Ry Cooder – Working man blues
“Hell, you asked me before, ‘Where are the working people?’ I don’t know that they’re out there as such anymore. It’s a very sad thing to think about. There’s an outfit here in L.A. called the Working Man’s Circle. These are old-time left-wing labor union people who get together, and they’re always dying. Today in the paper there was an obituary for a guy who was a Yiddish scholar in one of the working men’s circles. He goes way, way back. People who knew [the labor activist] Tom Mooney, or who shared a sandwich with so and so back in the days and had been on strike, or had been in this or that printers’ union or something.”
Making My Name Is Buddy, says Cooder, who put the project together using iTunes, made him feel a little less depressed about this vanishing working class. “I made the record because I really feel that solidarity, unity, is a vital theme that’s being lost. We’re so disunified,” he says. “You look at this country. Now they say, ‘Well, the Democrats are back.’ I say, ‘We’ll see about that.’
“Just think about the fear and all this stuff that J. Edgar Hoover got started; it’s still going on, worse than before,” Cooder continues, alluding to things such as the Patriot Act. “It’s nauseating. Everybody I know in our circle of friends, including my poor wife, is so bombarded with data and facts and hideous statistics. You could pick any one of them and it would be enough to drive you insane. It’s frustrating, and it wears you down. As a friend of mine said, ‘The little is exhausted by the struggle against the big.’
“So I sit here and I do this work. And I think it’s a very good thing for me therapeutically. It makes me feel a whole lot better. Every day that I can do this and make sense out of things on some musical level is a day that I feel a lot better than if I couldn’t.”
The question, of course, is whether anyone out there will listen, much less connect the dots between Cooder’s parable and the state of the world is today. That is, whether they will undergo a political awakening along the order of Buddy’s.
“I understand how people are now,” Cooder says. “They’ve got bad attention spans. They’ve got cell phones. They don’t seem to want to linger too long in any one place. And this is a freestanding record; you don’t link up. It doesn’t say to you, ‘Go to the Gap store and give the coupon and you’ll get a deal on this red-letter jacket.’ It’s got none of that.
“I really intended for that to be the case. I didn’t want Buddy to be like anything else. It’s gotta be its own thing. You have to take it as you find it, like an old-time story. When I was a little kid we had these beautiful children’s books about Mike the Steam Shovel and all that. I like all that kind of thing. Maybe people will sit down with Buddy and find that it’s intriguing enough. You know, maybe there are those who like to read and ponder these things. And it’s really good in your car. You can’t read in your car, but you can listen.”
Cooder has long been a devotee of the vernacular. He’s certainly made a career of being an ambassador for colloquial strains of music wherever he finds them. The corporatization of culture that he laments, though, is spelling the death of local forms of life and expression. Chavez Ravine, his previous record, paid tribute to a Los Angeles neighborhood that had died out. In much the same way, My Name Is Buddy is both a celebration and a requiem.
Big-box retailers won’t, in any case, be stocking Buddy, that’s for sure. “Starbucks is not gonna rack it I don’t think,” Cooder said. “Where we’re gonna sell this I don’t know. I mean, I’ve seen Tower go down this year. The two pillars of the record business were radio and retail, so now what? I don’t understand. I have not been able to see into what this means. I don’t even know what record companies do anymore. Not everybody goes to Amazon. Or will they?”
This isn’t to say that Cooder doesn’t also see glimmers of hope. In addition to offering Buddy, Lefty and Tom as reminders of the resilience of the human — or, in their case, creature — spirit, he ends his record on a positive if wistful note. “Bright Side”, its closing benediction, affirms this faith through testimony, but “Farm Girl”, the album’s penultimate track, is its embodiment, the depiction of a charitable gesture that’s one of the cornerstones of justice.
The song finds the three friends out on the road, penniless and hungry. They’ve just come from a shantytown known as Cardboard Avenue when they meet an open-hearted young woman, the opposite number of Buddy’s wary uncle, who invites them to supper. “Mama always says strangers can be friends,” the woman tells them. “We don’t have much, set yourself right down/Tell me who you are, tell me where you’ve been.”
“When the institutions all fail — when religion fails, and economics fails, and the government fails — the only hope you have is that other people will help you,” Cooder says. “The farm girl says, ‘Well, come on over. Let’s eat anyway.’
“Then we hear from Tom Toad. He says, ‘I can see something.’ He’s been blind, he’s lost his vision, but now he’s saying, ‘There’s a brighter side. I can see again.’ He feels restored. Somebody’s gonna help take care of him, and that’s about all that you can ask. But it’s tough, you know. It’s a tough future.
“I asked Pete Seeger about that, you know. He said that if the human race is still around in a hundred years, he believes overpopulation will be the problem. But he also said, ‘Never before has so much brainpower existed and been applied to so many problems. This is exponential and always ongoing, but so are overpopulation and all the attendant problems.
“I called Pete on New Year’s Day to say hello — he told me that he’s losing his memory — and he said that music is still one of the only hopes to bridge these terrible gaps. He said that we have to give people a sense of encouragement and hope when there is no justice, especially when you can’t seem to do anything about it.”
ND senior editor Bill Friskics-Warren is the author of I’ll Take You There: Pop Music And The Urge For Transcendence. He is working on a book about poverty and the human spirit.