Ry Cooder: I, Flathead

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. “*

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