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Ry, Flathead: RY COODER (Unabridged)
SS: The standing ovation at the end of the Carnegie Hall show must have been a pretty moving moment for you. You knew what this meant to the musicians.
RC: Oh yeah, of course. It was, “Okay, we’ve brought this all the way to this point.” Here was this audience that was going mad, and here are these musicians being given a glimpse of the world. Not that I’m so crazy about the world, but let’s show them that we care about them, provide an experience that’s meaningful for them, that they enjoy, doing something they love to do. I could have done the same for Sleepy John Estes. It’s a matter of opportunities. This was a great thing to have the opportunity to do. And the audience got it for once. Finally! I’ve been doing this a long time, you know. To see the audience — that being the world — get something for the right reasons, rather than the wrong fucking reasons, is pretty gratifying. You can say, “All right, then.” You knew this could happen, you just didn’t expect it to. It was moving, all right.
SS: Who were the Buena Vista musicians who had the biggest impact on you?
RC: Well, all of them together. Everything in Cuba is a group, they’re a very village-like people, they do everything together. They vibe together and they play together. They’re not stars in the sense that one stands apart. I guess the key to your question is who’s the oldest. It usually seems to be true that the oldest ones are closest to the origins and the root of the whole thing. Like Gabby Pahinui or, in this case, Compay Segundo. He had the most knowledge so he was the one you’d want to hang with. Because the one with the most knowledge can actually demonstrate it. I’d play something and Compay would go, “Incorrecto. Incorrecto.” Take the guitar away from me and play. He’d look at me. He had this phrase in Spanish: “My word is the seal of quality.” He would keep saying that all the time. “My word is the seal of quality.”
SS: Big ego.
RC: Oh, but he was right. Because no one could dispute it. This is a guy who lived with a secure knowledge that he knew exactly what it was all about. He’d made millions of records, but that’s not what counted. It was the thing he had inside himself. I’ve always said that Gabby Pahinui and Joseph Spence were my two biggest influences. And Compay Segundo and Joseph Spence — they’re practically the same person. I recognized it in Compay’s hand motions. “Oh, that’s Spence.”
SS: When I talked to you in the Eighties you were not a happy man.
RC: Well, life got better. I didn’t like having a solo career at all. It was the wrong fit. And if you’re doing things you know are wrong for you, then you’re liable to be discouraged and disgruntled. But I found the answer — it was in Buena Vista: Work with other people, and do something for other people, and you’ll do something for yourself. That was always true, I just never really zeroed in on it. And it didn’t seem feasible, understand? But once it was revealed to me to be quite feasible, then everything got better. I mean, it really did. Buena Vista changed my life too, and I mean apart from the money. It took the horrible burden away, thank God.
SS: The burden of being a solo artist?
RC: Yeah, it’s horrible, I can’t stand it. I mean, I don’t see how people can live. A lot of them don’t do so good.
SS: You said something similar not long ago: “I finally had to stop making those damn solo records, because they just didn’t happen. Something was missing. And commercially it was useless anyway.” Why do you think your solo albums didn’t click commercially?
RC: I was never a good team player for Warner Brothers. I didn’t make money for them and I wasn’t a good participant and I really never understood what that meant. Randy Newman said to me, “You’re committing professional suicide. Mexicans in leisure suits? With accordions? Warner Brothers won’t allow that, they won’t stand for it.” “Well, that’s just too bad,” I said, “because it’s what I’m going to do.” “Okay,” Randy said. “I warned you.”
SS: Did Warner Bros. ever try to get you to be more commercial?
RC: They were kind to me in those days. They wouldn’t be now. I’d be out on my ass in five minutes. But in those days there was a geniality, a cordiality that doesn’t exist in a corporate environment anymore. Somebody did say at one point, “Why don’t you get some leather pants and get hip? And take more of those solos, why don’t you?”
SS: Do you wish you’d gotten out of the major-label pop music business earlier?
RC: No, I don’t wish for anything. I did everything I could. I tried to keep learning. See, that’s the trick. If you keep advancing your cause a little, your abilities, something will turn up, and it did. I got to doing things that pleased me instead of made me sick. I’ve got Joachim to play with me now, and we do good, and stuff’s good. And I saw the way to make records.
SS: How?
RC: So I’m the author but not the focus of it. That’s all you need. It gets you off the hot seat. And how to tell a story right. I’ve been interested in music as narrative for a while, but I just didn’t see how to do it. You know, your Dust Bowl songs, and all those medicine-show songs and blues I did, that’s all story music. “Alimony’s Killing Me,” that’s a great story. But I went about it wrong. I went about it the way I was told, or the way I was expected. As this personality guy. But I figured it out finally. It only took me 40 years. Day late, dollar short.