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Ry, Flathead: RY COODER (Unabridged)
SS: Well, I, Flathead is real writing — real, imaginative fiction. The end is especially moving, where Shakey’s daughter goes up in the mountains and listens for a sign from her father. “I listened very carefully” — and wham, it ends.
RC: Thank you. That’s a real place, by the way. It's Surprise Canyon, just over the mountains from Death Valley. Me and Suzy used to take our son Joachim out to that area all the time. It’s beautiful.
SS: I also liked the trick of having a real album’s songs played by a fictional band, Kash Buk and the Klowns. When you realize it’s happening, you do a mental double-take. And it’s what ties the book and the album together into one.
RC: Yeah, and the record company took one look and said, “What the hell do we do with this? We’re in the CD business.” I said, “I am, too. But let’s just try this, it’s something new. Come on, you’re not selling any records anyway.”
SS: Do you have any ambition to publish a book by itself?
RC: Yes, in another year maybe, when I get done with these LA stories I’m working on. I think they’ll make a good book.
SS: What are they about?
RC: Just common people in LA. A friend of mine is a professional garage sale ferret, in a very deep way. I found him on the Internet. He calls himself Mr. Jalopy. I went to check him out and we got to be friends. He came across the LA city directory for 1931. It’s huge, the size of a great big bible. It lists every — or just about every — human being in LA at that time: their name, their wife’s name, their husband’s name, whether they’re a widow or widower, their job — pants-presser, lawyer, laborer. And their address, of course. And the classified, according to church groups, fraternal organizations — including the Klan — and hotels, lunchrooms, music teachers. So he gave me this thing and I thought, “I see. This is my assignment. I’m going to write about these people. I’m going to make up characters and they’re all going be these underclass, oddball folks who live downtown in 1940 or 1950 and do these jobs nobody knows or cares about, but funny things happen to them.”
SS: How do you know so much about blue-collar towns in the LA area, like Vernon and Downey? It isn’t like you’ve hung out there much.
RC: Well, not so much hanging out as reading and thinking about them. I have maps going back to the Thirties — big ones, city maps and trolley car maps. And I go to the downtown library a lot. There’s a photo archive and they’ve got a million images. I got to be friends with the woman who runs it. We hang out and I’ll say, “Let me look at industrial sites.” “Oh, they’re over here in this bin,” she'll say. "Let me look at trolley cars. Oh my God! They’ve got a lot of books with trolleys in them.”
SS: You clearly love research.
RC: That’s the best part, figuring out how to find something. You get an idea and it starts you off on your search.
SS: You’ve always been a researcher as a musician.
RC: It’s just fun to look for things. You hear something you like and someone says, “If you like that, go see this cat.” You think, “Oh! Okay!” And off you go.
SS: But most musicians just listen to the record. You actually seek these people out, like Gabby Pahinui in Hawaii.
RC: You need to experience these guys in the flesh. You need to sit with them, absorb what they do as directly as possible, not secondhand through records, films, books. So you look for an entry and go through it. But you have to have an idea. You can’t just go knock on Lalo Guerrero’s door and say, “Here I am!”
SS: Is it ever awkward? Say, if you meet these people without a plan?
RC: That’s what I’m saying. You learn you’d better have a goddamn plan. Chávez Ravine worked perfectly. I went to Lalo Guerrero and he understood. Don Tosti, Little Willie G. — they saw it was an interesting idea we could all contribute to and enjoy working on. After the whole experience — the research part, getting to know folks and learning things — it was always such a letdown, having the record come out and there it is. I had to learn not to be too stricken by the thing when it was done and you held it and felt bad. [Laughs]
SS: What about the novella do you feel best about?
RC: I don’t quite know, except it feels real to me. In my mind, these people live, I see them clearly.
SS: And the album?
RC: I couldn’t have pulled off a tune like “5,000 Country Music Songs” 10 years ago. It’s what I learned in Chávez Ravine: It’s not you singing, it’s the character. Here’s the thing: If you drive through the American West, you’re going to see a lot of abandoned farmhouses and trailers. What happened? Where’d everybody go? Here, a guy just says one day, “Nothing worked. I tried to write these songs and sell them, but it turned out all I was doing was playing for my wife. Now she’s gone. Mister, take what you want,” and he leaves his old house trailer and walks off down the road. Now that’s a common story, a very common and American story.
SS: Aside from the fact that they all take place in California, what connects the three parts of the trilogy?
RC: In my mind, they’re all about a place that’s gone. I’m 61 this year. The California I knew growing up is gone. What the trilogy is about is a time and a place that are gone, that’s all.
SS: A lot of the songs on your early albums — “How Can You Keep on Moving,” “Do Re Mi,” “Vigilante Man” — are labor songs. But My Name Is Buddy, the second album in the trilogy, marks the first time a whole album of yours is political.
RC: Yeah, that’s right.
SS: Was it because you’re older and don’t give a damn anymore about pleasing the label?
RC: No, I got mad. A friend of mine sent me a photograph of Leadbelly with the head of a cat Photoshopped over Leadbelly’s head. My friend wrote, “You’ll know what to do with this.” I sure didn’t. It was a death notice, the cat had died. His name was Buddy, it said. I looked at his face and thought, “Well, wow. Why is that cat so sad?"
There was a phone number and I called it. It was up in Vancouver, and it was a record store called Red Cat Records. I told them who I was and said, “I’m real curious about Buddy. Where’d he come from? Tell me where you got him.” “We found him sleeping in the alley in a suitcase,” they said. I asked what colore he was. “He was red.” You could’ve guessed. “Look online,” they said, and there were pictures of Buddy and he was an orange color. The image stuck with me, and over time all these things jelled in my mind. Buddy’s a stray, a hobo. He’s red, Buddy the Red — he’s a labor man. He’s a Wobbly. He’s sad because he wants unity and solidarity. And I’m sad because I want unity and solidarity, and because nobody remembers the great story of the working man and the labor unions. And because of this whole goddamned, fucked-up scene we call a country right now. I’m so mad, and I’m so pissed off. It’s terrible to wake up and feel like that every day.
SS: At least you’re a musician; you can channel that anger by shaping something.
RC: That’s right. I sat there and thought, “This is how I’m going to do this.” And then I got going and I saw, “This is going to be good. This’ll be a great record to make.”