Usa Cars Forum - Dreams on Wheels

Ry Cooder has been exhuming and reappraising overlooked areas of the musical culture of America (and beyond, as the Buena Vista Social Club can vouch) for so long now that he has become part of the story himself. More than four decades since he emerged as an electric blues guitarist so highly rated that he turned down an offer to join the Rolling Stones, Cooder continues to ferret out unfamiliar and neglected stories.



I, Flathead is the third part of a loose Southern California trilogy that kicked off with the acclaimed Chavez Ravine in 2005, an elegy for a destroyed Latino community in the heart of Los Angeles. Its follow-up, My Name is Buddy, told the history of US labour as seen by a folk-singing cat (how else?). I, Flathead, though, is an unashamed tribute to Californian strange. A set of linked songs supposedly performed by one Kash Buk, a jobbing musician and salt flats racer (a ?flathead? is an early V-8 engine), it explicitly evokes an era of ?popular mechanics? magazines, sci-fi comics and demobbed servicemen in search of a thrill, the time and place that threw up the Church of Scientology, the Hell?s Angels and Disneyland. The modern world, in fact.



Kash?s story is nostalgic for a time when weird was commonplace. The tunes are good too. Ridin? with the Blues is perfectly sleazy (and not miles from the Stones) and shifts effortlessly into the witty, McCarthyite- baiting Pink-A-Boogie. Johnny Cash is an affectionate valedictory pastiche. The brilliantly titled My Dwarf is Getting Tired (?and my fat man just won?t travel no more?) is unexpectedly romantic, even with its mentions of hot-dog-eating contests and cartoonish deaths. Steel Guitar Heaven evokes Cooder?s own musical heroes, while Flathead One More Time, apparently narrated by the late President Nixon, refers to Thunder Road, the Robert Mitchum movie rather than the Springsteen tune.



The music is sharp and enjoyably coherent throughout, but Cooder?s delightful accompanying novella Kashbook seals the deal. Featuring a cast of the dislocated, including socially invisible Japanese-Americans, mystical natives, a mechanic from another planet and a Cadillac-driving Ford dealer, it is a joy throughout and a timely reminder that LA is perpetually one big quake from reverting to desert. I, Flathead could probably survive a Hollywood big-screen treatment intact. But it is cheaper to shut ones eyes and tune in.