Ry Cooder: Paradise And Lunch : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Best known as a guitar virtuoso, Ry Cooder is a complete musician whose singing, selection of material, arranging and sensibility are as much a part of his art as his command of his instrument. Classed as a folk artist, he has a wholeness of approach separating him from such inferior purveyors of similar material as Dave Bromberg.

Cooder is devoted to the elimination of the gratuitous assertion of personality in music. He is in perpetual pursuit of the magic note: the right sound at the right time. Like the art of illuminated manuscripts, the power of his work comes first of all from the accumulation of so much brilliantly shaped and controlled detail.

The depth of his work comes from the tension he generates between past and present. He culls his material largely from folk, blues, old rock 'n' roll, West Indian and jazz sources. His ear for the antique and quaint may mislead some into thinking he is merely peddling sophisticated musical nostalgia. But Ry Cooder uses the past as an arena in which he can present a range of emotions, styles, feelings, even ideas, unavailable to him in most of contemporary pop music.

Like his three other solo albums, Paradise & Lunch doesn't idealize the past so much as suggest the fullness of human experience available through some of its traditions. He doesn't find that range in contemporary pop, where so much music seems so emotionally thin.

Not that Cooder ever sounds in awe of the past. He is no archivist preserving dying traditions for the sake of history — nor does he simply sing songs from and about the past. Like the Band on The Band, at his best he becomes the past. When he sings about the Depression, he sounds like one of its survivors. By embodying traditions with such grace, he becomes one with them. And they then speak as much through him as he speaks through them.

Musically, Cooder is unobtrusively eclectic. He conceals the enormous effort that goes into the conception and execution of every cut: He neither revels in his expertise, nor shows it off. His goal is to elicit our feeling for the finished work.

Rather than merely interpret, Cooder fulfills the intentions of the older songs. He isolates and then emphasizes or de-emphasizes particular elements in them, according to his vision of how best to do justice to their spirit. In so doing, he almost invariably sidesteps the usual comparisons between the older and modern versions. His "One Meat Ball" doesn't lead to a comparison with the Josh White (an early influence) original; Cooder's version is complete by itself.

"One Meat Ball" is on Ry Cooder, his first and to me still his best album. He moved effortlessly from the rock 'n' roll and shattering slide guitar of "Alimony" to the heartbreaking Depression-era "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live." On the latter, he introduced strings where none would have been used 40 years ago, and revealed that his respect for the past would never imprison his own sensibility.

Into the Purple Valley was a terrific sequel to Ry Cooder, but didn't match its zest. It contained one of his few outright failures, a version of "Money Honey" that varied from the standard for no apparent reason other than a desire to sound different. On the other hand, "F.D.R. In Trinidad" revealed his mastery of the difficult music of Joseph Spence, while "Teardrops Will Fall" showed his mastery of tremolo guitar and rock 'n' roll ballads — a mastery that culminates in the best song on his new album, his own "Tattler."

Boomer's Story was different. He gave up some of the breadth of the first two records to aim for greater intensity, with more emphasis on his guitar playing. He united two seemingly irreconcilable pieces of music through the melancholy of his approach — the modern soul classic "Dark End of the Street" and the Union Civil War song, "Rally 'Round the Flag." And he then played off the tragedy of the latter against the joyfulness of a 20th-century battle song, "Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer."

Paradise & Lunch is probably the closest Cooder will come to making a happy album. He's dropped the Depression as a subject, although not as a musical source, and has relied more than ever on a gospel feeling — the joyful side of gospel. He also shows more interest in jazz and, on "Ditty Wa Ditty," a duet with jazz pianist Earl Hines, he unleashes his most impressive single-string guitar playing so far.

Paradise & Lunch is pitted halfway between the scope of the first two albums and the intensity of the last one. The good-timey feeling of "Tamp 'Em Up Solid," a relaxed guitar and vocal vehicle in the "Nine Pound Hammer" vein, only heightens the effect of the hauntingly tragic, obscure Burt Bacharach song, "Mexican Divorce."

Cooder has used this song to compress his feeling for Spanish and Latin folk styles and it is one of the gems of his recording career.

For moodiness and melancholy, he has recorded nothing that compares to "Tattler," a song he co-wrote with Washington Phillips and coproducer Russ Titleman. A rock 'n' roll song modeled after the style of "Teardrops Will Fall," it never quite sounds like a rock 'n' roll song. Besides the beautiful tremolo guitar and exceptional rhythm-section playing, it employs two of my favorite Cooder touches: the original approach to string arrangements and the use of an allmale chorus.

That chorus is in evidence on a gospel spoof, credited to Blind Willie McTell, "Married Man's a Fool." But the levity of that number only sets the listener up for what is, with "Tattler," the album's finest moment, "Jesus on the Mainline."

Ry Cooder hasn't got a classic voice but he can sing songs like this one with deceptive ease. He sounds assured, plaintive, unapologetic, and in perfect synchronization with the lyrics. His sense of rhythm is positively uncanny, the song seems wired into the human pulse. Not satisfied with that, at crucial points the band plays around that beat, giving the track an unanticipated complexity. Finally that wonderful chorus wrings every ounce of spirit from the material, inviting at least our spiritual, if not actual, participation.

I find "Jesus on the Mainline" liberating music. It liberates through Ry Cooder's commitment to detail; through his precise but never labored or academic approach to performing; through his ability to locate the spirit, the intelligence and the heart of a song, and reveal them to us. Those are his very special gifts.