Ry Cooder

I, Flathead

Nonesuch Records

By Steve Hochman

That Ry Cooder sure has a lot of nerve. First he wanted you to learn about obscure blues music way back in the ‘70s when few people cared about such things. Then he wanted you to tour the world with him, musically speaking, from Okinawa to Texas to Mali to Cuba. And he wanted you to go see movies that he'd written scores for. Then he wanted you to learn about Los Angeles history with his Chavez Ravine album, concerning the community displaced to make way for Dodger Stadium.

But now he's really done it: He wants you to read.

All right, you don't have to read the hardback novella in which his new album is packaged. The songs stand on their own. But heck, it's not exactly "Anna Karenina," coming in at a tidy 97 pages. And the book's series of related fantasias of life in the California desert flats centering on speed jockey (the automotive kind, not pharmaceutical) and musician Kash Buk provide colorful elaborations on the musical portrayals on the disc. A supercharged alien, a winsome high school girl, guys with names like Screech Owl and Hung Far Low, Cold War paranoia, Johnny Cash line-walkin' . . . what else do you need? And if Cooder the writer doesn't quite have the ear for subcultural language and story development that Ken Nunn has flashed while exploring the surf and desert worlds in his electrifying novels, he nonetheless shows a great flair for storytelling.

The set is presented as the conclusion of a trilogy that started with Chavez Ravine and continued with 2007's My Name is Buddy (sort of in the spirit of Don Marquis' "Archie and Mahitabel" tales). And while on the surface it's hard to see the connection between an obliterated community, a vagabond cat and some desert denizens, it's all about a common time (the ‘50s) and place (SoCal) in which combinations of media, technology, consumerism and westward migrations brought on all sorts of cultural, economic and psychological dislocations and displacements, a sense of both electricity and dread. (Kind of the same themes Cooder dealt in via Blind Alfred Reed and Joseph Spense songs on his early ‘70s albums.) In this world, it's the alien who seems most suited to the circumstances.

Musically, I, Flathead is the most focused of the three, which isn't to say it's by any means homogenized. There are border sounds (Mariachi Los Camperos guesting on the opening "Drive Like I Never Been Hurt," Tex-Mex great Flaco Jimenez's accordion on "Filipino Dance Hall Girl"), oddball jazz (atmospheric trumpeter Jon Hassell on "Flathead One More Time") and "Twins Peak" surreal-pop (Juliette Commagere's specterish, and Spectorish, vocals on "Little Trona Girl," accented by Cooder's almost subsonic twang guitar) among other sounds. And steel guitar country provides something of a thread motif along the way, most specifically in the swingin' Spade Cooley tribute "Steel Guitar Heaven," which sets up the super-swingin' dog sketch - no kidding -- "Spayed Kooley."

Much of the time, though, it's just Cooder's hyper-syncopated picking and slippery slide with a drummer (a rotating cast of his son Joachim, uber-ace Jim Keltner and Martin Pradler) and bassist Rene Camacho - streamlined just like one of those salt-flats rocket cars. It allows him to shift gears (sorry, couldn't help it) from the dim-lit atmosphere of "Can I Smoke in Here?" to "Steel Guitar Heaven" to a "Ridin' with the Blues" drag race. Here and there he affects a character voice or hick accent, maybe at times overplaying things. But for the most part he's a narrator just singing, which is when he's at his best - his natural voice starts with a character-actor quality as it is, arguably getting the best results with the least effort, as on "5000 Country Music Songs," almost echoing the wistful nostalgia of the folk-pop classic "The Green, Green Grass of Home." The songs/stories are strong enough, involving enough that they never need forcing, never need over-selling.

It's tempting to think of this as autobiographical, with references littered throughout of hearing Johnny Cash on the radio as a kid, of wandering into unfamiliar situations, of racing and playing. But if so, who is Cooder? Is he Kash Buk? The little space traveler Shakey? The person picking up the school girl? The guy touting Spade Cooley? Spayed Kooley? More likely he's all of them.

And the most intriguing thought is that the time period this trilogy covers only takes in Cooder's youth. Given his later wanderings, from teen sideman with Captain Beefheart and the Stones to vintage blues stylist to global explorer to captaining the Buena Vista Social Club in Havana, he's got plenty more wild stories (fact and fiction) for us to hear. Or read.