His Name Is Flathead: A Rap With Ry Cooder
With I, Flathead Ry Cooder completes the trilogy of records about 1950s/60s California that began with Chavez Ravine and continued with My Name Is Buddy. Complete with his own superb 53-page novella, the album explores a lost world of pedal steel guitarists and salt-flat drag racers. It also sounds fabulous. I talked to the wry Cooder about the album, its hero Kash Buk, and the vanished land it celebrates. -- Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director
Sometimes what is most exotic is what you unearth in your own back yard --or at least in your own recent cultural past. For Ry Cooder, a man who's done so much to put "world music" on the rock'n'roll map, the rediscovery of America(na) on Chavez Ravine, My Name Is Buddy and now I, Flathead has come as a kind of third wind in a career characterized by fascination with pre-rock pop culture.
If Chavez shone a blinding light on the neglected music of Mex-Angeles and My Name Is Buddy celebrated the political radicalization of folk and bluegrass, then I, Flathead grapples with the blue-collar white California of the '50s and '60s by imagining archetypal naugahyde redneck Kash Buk and his bar band the Klowns. "Hot rod cars and country songs," Cooder notes of the album's milieu in his press release; "honky tonks and dirty blondes…" There's plenty of all those here.
Cooder: "I don't know what got me doing this. The Chavez Ravine thing just came one day after looking at those photographs from 1949. After all those years of trying to imagine the East LA sound and trying to sneak up on it, it finally occurred to me to go to that place and do it already.
"The song 'Johnny Cash' is completely real and true. I memorized all those songs immediately, and I couldn't get rid of them once they were in my head: 'Hey Porter,' 'I Walk The Line,' 'Folsom Prison Blues.' I couldn't concentrate on anything in school because those songs were in my head. The teacher in the fourth grade would come around and say, 'What are you staring out the window for? You're supposed to be on Page 10 with everybody else.' And when I listened to the hillbilly radio stations I'd ask my dad, 'Who is this and what are they talking about?' And I wondered about Vernon and Downey and Norwalk and Southgate, because we lived in Santa Monica. And my dad would say, 'Oh you don't wanna go there, that's just a bunch of rednecks.' He'd say, 'Well, don't go up on Ocean Park Boulevard with all the bars where the aircraft workers go.' And of course I went up there and stood in the doorway and listened to the jukebox and it was Ray Price and Lefty Frizzell and I thought, 'That's the sh*t, that's the good stuff.'
"I read an interview with the great country songwriter Harlan Howard where he said he'd written 5000 songs. But suppose you'd written 5000 country songs that nobody wanted to hear… which is so often the case in the western part of the United States, where the homesteading didn't work and the little farm didn't work and the idea that you were going to be great didn't work and you ended up in a factory or a bad office job or not even working… like now, where we have people losing their homes. So this poor guy says, I tried to do this, and the only person who backed him up was his wife and now she's gone. "Take what you want and I'm outta here…" This is very sad but it's very typical."
Hear an audio interview with Ry Cooder, and read more interviews and review with him, at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.
