Ry Cooder is a musician with an uncanny ability to absorb the music of all kinds of musical cultures. I dont have the time to go into them all here but the term spanning the globe certainly fits. Some of his experiments work better than others at least to my ears, but the big payoff comes when he brings these different experiences and lessons learned back to the table for his real bread and butter which is Rhythm and Blues drenched pop. In that locale he draws from a very deep well.

The thing about looking down those deep wells is you might end up running around the Mojave Desert in the middle of the summer wearing ridiculous yellow sunglasses. Ive spent some time driving around out there trying to sell funeral insurance to people in places like Mojave, California City, Quartz Hills People from L.A. moved east to retire on the cheap, more than a few old movie people. People with more stories than you can pay attention to.

I really havent paid much attention to Ry Cooder lately. I sort of lost interest right around the time Buena Vista mania hit my local PBS affiliate. A couple years ago I found it rather ironic that hed turned his far flung musical attentions on Los Angeles, his own backyard. Chavez Ravine, the first installment of what is being called his California trilogy seemed to be more or less an extension of his recent Latin excursions. Next up was the cartoonish My Name is Buddy, which certainly got all the pinkos up at KPFA fired up during pledge break last year. He finally capped things off with I, Flathead over the summer and Im digging it. The music and stories are more familiar to me.

By his own admission, Cooder is more into writing stories than making music these days and it really shows. The music plays a strong second fiddle to the story of Kash Buk, a hard driving, hard living salt flats hot rodder. The album is an evocative take on a weird little slice of postwar California that had a huge influence on American pop-culture. If you ever head of that hot rod race when the Fords and the Lincolns were settin the pacewell Kash Buk could have very well been the kid in that hopped up Model A. Theres also a dog named Spayed Cooley and yet another space alien.

Which brings us to Cooders spankin new Rhino retrospective The UFO Has Landed, a collection that frames his entire career-jeez its been 40 years- into the same bohemian SoCal narrative. Songs handpicked from his solo albums and movie soundtracks. Of course some of my favorites have been left out but the great thing is how many are here and how songs like the delicate beauty of Theme from Alamo Bay fits together with the righteous indignation of Which Came First?

Yeah the moon comes up and the sun goes down
This old world keeps spinning around
Just as sure as the day turns into the night
What you do in the dark will turn up in the light
Masked man ridin out across the land
Spreading destruction and moving his hand
He carries a ray-gun, shoots from the hip
Got your past in his pocket, your futures in his grip

You may be a hater, you may be a lover
You bet your life one destroys the other
I dont know how it all began, which came first
The egg or the hen

I wonder about Ry Cooder and UFOs . They say he lost an eye when he was four, some kind of mishap with a knife. Im thinking it was one of those alien abduction/surgery deals. Maybe they took his eye and left him a special gift of some kind. Something that would enable him to climb inside the heads of guys like Ike Turner and Curtis Mayfield. Something that would drive him to almost singlehandedly keep tremolo alive and throbbing through the 80s. Something that helps a poor man stand such times and live.