This is his new album theme.
Click on the MULTIMEDIA SLIDE SHOW link at the page left, then click "Full Screen Mode".
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/tr ... ?th&emc=th
This one brought tears to my eyes. BTW, the tank lakester featured in the slides was actually completed this year, built from a wing tank found in a scrap yard not too far from El Mirage. It's all new except for the original paint. Go-geous.
RY COODER AT EL MIRAGE
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jingle_jangle
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Re: RY COODER AT EL MIRAGE
That was slick.It reminds me of when we would bag school for a day and go to Bonneville salt flats to watch the cars.
Re: RY COODER AT EL MIRAGE
Ry Cooder.....been listening to him since the early 70's. The man has a lot of musical genres swimming around in his cranium when it comes to songwriting. Excellent composer, singer, and player. Wow, "time is a jet plane," as Dylan once sang. Where has the time gone since then, eh? Peace, out.....Goofyfoot.
Play on, pick often, jam with any Rickenbacker, and prosper.
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jingle_jangle
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Re: RY COODER AT EL MIRAGE
Found myself wondering about the same thing, David...when I moved to SoCal in the late '70s, I spent some spare time hitting all the places I dreamed about as a kid. My reasons for the move were--how to put this--that I had always felt that SoCal was my "ancestral home"...the vibe was right in tune. Much of this was automotive, and I haunted those places. I'd been a Cooder fan since his very first album, and soon found myself with an ex-Cooder guitar that I bought in Studio City in '80 or '81.
I knew Cooder was a car nut; the cover of his "Into the Purple Valley" album shows him and his wife Susan in a '41 Buick convertible; all part of his American history thing, wrapped up in music, old culture, the instruments, the sound, the technique. He loves to talk about this stuff with people who share his love, but suffers neither strangers nor fools lightly. When interviewed, he takes on a cranky, professorial persona. He shuns the celebrity spotlight. Notice how he is sitting through the Buena Vista concerts of fifteen years ago; to him, the Cuban musicians are the show; he's along to ride and facilitate.
I was involved in flathead culture back in the early '70s in Chicago; drove a '49 Merc woodie with a hopped 59AB motor, two 97 Strombergs on an Edelbrock manifold, tube headers into Smittys. Nothing sounds like a flathead through glasspacks. It had been bought new in '49 by the owner of a Chicago speed shop that catered to the flathead set pre-Chevy V8, and he used it to tow his own wing tank streamliner from Chicago to Bonneville from about '53 to '59; it passed to his son and then to me. It had some Bonneville placques on the dash. At the time I'd never been west of the Mississippi, so this was strong mojo.
Nowadays I attend very few hot rod shows, but I still get a chill when I hear a flatty sounding off.
I downloaded the new Cooder album from Amazon last night and listened to it twice through. It nails the half-lit time and places on the fringes of dry lake culture. It's like peeking through the screen doors in high desert rat hole-in-the-wall towns at 11 pm when nothing is moving but the bugs around the street lights. There's the bit of Texas swing carried on the warm late night breeze. You don't know where it's coming from, but the sound of the C6-tuned steel fades in and out. There's a stray dog poking around the trash.
The ground all around is flat as a pool table, but ringed with low mountains in the far distance. The most beautiful times of day are sunrise--when the speed runs begin and the dense, early morning air gives the best times, and sunset, when it's starting to become a hazy memory with a soundtrack that's a mix of western swing (the music that fired Leo Fender's synapses, for sure) and ranchero quasi-polka. The mix is more comfortable than the relations between the two groups that created the music will ever be in any other way.
Colors: Dusk orange, black, a smoky sometime purple, flickering neon bar sign red and blue, bright dirty yellow of a street-light way up above. Lots of shadows and you can kick up dust by just opening that screen door.
The album has lots of overblown prose like the stuff above, peppered with molasses-drawl humor that gives you a wink to include you in the joke. Just when you wonder if it's all spoken-word, it hits you with some superb musicianship, but it never loses its observational catechism. The characters are not broad types, but individuals whose stories are important to them. And Ry's guitar is always there to anchor you.
The last song in the portrait, "Little Trona Girl" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trona,_California), sees the narrator fade into time, driving like a dry lake Flying Dutchman while a young girl's voice, front and center, mourns his passing and knows she's not likely to see him again. It's a deep-blue moment in time with a sad, voyeuristic feeling. You're there, too, leaning against the rusty gas pump, and wishing the ride would've lasted longer than 53 1/2 minutes.
I knew Cooder was a car nut; the cover of his "Into the Purple Valley" album shows him and his wife Susan in a '41 Buick convertible; all part of his American history thing, wrapped up in music, old culture, the instruments, the sound, the technique. He loves to talk about this stuff with people who share his love, but suffers neither strangers nor fools lightly. When interviewed, he takes on a cranky, professorial persona. He shuns the celebrity spotlight. Notice how he is sitting through the Buena Vista concerts of fifteen years ago; to him, the Cuban musicians are the show; he's along to ride and facilitate.
I was involved in flathead culture back in the early '70s in Chicago; drove a '49 Merc woodie with a hopped 59AB motor, two 97 Strombergs on an Edelbrock manifold, tube headers into Smittys. Nothing sounds like a flathead through glasspacks. It had been bought new in '49 by the owner of a Chicago speed shop that catered to the flathead set pre-Chevy V8, and he used it to tow his own wing tank streamliner from Chicago to Bonneville from about '53 to '59; it passed to his son and then to me. It had some Bonneville placques on the dash. At the time I'd never been west of the Mississippi, so this was strong mojo.
Nowadays I attend very few hot rod shows, but I still get a chill when I hear a flatty sounding off.
I downloaded the new Cooder album from Amazon last night and listened to it twice through. It nails the half-lit time and places on the fringes of dry lake culture. It's like peeking through the screen doors in high desert rat hole-in-the-wall towns at 11 pm when nothing is moving but the bugs around the street lights. There's the bit of Texas swing carried on the warm late night breeze. You don't know where it's coming from, but the sound of the C6-tuned steel fades in and out. There's a stray dog poking around the trash.
The ground all around is flat as a pool table, but ringed with low mountains in the far distance. The most beautiful times of day are sunrise--when the speed runs begin and the dense, early morning air gives the best times, and sunset, when it's starting to become a hazy memory with a soundtrack that's a mix of western swing (the music that fired Leo Fender's synapses, for sure) and ranchero quasi-polka. The mix is more comfortable than the relations between the two groups that created the music will ever be in any other way.
Colors: Dusk orange, black, a smoky sometime purple, flickering neon bar sign red and blue, bright dirty yellow of a street-light way up above. Lots of shadows and you can kick up dust by just opening that screen door.
The album has lots of overblown prose like the stuff above, peppered with molasses-drawl humor that gives you a wink to include you in the joke. Just when you wonder if it's all spoken-word, it hits you with some superb musicianship, but it never loses its observational catechism. The characters are not broad types, but individuals whose stories are important to them. And Ry's guitar is always there to anchor you.
The last song in the portrait, "Little Trona Girl" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trona,_California), sees the narrator fade into time, driving like a dry lake Flying Dutchman while a young girl's voice, front and center, mourns his passing and knows she's not likely to see him again. It's a deep-blue moment in time with a sad, voyeuristic feeling. You're there, too, leaning against the rusty gas pump, and wishing the ride would've lasted longer than 53 1/2 minutes.
Re: RY COODER AT EL MIRAGE
Jingle_jangle.....Believe I wore out the grooves on Ry Cooder's eponymous LP and "Into the Purple Valley" when I was at the University of California @ Santa Cruz. Those were gooood times, brah. There was something both eclectic and earthy about his musical arrangements. The man has soul, plain and simple. Thanks for sharing your reminiscences of his music and how it affected your life. I enjoyed reading your account. You've piqued my curiosity. I'll have to score his most recent release. Ciao for now.....Goofyfoot.
Play on, pick often, jam with any Rickenbacker, and prosper.
Re: RY COODER AT EL MIRAGE
+1 on Purple Valley. Ry Cooder expanded my horizons exponentially when I was a sapling.
All I wanna do is rock!