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Ry, Flathead: RY COODER (Unabridged)
SS: Do you ever give Joachim advice?
RC: Well, I always taught him what I knew. I always tried to show him as things came up, “Here’s what I think you’re looking at,” or “here’s what I think you should know.” Now he knows everything I know, plus what he knows. He’s very smart. He can size someone up in two seconds.
SS: You don’t worry about him getting depressed if he doesn’t make a platinum record?
RC: No, there’s no problem with him and his own self vis a vis the world. He’s real centered. His girl Juliette and her sister Carla used to say, “I want to be rich, I want to be famous, and I want it now.” I’d say, “No, because that can be taken away when you least expect it. You want to think in terms of what’s inside. Develop that, because they can’t take it away.”
SS: I heard your mother grew up as a sharecropper.
RC: Her parents were sharecroppers, poor Italians who came to New York and then migrated out here. She didn’t have shoes, and she didn’t speak English until she was around eight years old. They flooded out every year. It was very poor. My father’s family came out from the Cincinnati area, although he was born in Canada. His father was a medical student up there in McGill University. They came out here because it’s where people were coming in the Twenties.
SS: What kind of work did your father do?
RC: He didn’t have a specific profession. He never really got himself together. He was a guy who couldn’t get along with people, so he didn’t do very well as an employee. When I was little, these chain department stores would say to him, “We’ve got a shortage up in the Spokane branch, go find out why.” So he’d go discover that a saleswoman was stealing blouses. He was a troubleshooter. He did a lot of things having to do with that kind of work. I can’t even tell you, it was sort of random.
SS: So you weren’t affluent.
RC: Are you kidding? For a while we didn’t have a car. My father was out of work so much. My mother worked for a while as a nursery school teacher, then for a doctor at UCLA. But no, we didn’t have any money.
SS: I always thought you grew up very middle-class.
RC: Ha! We were never starving, it wasn’t like we were working poor, but we were always one jump away. They just didn’t ever do very well. They didn’t have education and just couldn’t make it work.
SS: Do you think that losing your eye had to do with your becoming a musician? [In an accident that occurred when he was three years old, Cooder poked out his left eye with a knife.]
RC: Oh, of course. It’s what did it. You talk about fate saying, “I think this kid needs to go here so I’m going to fix it that way.” Because that’s why a friend of my father’s, the one with the Folkways records, gave me a guitar. I couldn’t do anything. I think he thought the guitar would comfort me, which it did. He knew that it would help give me something to do, which it did.
SS: Do you remember the accident?
RC: Sure, in a funny, detached way. I don’t remember the details. I was in the hospital a long time. It was pretty bad. If anything like that had ever happened to my son… And it’s very easy to prevent, that’s the stupid part. It shows you how negligent they were.
SS: When did you decide you wanted to pursue music?
RC: It came in stages. I couldn’t have been 10 when I found KXLA, which played all the honky tonk. When I heard “My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You” by Ray Price, I just said, “Uncle, I give up. I can’t fight this.” But the real clincher would’ve come later. What was it? It was Big Joe Williams’ Tough Times, with the electric nine-string guitar. I was probably 15. That was it. I said, “Okay, I think I can make that sound, I think I can do this myself, and that means it’s the way to go.”
SS: How long were you a regular at recording sessions?
RC: I never was a regular. I was an occasional add-on guy, a color guy. I didn’t really pursue it.
SS: Did you decide not to join the Rolling Stones, or did they decide not to hire you?
RC: I’m going to tell you — everything you’ve ever heard about that is a bald-faced lie. There was never anything about joining. That’s a lie. Let me just tell you, I remember when I learn something or if I was with somebody I thought was great. If you ask me what Keith Richards had for lunch I can’t tell you. I can tell you what Gabby Pahinui had for lunch. I got nothing out of that experience except a bunch of rumors that follow me around like tin cans tied to a dog’s tail. It was demoralizing, but I don’t dwell on it.
SS: The producer and pianist Jim Dickinson once told me you went through a long period of inactivity and depression, where you sat on the beach for a year.
RC: Or more. It was around 1988. I just didn’t want to make records anymore. Actually, at this point I don’t think I want to do it anymore. I’m telling you the truth. I want to write my stories and be left alone. I’m in that mood. Not in a bad way, not in a negative way at all. I’d like to go camping. I’ve worked too hard for the last 10 years, I’m so fucking tired I can hardly tell you. But writing’s fun. I get a big kick out of it.
SS: How much time do you spend doing it?
RC: I get up and write for let’s say two hours. At that point I need to move around a little. Michael Ondaatje told me he works from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon, regardless.
SS: Well, it helps to have a fixed schedule — the activity itself is so unpredictable. E.L. Doctorow once said about the occupation of fiction writing, “It’s no sane life.”
RC: That’s a nice little statement you could quote at a party. But I’ll tell you what’s “no sane life” — working at McDonald’s or cleaning the streets.
SS: Sure. It’s just that sometimes you sit down to write and there’s nothing there.
RC: That’s okay. If it was always there you’d be so mechanical you’d be like an ad copywriter. I don’t know. E.L. did all right. He got there.
SS: He’s achieved a lot, if that’s what you mean. But he’s talking about living by your imagination and how difficult it is.
RC: But it’s the best way to live. I know that’s true.