Ry Cooder - I, Flathead
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Ry CooderEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2008-06-24
Music Label: Nonesuch
Soundtracks:
- Drive Like I Never Been Hurt
- Waitin For Some Girl
- Johnny Cash
- Can I Smoke In Here?
- Steel Guitar Heaven
- Ridin With The Blues
- Pink-O Boogie
- Fernando Sez
- Spayed Kooley
- Filipino Dance Hall Girl
- My Dwarf Is Getting Tired
- Flathead One More Time
- 5000 Country Music Songs
- Little Trona Girl
Free Music Notes for I, Flathead
Free Music Review: A fine end piece to his trilogy.
Hit: 4 Stars
It takes courage to release a concept album, and something close to mad faith in one's art to release three in succession, as Ry Cooder has.
The concept album is usually an accident waiting to happen, so Ry Cooder is pushing his luck making three in a row.
"I, Flathead" is the concluding part of his 'California Trilogy', following 2005's "Chavez Ravine" and last year's "My Name Is Buddy", and it's a tribute to Cooder's talents that it's a match for either.
More than four decades since he emerged as an electric blues guitarist so highly rated that he turned down an offer to join the Rolling Stones when they looked for a replacement for Brian Jones in the Sixties, Cooder has ploughed a less commercial but hugely rewarding furrow as possibly America's most important rock musician.
A set of linked songs supposedly performed by one Kash Buk and his 'Klowns', a circle of 'petrolheads': drag racers and automotive junkies who wander the salt flats of California in the early 60s.
This third album in the guitarist's recent Californian collection is the most essential, with the former Captain Beefheart and Randy Newman sideman mining a rich southern Cafifornia seam.
Kash's story is nostalgic for a time when weird was commonplace. There are a couple of awkward narrative moments but they're soon forgotten in a project that affirms Cooder's acute sense of place and musical history, and his fiery ambition to make 'vernacular American music'.
The music is sharp and enjoyably coherent throughout. The playing is sublime, the drama captivating - check out "Can I Smoke In Here" for authentic atmosphere and "Pink O Boogie" for jangly In Here' for authentic atmosphere and 'Pink O Boogie' for jangly paranoia.
Pick of the album: "Waitin' For Some Girl", "Ridin' With the Blues", "Can I Smoke In Here" , "Pink-O Boogie", "5,000 Country Music Songs".
Chavez Ravine
My Name Is Buddy
I, Flathead Poster
Ry Cooder's I, Flathead, is the culmination of his ambitious and fascinating "California Trilogy," the last of three albums in which the singer and guitarist journeys through the real and imagined history of mid-20th century, multi-ethnic California, sampling the sounds of its barrios and byways, its nightclubs and honkytonks. He encounters the disenfranchised, the hopeful, the cheerfully strange and seriously nefarious, along with the occasional alien who races around in a souped-up flying saucer on the desert salt flats. On previous installments, Ch?vez Ravine (2005) and My Name Is Buddy (2007), learning the facts and stories behind Cooder's songs made them even more compelling, whether it was the not-quite vanished legacy of the Ch?vez Ravine neighborhood of Los Angeles, bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium, or the allegorical, Bound For Glory-like adventures of Buddy Red Cat in a time of commie-baiting and union-busting. This time, however, no research is necessary: Cooder, a California native, has written a remarkable 104-page novella to accompany this disc, a surreally funny page-turner of a tale about itinerant musician Kash Buk and the various characters he meets in his travels out west, all of whom get to narrate parts of the story. If you mixed John Steinbeck with, say, Thomas Pynchon, and threw in a bit of Popular Mechanics for good measure, it might read something like the I, Flathead narrative.Ry Cooder's I, Flathead is the culmination of his ambitious and fascinating "California Trilogy," the last of three albums in which the singer and guitarist journeys through the real and imagined history of mid-20th century, multi-ethnic California, sampling the sounds of its barrios and byways, its nightclubs and honkytonks. The CD functions beautifully on its own, but also serves as a sort of soundtrack to the book equivalent. Abetting Cooder in his story telling is a veritable repertory of players who've appeared in the previous discs in the trilogy, among them drummer Joachim Cooder, Jim Keltner, Flaco Jimenez, Jon Hassell, Juliette Commagere and Gil Bernal.
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