Ry Cooder – Paradise and Lunch
My first awareness of Ry Cooder was when he wrote the score for “The Long Riders”, a 1980 western that looked cool from the television commercials but not cool enough to spend my hard-earned 16-year-old dollars on at the local multiplex. It had a great marketing gimmick, casting four sets of acting brothers (the Keaches, Carradines, Quaids and Guests) as four sets of bank robbing, murdering outlaw brothers (the Jameses, Youngers, Millers and Fords). The marketing also made note of Cooder, which I thought odd because I had never heard of him.
We can add Ry Cooder to the long list of very successful artists who I managed to get through life without listening to until starting this project. I was clearly a lot less adventurous in the past, because the list of styles he’s associated with on his AllMusic profile is a feverish wet dream of possibility: country, roots and blues rock, contemporary, modern electric and slide guitar blues, Cuban pop and traditions, worldbeat and – my favourite because I had never heard of it – ethnic fusion. (I was sort of disappointed when I saw what it was.)
This is another 1974 album that is either mostly or entirely covers (see here, here and here) or live versions of earlier studio work (more of those are coming). What was happening that made the year so bereft of great original music that the good voters of the Pazz and Jop couldn’t find 20 collections to get behind? The singles chart doesn’t offer any help: sure, there was dreck like “Seasons in the Sun”, “(You’re) Having My Baby” and “Billy Don’t Be A Hero”, but any year that includes chart toppers from the likes of Stevie Wonder, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and The Spinners is not doing too badly for itself. Based on this list from Acclaimed Music, I believe they just weren’t paying attention.
There are several songs about relationships and infidelity, but that’s all they have in common. The easy rolling “Tattler” may be the most pop-ish song on the record, with the sunny gleam of a fatigued Pablo Cruise. It’s followed by the sluggish Southern rock feel of “Married Man’s A Fool”, then later we get the peppy ‘50s-feeling rhythm and blues of “If Walls Could Talk”. And though the subject matter is far from happy, he never wallows in it: Cooder is having too much fun playing these songs that he clearly loves to let them drag him down.
Other than “Mexican Divorce”, which is a disjointed mix of styles that doesn’t have the same energy as the rest of the record, and the record’s closer, “Ditty Wah Ditty”, which has some delightful jazz piano but doesn’t really come together as a song, I love everything here. It’s one of the more summertime records I’ve ever listened to: if you can’t see yourself sitting around a campfire with a beer in your hand after a blistering hot day while Ry soothes your soul, then we aren’t listening to the same record. The entire album feels like a mosaic of cultures and styles. “Tamp Em Up Solid” has the gently chugging rhythm of a train ride, while “Jesus on the Mainline” is a thumping old spiritual. But my favourite track by far is the jittery rhythm of “It’s All Over Now”, with its cribbed reggae style beat, ragtime piano and sing-a-long chorus.
I finally sat down and watched “The Long Riders” a little while ago (you can find it on the (lightly) ad-supported free streaming service Tubi). It had its moments – a scene at a funeral where almost all the men carried rifles struck me in particular – but the script is cliche ridden, the plot takes considerable liberties with the true story of the protagonists’ misbehaviours, and the violence is so over the top that it becomes a distraction. Cooder’s score, though, perfectly captures the era when the post-Civil War south was evolving into the stereotypical Wild West. You can get a small taste of it from this trailer: you will also see near the end that Cooder’s name was listed before the director, writers and producers. It feels like something that should be playing under sepia tone images from a Ken Burns documentary. That he accomplished this with some instruments that were definitely not found in Missouri in the 1870s – the baglama and tanpura among them – is all the more a tribute to his creativity, and a good reason why the music has aged better than the images that it accompanied.
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