Ry Cooder Crafts Offbeat Tribute to Fifties Los Angeles

Ry Cooder, legendary guitarist and producer, is considering the state of his career at age 61. "I don't know what the point is, honestly," grouses Cooder, whose work has spanned everything from playing session guitar on Let It Bleed to reassembling the Buena Vista Social Club. "The whole thing is dismantled. Retail is gone. Radio is gone. OK, now the records are gone. It worries me about what [his son and percussionist] Joachim is going to do. I'm not worried for my sake — we won't starve. But it's too bad." The music business is high on the list of things Cooder liked better in the old days; Los Angeles is another. His new album, I, Flathead, is the third in an ad hoc trilogy of records about lost L.A. culture, after 2005's Chávez Ravine and 2007's My Name Is Buddy. Cooder treasures vanishing pockets of California culture: neighborhoods that have been plowed over, homemade drag cars, kitschy roadside attractions. "It's not that I hate the world," Cooder says. "I just preferred it another way." We meet for lunch at Philippe's, a funky old restaurant in downtown L.A., in business since 1908. "If you're smart, you'll get the turkey sandwich," Cooder advises.

The inspiration behind I, Flathead: Cooder wanted to write about the people who lived in Los Angeles in the middle of the 20th century. "This mass of hundreds of thousands of defense workers and factory workers and people that liked their honky-tonk music," he says. Cooder has intense nostalgia for the experiences he missed out on when he was still in grade school in Santa Monica and the local hot-rod artists he never actually visited. "If I'd been smarter," Cooder says, "I would've gotten Von Dutch to pinstripe my guitar, or my lunchbox."

Cooder actually learned to play guitar from the radio; he would stay home from school and listen to Bob Wills and Kitty Wells on "the hillbilly radio station" all day. He longed to go to the Ray Price gigs he heard advertised. "It would have taken us 45 minutes to get there," he mourns. "No freeways in those days. 'You don't want to go there,' my dad said. So I never did." On his L.A. trilogy, Cooder didn't want to do straightforward song portraits of those honky-tonk factory workers: "What are you going to say about the white lower class that Merle Travis didn't already say?" So instead, Cooder started writing blue-collar-noir science-fiction short stories about an extraterrestrial visitor, the Native American girl who loves him, and a meatpacker and musician named Kash Buk. The deluxe edition of I, Flathead comes with 97 pages of those stories, and 14 songs that are presented as the music of Kash Buk and the Klowns.