RY COODER IN FOUR EPISODES, 1985-2023 Episode 1
"Ry, you have turned me into John Ford!"
These profiles and interviews, written and conducted across almost four decades, will add up to a serialized biography of one of America’s great, and still undervalued, musical resources. Ry Cooder, now 76, has recorded more than 50 albums: solo projects, collaborations, and movie scores, and contributed to countless others. He has won seven Grammys (not that that would mean much to someone as dismissive of industry encomia as Cooder). This is the story, told largely in his own words, of Cooder’s entire life, going all the way back to his single-digit years and the terrible early-childhood accident that, paradoxically, was the catalyst for his splendid career.
The Cooder series has four episodes. Episode 3, which contains multitudes, is broken into Parts 1 and 2. They are posted separately, featuring the mini-episodes”I Foung the Answer: It was in Buena Vista” and “Leftward Ho!”
Episode 1. Am I Getting Too Hollywood?
(Originally published in Rolling Stone, October 10, 1985 as “Ry Cooder’s Crossroads Blues,”reprinted here in slightly different form, with lots of newly added material, including introductions, commentaries, and footnotes packed with educational arcana).
When I first encountered Ry Cooder, in July 1985, I was an eager young writer who had finally found an outlet, Rolling Stone, for a profile of one of my musical heroes. Cooder, then 38, was several years into the unanticipated but highly productive second phase of his career. An icon among roots-music cognoscenti, Cooder was deeply disillusioned—embittered isn’t too strong a word—with the record business when the opportunity arose to write a movie soundtrack. He ended up writing 15, and parts of two others. Any distaste Cooder may have had for his new milieu he kept to himself. After spending more than a dozen years making superb albums that failed to pay the bills, scoring movies was, as Cooder put it, preserving the slightest of distances between himself and his new employers, “a good job of work.”
Ry Cooder, second from left, with Frank Frost & band on the set of the movie Crossroads. Frost sits front and center. Cooder’s longtime backup singer Terry Evans is second from right.
"WHERE IS RACCOON AT?” Frank Frost wants to know. Clutching his harmonica, Frost is queasily eyeing the manic bustle of the movie set, extras scurrying into into place on the pine-wood dance floor. Time to shoot the big juke-joint scene in Crossroads, Walter Hill's new movie about an aspiring blues musician and his elderly mentor. Played by Ralph Macchio, The Karate Kid's diminutive star, and the veteran Joe Seneca, the two make a dusty odyssey from New York to the Mississippi Delta, the boy in search of guitar mastery and the weary old man, who once made a pact with the Devil, à la blues legend Robert Johnson, in search of his lost soul.1
Mike booms are lowered, cameras readied. A half- dozen voices bark, "Quiet!"
"Where's that Raccoon?"
Frank Frost is a stranger here, in need of a translator, a cultural liaison, someone to steer him through this baffling jargon of takes and cuts and wraps. Frost, 49, is a member of a near-extinct species. He is a deep-Southern black bluesman, a barrelhouse shouter from Greenville, Mississippi ("There's a few other bluesmen around Greenville, but they just country folk; myself, I'm a recording artist"). Frost and his band were tracked down and whisked from cotton country to Stage Twelve, Columbia Studios, Burbank, California.
Frost finally spots the high-strung, handsome man he calls Raccoon. If Ry Cooder—master guitarist, sought-after soundtrack composer, and no doubt the only resident of Santa Monica to own a Frank Frost album—looks a little haggard, it’s because Cooder’s up to his neck in his fifth and most demanding soundtrack in 18 months: rushing around the set, checking with soundmen, huddling with Walter Hill, wondering in his emphatic, grainy voice where the hell he's left his sunglasses. He hurries over to Frost and the two confer, an old fighter — scarred, a little dazed—and his cornerman.
"Quiet!"—one last bellow. Macchio and Seneca take the stage. The cameras roll; the taped music spills out. Ruckety, infectious riffing, Ry Cooder music, and the extras start to stomp and sway. Ralph Macchio looks out of place, cutting little bunny hops amidst the grizzled black men; Joe Seneca makes a cute old cinematic blues codger in a chewed-up felt hat. But Frank Frost is achingly authentic, bony arms dangling, his paisley shirt sweat-soaked.
Abruptly, Ry Cooder lowers his finger at Frost, who swings his harp skyward. He's hit his cue perfectly, and Cooder smiles for the first time today. Watching, listening, he suddenly looks as innocent as a child.
RY COODER paces Walter Hill's empty office at Columbia Studios. Next door, Crossroads executive producer Tim Zinnemann chats with guests. The air conditioner purrs. "Am I getting too Hollywood?" Cooder wonders aloud. “Tim Zinnemann's always joking that I am, that I'd better watch out." Tall, slim and tanned, Cooder wears a sapphire-blue tank top, beige shorts and nubbly-insoled health sandals. Visually, he fits right in, but he lacks the true looking-past-you Hollywood conversational manner. This is a complicated man: shy, cantankerous, awkwardly decent, a staccato unleasher of intricate thoughts. In bed by nine. Not Hollywood.
"No, I'm just an involved outsider here,” Cooder says. “I provide a kind of service. Similar to the one I used to provide the record industry, except the record business wasn't as receptive."
From 1970 to 1982, Ry Cooder released ten critically lauded albums, at once stylish and earthy: Into the Purple Valley, Paradise and Lunch, Bop Till You Drop.... An ardent cult formed as Ry shaped a worldful of sources—country blues, urban blues, Mexican-American border music (norteño), Hawaiian slack-key guitar, and other genres— into his own highly melodic pop style. Yet except for Bop, which sold 300,000-plus copies, Cooder never really dented the market. Broke, disgusted, and tired, he stopped making albums and undertook a surprising new career, suddenly "rock's resident soundtrack wizard," as the Los Angeles Times puts it. And finally solvent.
Cooder’s rookie score, for Hill's 1980 Western The Long Riders, resonates with a burnished, old-fashioned lyricism. It won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award. A yet more memorable soundtrack, with contributions from Freddy Fender, Domingo “Sam the Sham” Samudio, and others, came in 1982 for the Jack Nicholson drama The Border.
By 1984, Cooder was a busy, busy man. That year, dropping Hill's Streets of Fire for four days to start Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, he wound up juggling both jobs with Louis Malle's Alamo Bay (Malle adored Cooder’s score, especially the leisurely unrolling theme, which evokes both the Far East and the American West. “Ry,” exclaimed Malle, “you have turned me into John Ford!”).
“Keeping that kind of schedule is how you build a reputation,” Cooder says, “but you've got to watch your health. I was really nervous, not sleeping." Crossroads, his eighth soundtrack, is an especially taxing job, requiring music both on- and offstage; meanwhile, Paramount impatiently awaits Cooder’s attention to its thriller Blue City, based on the Ross Macdonald novel.
"With someone like Ry," says Walter Hill, “you don't ask how, you just admire. Ry is a great artist, nothing less. [Elsewhere, Hill called Cooder “the most talented person I’ve ever known.”] Face it, ninety-six percent of all movie scores are corny beyond belief. Ry has always had this ability to be touching, but with sophistication."
Hill, a roundish sort of mini-Falstaff in a dirty Lacoste shirt, thinks back to 1979. "Ry Cooder walked into my office wearing Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt and a big green pith helmet. I'd heard his Jazz LP. It had a lovely country-marching-band, early-jazz flavor. Hmm, I thought, very interesting for The Long Riders. So Ry came in, immediately told me he hated the album, wondered how I could possibly like it, and said he'd be glad to work with me. Of course, the studio said, 'Can't use him, he's got no credits.' That just made me more determined. So he got hired — I don't know if he knew this — on a kind of trial basis. And from the start he knew exactly what he was doing."
How does Ry Cooder score a picture? He normally starts by staring at a rough cut for up to two weeks, waiting for "a feeling, a way in, a way to trick myself into finding any kind of handle I can get on the damn thing." At length, marvelously enough, he begins to hear an actual chord: "The movie starts hovering in a tonality. Paris, Texas was in E-flat. You get the movie's key from the wind. The ocean. Air noise. Easy if it's been shot in the countryside. City pictures, it's hard to pin the key down. I have to throw out that whole methodology and look for other hints. What I was trying for in Paris, Texas was simple: the musical equivalent of Harry Dean Stanton's walk, that lonely walk.
"A soundtrack is glue. Music gives the audience subliminal cues. It can anticipate something they're about to see or stir a memory of something they saw an hour before. It's a continuity beneath the linear continuity of the film. When a picture’s got room for that kind of subtext, then you're talking about something I can work with.
"Doing these movies, I've learned so much I never knew before. It's hit and miss, hunt and peck. Hollywood's been a giant hands-on nursery school for me. I figure now I know something. I never used to think I knew any goddamn thing at all."
AT THE center of Ry Cooder's life is what he refers to, typically half-sardonically, as "‘My Quest.’ Being led into strange, new musical territory." It's this compulsive inquisitiveness that has often gotten Cooder labeled as a kind of rock & roll ethnographer, "some kind of horrible Egyptologist, a hopeless antiquarian. Whereas that's not the point at all. I've just been looking for what I can use, absorb into my own playing. With me, practicality is everything. I've got to know how to do something."
Growing up middle-class in Santa Monica, the only place he has ever lived, Cooder showed musical ability early. By his mid-teens he was thriving on the L.A. folk and blues scene, a multi-instrumental whiz: guitarist, mandolinist, banjoist. As a precocious L.A. sessionman (too young for a driver's license, he had to be driven to his first record dates), Ry played for Paul Revere and the Raiders, Arlo Guthrie, Randy Newman, the Rolling Stones: everyone.
“I didn’t really pursue session playing,” he says. “If I’d wanted to, I’d have worked it, hustled it. But I didn’t really want to do that kind of work.” Cooder's hunger for the novel, the unlikely, began to propel him around the world. He played with bluesmen, jazzmen (including the great pianist Earl Hines), Asians, Cajuns, and the norteño accordion virtuoso Flaco Jimenez. And with the two guitarists, both now dead, whom he considers "my musical beacons": Bahamian Joseph Spence and Hawaiian Gabby Pahinui. "They had what I call high-Zen understanding," he says. "If you hear the sound they make, you know right away it's the Sound. It's always rrright there, in everything they play. Those are the great masters, the people that are cool to know about. Sometimes I think I'm headed in that direction, sometimes not. One encouraging thing about these guys is that as they got older, they got better."
But the bottom line was forever intruding. Cooder worried nonstop about feeding his family: his wife, photographer/artist Susan Titelman, and their son, Joachim, now seven.
"You look up and you're going to be fifty with nothing to show. I never made any money selling records, and all I did on the road was go broke. If I started giving you horror stories about the road — wow, it's too pathetic, too ugly." Canceled credit cards. Frantic calls from Titelman that the phone company was about to cut their service off. "Readers think the road's great — you get rich, you have a big time. Fact of the business is, you get old on the road, you get tired, you get disgusted, you die."
SANDALS FLAPPING, Cooder turns briskly down New York Street, a deserted block of 19th-century brownstone facades on the Columbia lot. Lunchtime over, he's on his way back to Stage Twelve.
With music so important in Crossroads, and with so much of it on camera — gospel singers, juke-joint rave-ups, even a re-creation of Robert Johnson singing “Crossroads Blues”— Cooder has been putting in long hours. He's just delivered to a delighted Tim Zinnemann a brand-new tape, fruit of a hard night's labor. It's the movie's climax: a guitar battle, with Macchio's character dueling Satan's hottest picker in a blaze of high-volume pyrotechnics. The actual players are Cooder, R&B veteran Shuggie Otis and the well-known shredder Steve Vai.
More fun for Ry than guitar face-offs has been working with Frank Frost. Harp player Juke Logan, Cooder's Crossroads assistant, had successfully snooped around Greenville for Frost. Cooder immediately flew Frost and his band, John Price and the Wonders, to Hollywood to cut a fistful of tunes.
The Mississippians were surprised and delighted by Cooder’s knowing touch. "I told him I never heard a white man could fit in so quick and so good with my blues," says Frost. "He just look at me and say, 'You're a musician, I'm a musician,' and that was that." Adding to his roles as the Frost band's producer and on-set prompter, Cooder has done time as equipment hauler, mother hen for bluesmen in a strange land, and even impresario, booking Frost and company into Al's Bar, a trendy L.A. joint, for a farewell gig, with special guest Ry Cooder.
Back at hangarlike Stage Twelve, it’s one more juke-joint take and maybe it's a wrap. Frank Frost saunters up, pats Ry on the back.
“Raccoon, we on the downside now. Pretty soon it's a day."
Frost smiles grimly. "Man, the uncle took some kinda bite last week. Nine hundred out of two thousand."
Cooder shudders in empathy, hunkered next to Frost. Someone cheerfully points out that Frost will get some rebates come spring. Frost waves a hand: "Naw, man, April a long time off. I got six kids, eight mouths to feed — I need it now."
"Need it now," Ry tersely agrees, looking straight ahead.
"THE QUESTION," Cooder says, "is how to make a living playing goddamn music. And for the first time in my whole life, in twenty-odd years of making music, I'm able to make money, a living. And I can go home at the end of the day. I have a life. I don't call the road a life."
What about making albums? "I'll make another. I'm under contract to Warners for a record a year. It's been three years now; they've been nice about it." But he's not eager to painstakingly craft another Ry Cooder gem only to see it fall between the commercial slats. "A record's a marketplace item, it's a piece of business, it's For Sale. Marketing is such a factor. You have to have all that in place before you move. They've marketed Los Lobos to the point where they're on the charts. To me, that's a modern miracle. But it takes great care, thought and attention to detail.
"The point is, I don't know what to do. Manfred Eicher of [the jazz and audiophile label] ECM called me, said he'd like me to do, what, acoustic guitar with string quartet. Tells me everyone wants to hear solo guitar. Not me. Horrible stuff. New Age, Windham Hill music."
Besides, Cooder argues, his soundtrack albums are personal statements no less than his Ry Cooder records. "Believe me, it's all Ry Cooder music. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that the movie music is much closer to being the music Ry Cooder likes to make than the Ry Cooder music you think you're listening to on Ry Cooder records, and that's a fact. It's music freed from the constraints of the four-minute song, from the horrors of 'How do we sell it?', from the demands of the marketplace. And I just like it better. The guitar playing I've done on the scores is galactically improved; the music is universally better than any of the stuff on my records. People don't want to believe that. They say, 'Naw, you want to make a record, one of those wonderful records.' I am making those wonderful records, it's just that the jar's changed.
"I did a Levi's ad. 'Travis, you're a year too late' — that one. Now that made me very happy. Thirty seconds of utter perfection. I don't play my old records for anyone. My wife's always saying, 'Oh, let's give one of your records to so-and-so'; I say, 'Don't give that junk out.' But I'll play that ad for anybody.
"Everyone talks about personal vision. Personal vision is in the notes. The little notes, the sounds. The notes are the notes are the notes. If you want to call it a Ry Cooder album, call it that. You can call it a film score, you can call it a Levi's commercial, you can call it Ray, you can call it Zimmy. Call it, in the words of Sonny Boy Williamson, your mama — I don't care!"
So, as he sees it, Ry Cooder's quest continues in the midst of Hollywood mammon. "As long as I can do jobs for people like Hill, who want to corral something real, special, like Frank Frost, then I get to have my charlies. I get to see these guys, play with 'em, learn from 'em.
"If I'd never called Frank Frost, I'd never have seen his drummer's incredible drum set. John Price never tunes his drums. They've collapsed into de-tune, into this low sound that's so... wonderful. That drum set is my personal payoff for doing Crossroads. I might never have found that sound. That alone, hearing those drums, gave me something like the feeling of ‘Maybe now I could make an album and not hate it.’"
AL'S BAR, Fourth of July. If Ry Cooder dislikes the spotlight, he's in it now, literally, frowning as he squats onstage untangling cables. When the crowd is let in, it floods the room to the walls and right up the walls onto stools, chairs, shoulders. It's not often that L.A. gets to glimpse a gutbucket Mississippi blues band. More to the point, how often do Cooder’s fans get to see him play live anymore?
The Hollywood folks are here, drinks in hand. Resplendent in Stetson hat and crimson shirt, Frank Frost blasts his harp. He jumps offstage and jumps back on with a banged-up Stratocaster, ripping into a solo with his teeth (down Frost’s neck runs a long scar, the work of a snapped string from an earlier such episode.) The Hollywood people are visibly surprised at Cooder, the nervous, efficient functionary from the movie set but with a guitar in hand, scratching dirty rhythms. Squeezing out a luminous slide-guitar solo, grimacing in absorption while Frank Frost shouts, "Play it, Raccoon!"
The night opens up. Frost's guitarist, Otis Taylor, starts jumping up and down, hollering incoherently. Exhausted, Frost staggers offstage again, perhaps for good. Down front, a couple undulates in an unending, X-rated kiss. Embarrassed bystanders turn aside, but they don't understand; what Frank Frost has conjured here in chic loft-district L.A. is a genuine all-hell-busted-loose, outskirts-of-town Delta roadhouse.
Cooder has finally relaxed, smiling at his wife, at the band, even out at the house. He hits another solo, and, face upturned and eyes shut, plays on, beautifully, and on. It’s way past his bedtime. Difficult man in health sandals; seeker on the path to high-Zen knowledge. Busy nine-to-five professional, back in the joints for a night.
Obscure R&B fact #254: If anyone would, Ry Cooder would have known that not only was Joe Seneca a songwriter as well as an actor, but that Seneca co-wrote “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” a 1961 hit for Ike and Tina Turner. In Ike and Tina’s hands, it’s a semi-novelty song, a piece of hokum. Cooder recasts it, typically. His version, as heartbreaking as it is restrained, is one of Cooder’s classic performances.
Great stuff, great insights. Looking forward to reading all the parts. Ted Gioia sent me your way, and I'm glad he did.
Love it!