder found himself in the movies. It became his day job: no more schlepping through the sticks, no writing records, no deal-making, just turning up at the Hollywood studio each day—it was just down the street—and penning film scores.
Cooder had debuted in 1968 with MGM's _Candy_, and shortly thereafter, he worked on Nicolas Roeg's 1970 film _Performance_, starring Mick Jagger. Jack Nitzsche assisted the guitarist on both soundtracks, and it was then that Cooder ended up on THE ROLLING STONES' _Let It Bleed_.
Hollywood's Musical Maestro
The movies provided a lifeline—as they still do—for Cooder never lost his passion for country blues, early jazz, hillbilly, Hawaiian, Caribbean, Cuban, Mexican, gospel, rock and roll, and other roots styles.
"Ninety percent of my musical education I got on the job," he wrote in the liner notes for his double-CD anthology, _The Music of Ry Cooder_. "I'm grateful I had the chance to develop ideas and sounds that were spiritual and exploratory. It's the only way I know how to work."
Film Scores and Innovative Collaborations
Despite his affinity for folk—and thus, rural—genres, it's the sound of his moaning slide guitar that most attach to urban scenes. The soundtrack to 1970s _Blue Collar_featured some of Cooder's finest slide work, drummer Jim Keltner—who has played with Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, John Lennon, and Joe Cocker—backing him.
Cooder managed to retain a core set of musicians from his band; David Lindley and a few other mates would appear on 1980s _The Long Riders_, which began a long association with director Walter Hill.
Cooder would score several of his films: the cult rockabilly actioner _Streets of Fire_, the equally cultish but blues-infused _Crossroads_, _Southern Comfort_, _Johnny Handsome_, _Trespass_, and, in the 90s, _Geronimo: An American Legend_and _The Last Man Standing_.
But other directors and producers have also sought Cooder's compositional and instrumental talents: Louis Malle's _Alamo Bay_, Wim Wenders' _Paris, Texas_, the latter featuring a chilling slide guitar that wails like a phantom—Cooder's homage to the great but then near-forgotten Reverend Gary Davis.
With Hill's support, Cooder has woven instruments from all over the world into his ever-expanding tapestry. The shakuhachi and Korean gong, the pump organ and harmonica, the banjo and saz, the cornet and accordion—they all share equal space with Cooder's vintage acoustic and electric hybrids.
An American Artist
"Ry Cooder is not just a movie composer, guitarist, rock & roll singer, folk singer, blues historicist, or dilettante with exotic or obscure musical forms," observes Walter Hill. "He is also a great and profoundly American artist. In his work, there are recurring patterns, moods, and ideas that seem unique to him. And Ry's film music is, if anything, a form of indirection. He does not underscore, he surrounds; he does not pump up the climax, he creates an atmosphere for it, a context for the story, supplemental information, a depth of feeling rather than a burst of action."
A Musical Explorer
Cooder has been a lifelong disciple of the music of the American working man—black, white, and brown. A restless innovator with an insatiable musical curiosity, he has explored a new musical milieu with each new recording or concert tour.
At times, he has dabbled in avant-garde rock, at others, roots blues, then country-and-Western, even jazz. For those who could keep up with him, Cooder has shone a light on neglected genres of music with stunning results. But his unwillingness to be pigeonholed and stuck in any one style has somewhat alienated him from the music establishment.
Although younger musicians hold him in high esteem, and _Rolling Stone_has called him "the great mandolin blues revivalist," his fan base consists of a musical minority.
Early Influences and Career Milestones
Cooder got his first guitar at age 3. Eight years later, his father bought him a 10-year-old Martin and arranged for instruction. But to no avail—the young Ry was allergic to instruction and started teaching himself.
At 13, he was smitten by country-folk records, driving Cooder to seek out a guitarist trained in the Appalachian finger-picking style. This led him to California's then-folk center, the Ash Grove nightclub.
"Whenever a good player came to the Ash Grove, I was sitting in the front row watching," recalled Cooder in a biography for his label, Warner Records. "If someone like Reverend Gary Davis was in town, I'd hang out with him, go to his hotel, give him five dollars, and ask him to play as long as he could. I'd watch. After a month, I started to get the idea of how he made those sounds. The club would have hootenannies, where members of the audience would get up and play. And when I was about sixteen or so, I got thrown up there somehow...I was not only scared; I was in a state of panic. I was playing and sweating, and people were laughing and clapping."
Cooder became a regular performer at the club, and in 1963, he paired up with Jackie DeShannon in a folk-blues duo.
Success did not follow, however, and Ry widened his instrumental weaponry—learning banjo and the traditional slide guitar blues style. To achieve a bright, resonant tone when sliding, he wore a 3-inch bottleneck on his little finger.
His technique was honed in the time-honored way of all great players: hours of listening to albums of Mississippi Delta slide blues guitarists, any and all, in the attempt to catch the attack.
"Probably around 1964-65, Taj Mahal came to L.A.," said the guitarist. "He was pretty raw, and I was pretty raw. So we just got together and went down to the Teen Fair on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and just sat down by the Martin Guitars booth and played some Delta blues. Rough and tough."
Collaborations and Side Projects
With Taj Mahal, Cooder formed the first incarnation of THE RISING SONS, igniting Los Angeles' burgeoning club scene with Delta blues.
An album was planned for Columbia Records, but it was never completed. The SONS didn't last long enough to deter Cooder from taking session work with Gordon Lightfoot, Randy Newman, LITTLE FEAT, and a host of others he'd rather forget.
Next, there was an alliance with Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. This improbable pairing—the Zappa-esque Beefheart and the folk-bound Cooder—made sense only when considering Cooder's voracious appetite for new musical forms.
He proved an excellent foil on Beefheart's debut album, arranging two of the songs. After the Captain Beefheart Magic Band, he traveled to London with Jack Nitzsche and played on THE ROLLING STONES' _Let It Bleed_, although only his mandolin on "Love in Vain" made the final cut.
Informed sources hinted that Cooder was the first choice to replace both Mick Taylor and Brian Jones in the STONES. The connection was drawn with a dispute with Keith Richards over writing credits for the famous slide riff that became the song "Honky Tonk Women." Richards is said to have remarked that, "as far as he knew," he had taken the riff from Cooder.
