Go Red for the Fourth of July:
Ry Cooder and My Name is Buddy
July 5, 2007
Despite my private moaning that the album is a thing of the past.. overrun by singles and ipod shuffling.. great albums continue to appear. Instead of beating a retreat, albums have blossomed into multi-media projects. Elaborate art work, DVD footage, and web tie-ins have all allowed artists to project their work into multiple contexts.. allowing for lusher musical fictions to take shape. A recent example of this phenomenon is My Name is Buddy by Ry Cooder.. an album that develops the story of Buddy Red Cat, Lefty Mouse, and the Reverend Tom Toad. In this case the pencil sketches and additional short stories built around each song add something extra to the album.
My formal interest in the album is overshadowed by my sheer enjoyment of the project. If ever there were an Old Roads album, this is it. Notionally the album is a return to the Depression era world of Woody Guthrie. Folks are leaving home and heading to the West, organizing themselves into unions, and getting harrassed by the cops. The album does not merely employ these themes, but consists of songs written in historic styles. Sometimes you hear Woody Guthrie, but other times the Carter Family, the blues, or religious speechifying. Ry Cooder has given us an archeology of old American musical styles. That would be interesting enough, but then he manages to make these old themes address our own political moment.. and with a sharp edge!
For me the most daring move of the album was to unflinchingly embrace "Red" values. The banner song of the album is "Red Cat Till I Die":
Now, you think you're hard-boiled, you're just yellow inside
My daddy always warned me, now I know he's right
You're just cowards hiding behind a little tin star
The people are starting to realize what a bunch of clowns you are
And in case that isn't enough of a thumb in the eye of the political establishment.. try the final stanza:
But I'm a red cat till I die, I a red cat through and through
I won't fight your rich man's war and kill poor folks for you
You can't make me do things I know it's wrong to do
I'm a red cat till I die, I'm telling you
All of this could be applied to the Depression.. but here and elsewhere the lines clearly break out and address our contemporary world. For Cooder "Red" does not bring with it specific doctrines that can be tied back to Marx; the word is a convenient historical identity that can be resurrected to mark opposition to political authority.
One of the most clever of the songs on the album is "The Dying Truck Driver".. which is a dead ringer for a the gently harmonizing sound of the Carter Family. The story is laid out in a linear fashion.. and the basic set-up is simple enough: while passing through the San Joaquin Valley our furry left-leaning friends run into a dying man, who they judge to be a truck driver. It is a replay of the Good Samaritan.. cast into Guthrie/Steinbeck land. Upon further inquiry it turns out that the truckdriver was struck down by a surprising culprit:
It was no vigilante gang, nor ranch-boss thugs this time
But the meatloaf special dinner I had on Highway 99
A comely waitress served me there, she cooled me with her fan
But fatal meatloaf has struck down this old truck driving man
It seems like a strange parable at this point. Watch out for the mealoaf?? But the significance of that meatloaf becomes clear in the final stanza:
Now, the workingman must be well warned whenever headlines scream
"Your rights must yield, the bombs must fall to save democracy"
The flag they fly, their stew of lies served up at voting time
Like poison under the gravy on Highway 99
The meatloaf turns out to be a great object lesson for the Fourth of July. Cooder is serving up a plate full of Americana to his listeners.. songs delivered in the American idiom. He also warns us about that plate of Americana: it could be poisonous. In other words, he is not out to take away the meatloaf or any other pleasure of America's past. He clearly respects the truck driver who, dying, calls on what he thinks are angels to bear him up to Jesus. The problem is that those bits of Americana and religion can be turned into something quite different.. and more dangerous. Words like freedom and liberty.. even Jesus.. can be turned to mean their opposite. Cooder thus stakes out in "The Dying Truck Driver" a position on the American past. One that, incidentally, is useful to keep in mind while listening to the album, which is both an embrace and a push back to American values.
