Ry Cooder: Boomer's Story : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The phenomenon of the session man-turned-solo artist is one of the current scourges of the music business. But Ry Cooder, session man nonpareil, fortunately defies the pattern. In an interview last year in Sing Out, Ry stated, "I [played] with studio people and went through that whole scene.... First I was intimidated by it, which is understandable because it was so slick and polished and everybody was so 'right on' all the time and laughing at me for not knowing what a diminished chord was. Then I found out that they were all a bunch of hacks, and who needed to know what they know? It just didn't mean a damn thing."

From the beginning, versatility to the point of invisibility has had no allure for Ry. His limited, intentionally primitive musical approach has been part of an overall stance, and it is this stance which gives Ry, although he writes almost none of his own material, as tangible a personality and outlook as our finest singer-song-writers.

To be precise, Ry's personality is a persona. Having lived for so long in the world of old scratchy records, Ry offers himself as one of its downtrodden, Depression everymen. Ry Cooder and Into the Purple Valley introduced us to this affable, bedraggled anti-hero; Boomer's Story assures us that within those marvelous limitations Ry sets for himself there is still "available space."

Boomer's Story hasn't the diversity or activity of the first album, but it has the authority of the second and a bit more adventure. Ry's cracked voice is more studied than before; he's turned his liabilities into assets. But the overall tone is casual, homemade, right down to the stark, monochromatic cover. Plainly laid out are the rewards of Ry's siftings through the archives of American folk music.

"Come and gather all around me/and listen to my tale of woe," the first in Ry's gallery of life's losers implores. Boomer, like the character in "Good Morning, Mr. Railroad Man," is a hobo. "Boomer's Story" is very Band-like, especially when the vocal harmony enters. It contains Cooder's typically pungent, syncopated interplay of mandolin and electric slide guitar, as well as the bass and piano of Jim Dickinson and the drums of Jim Keltner. "Cherry Ball Blues" is one of the album's three instrumentals; the beautifully blended acoustic and electric slide guitar are wittily repetitious. "Crow Black Chicken" and Sleepy John Estes' "A Sweet Mama" include muted trombone. On "Maria Elena" Ry casts his gaze southward. But "Maria Elena" is other than a bit of Hispanic scholarship—for one thing, Ry plays a metal-string guitar—but, with its dulcet violins, it continues the Hollywood motif of Into the Purple Valley: You can almost see Rita Hayworth sipping sombreros amid the potted palms.

Ry wisely allows only his guitar to tell the tale of clandestine romance in "Dark End of the Street." The statement here is too full-blown for Ry's croakings, but his guitar, with fantastic attention to dynamics and nuance, speaks eloquently. The following three songs are political. The assurance of "Rally 'Round the Flag" ("The Union forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah/Down with the traitor and up with the star") is belied by Ry's defeated tone. It contrasts with the exuberantly oblivious WW II "Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer" ("What a show, what a fight/Boy we really hit our target for tonight"). The last album's "F.D.R. in Trinidad," a balmy celebration, is here supplanted by "President Kennedy," a decrepit lament sung by Sleepy John Estes (whose mandolin-playing partner Yank Rachel has been an important influence on Ry). These bits of tattered patriotism only deepen my Election Day doldrums.

That's Boomer's, or Cooder's, story. I wouldn't be surprised if this and the other two he has given us so far mean the same to collectors 30 years from now as the records of Ry's antique heroes do to him today.