by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Thanksgiving in Nashville, With Ry Cooder and Friends
This time every year I listen to the Last Waltz concert, which took place on Thanksgiving Day 1976 in San Francisco: the Band and friends – Joni, Neil, Bob, Muddy, Eric, Van, and the rest – celebrating the band’s history and saying a weird and needless farewell.
Concert Vault has audio of the full four-hour-plus concert, including a bit of the “Canterbury Tales” read in Middle English and the Lord’s Prayer recited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of all people. Lately, it has added full video: a simple black and white feed probably used by the sound and light technicians to keep track of things. (It’s available on YouTube, too.) To see The Last Waltz in B&W is a strange, reverse effect; this concert, known first through a movie expertly filmed and edited in 70mm by Martin Scorsese and put out in wide release, is now a video bootleg, a concert seen through the keyhole.
That’s the effect of seeing so many of the full-length concerts now posted on YouTube. Once a home for short videos, the site now hosts dozens of shows that are seen as too long to support a commercial release. The Tedeschi- Trucks Band’s full-concert reworking of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen is one.
The Americana Music Association’s concert honoring Ry Cooder is another. It took place in September a year ago, but I wouldn’t have known about it except for YouTube. I graze there for old slide guitar videos from time to time, and one night, there it was: a Last Waltz-style gathering of Cooder and his friends and associates from over the years – Flaco Jimenez, Loretta Lynn, Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell, Jason Isbell, Taj Mahal (doing a stage-shaking Statesboro Blues) and Jackson Browne (doing “Fountain of Sorrow”). Through it all, there is Ry sitting on a chair stage left and working his rack of customized guitars: the sideman as star.
Meant as an ending, The Last Waltz was the beginning of something: it was the concert that carried the old-time musical revue (perfected at the Grande Ole Opry) into the age of the multiplex, whence it has migrated to YouTube.
The Americana concert is here. Happy Thanksgiving from Ry Cooder and company.
Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 36: Ry Cooder, “Jesus on the Mainline”
The new Fretboard Journal features a 28-page, 9000-word interview with Ry Cooder, who talks about his music and the old, rare, odd, cool, and tinkered-with instruments he uses to make it.
On this video from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1994 he is playing a Vox 12-string Mandoguitar strung and tuned in an unusual way.
The young guy with the face fuzz drumming behind him is his son Joaquim. The singers are Bobby King, Terry Evans and Willie Green, who moved him into the major leagues overnight when he started working with them in the middle seventies. And the long-haired guy on the left is David Lindley, who is known to FM listeners of a certain age for his searing slide work and falsetto vocal on Jackson Browne’s live version of “Stay.” He’s playing what looks like the Vox 8-string bass shown on his website.
The instruments aren’t incidental to the sound. As far I can tell, when Cooder plays and sings gospel music he isn’t trying to make it sound religious at all. What he is doing is bringing out the sweetness, the tenderness, the intimacy, of music we usually hear in terms of communal exhortation. It works totally: and it begins with the bright, sweet, ringing inverted major chords he plays and the tone of his instruments – “open and extended, with none of that heavy magnetized midrange that everything has,” as he described the pickup on one of his guitars, “… completely transparent.”
He probably came to know the song through the recording by Sam Block issued by Smithsonian Folkways.
And if you can believe it, earlier the same night he played a set with the great Malian musician Ali Farka Touré. That was some Saturday night in New Orleans.
“If you’re sick and you wanna get well, tell him what you want …”