Ry Cooder, Los Angeles Stories (Stop & Go Press, 2009)
That's right, Ry Cooder is in the book section! This slide guitarist extraordinaire has discovered later in life that he enjoys telling a story. His last three CDs have done this in one way or another. Chavex Ravine told the story of the loss of an area of Los Angeles which was home to a community of Mexican-Americans, who were moved out to make room for Dodger Stadium. The second in this series was My Name Is Buddy which took a cat named Buddy on a Woody Guthrie inspired odyssey through California. It was fun and filled with good tunes, but Steinbeck had little to fear from Cooder's writing. Then Ry offered I, Flathead, which came packaged in a hardbound book. The book featured not only the lyrics to the songs, but a novella which fleshed out the stories. On his recent tour of Europe with son Joachim on drums and Nick Lowe on bass and vocals, the souvenir stand had t-shirts, posters and a surprise offering: a hard cover book called Los Angeles Stories was there amidst the merch. You could buy a signed copy or unsigned. It wasn't cheap, and many Rylanders had to buy two or three copies for amigos back in the U.S. who wouldn't benefit from the tour.
My copy was bought for me in Barcelona and mailed at great cost (it took a page of stamps to cover postage!) and was awaiting my return from my sumer vacation. It was the first package I opened, and that night, tired as I was from traveling, I sat down to read the first story. There was certainly a sense of place and time in the tale of a dooor to door salesman who gets involved in a mystery by circumstance. It was a bit like a Raymond Chandler story. Maybe not as cleverly plotted, but rich in language, character and the essence of 1950's LA. Each tale has a title and a date, and early to mid-50s seems to be Cooder's ouevre. Some of the stories echo each other as characters (or at least names) reappear. The links are tenuous except that they all take place in the City of Angels and all involve people involved in shadowy activities -- musicians, gun shop owners, pornographers, thieves, and all sorts of women.
Cooder has his own voice, and if he had started writing sooner, might have made a bigger splash in the literary world. It might be too late for that. Self-publishing might have worked for Walt Whitman, but people are now looking at blogs, and Web sites. Once you've established yourself in one artistic community it's not easy to bridge to another. The book is beautifully designed, a lovely embossed image of LA's city hall. The paper stock is heavy and slick, and while you will find the odd typo, it's a fairly well done project.
What's the audience? Well, obviously, Ry Cooder fanatics will have to get a copy. Fans of hard-boiled fiction might want to give it a try, and anyone interested in the city itself, will find much to savour. It's not easy to find, but the No Alibis Bookstore in Belfast had some copies.
