"Poor Man's Shangri-La"

In Ry Cooder’s first solo release since 1987 brought us Get Rhythm, he takes a decisively different path, laying down 15 tracks in the form of a concept album that chronicles the life and times of Los Angeles’s Chavez Ravine neighborhood, from the mundane occurrences of its eclectic, multigenerational, bilingual, dynamic community to its eventual bulldozing, which ultimately made way for a stadium that helped lure Brooklyn émigrés, the Dodgers, to town.   Los Angeles is where Cooder is from so he has a particular connection with this   The undertaking means a lot to him, and it shows. The diversity of song styles reflects the dynamism and authenticity of the community that Cooder has chosen to resurrect. There are the conjunto & corrido forms, musical genres that have long emanated from border towns in Texas and California .  Afro-Cuban son, Costa Rican folk songs, jazz, Latin pop, and R&B evoke broader cultural influences and constituencies within, and even a little beyond, the vibrant neighborhood of Chávez Ravine. Cooder takes all these elements and creates a seamless blend of his own musical imagining, providing insight into what was going on at the time and also selecting covers by artists who were popular during this turbulent era.  Some of Cooders collaborators in this recording are veterans of the Chávez Ravine ordeal, including Don Tossi & Lalo Guerrero (both have passed away since contributing). While the covers such as “Onda Callejera” and “Barrio Viejo” function as primary sources in the resurrection of Chávez Ravine, the Cooder originals offer a sort of hind-sighted historical analysis, weaving in elements of fantasy, like the arrival of the outerspace vato, to push the perspective a step further, encouraging us to see Chávez Ravine as an extraterrestrial visitor would see it, mixed with excitement and wonder, but also sadness and longing, because the listener, like the space dude, knows the fate of those dwelling in the doomed community.

The song that marks the arrival and prophecy of the space vato, “El UFO Cayó,”(The UFO Fell) has the ambient, spaced-out drone of a Bill Laswell track, particularly something off of his album Imaginary Cuba, which, much like Chávez Ravine, seeks to resurrect a time and place no longer present – or perhaps that never entirely was. The song features vocalist Juliette Commagere, fluttering along in Spanish with the resonating musical bed undulating beneath her every silken note. There is a long section in the middle where the inhabitant of the fallen UFO comes down and speaks his space prophecy (on the album in Spanish): “There are some Anglos that want to take away your lands and put up a baseball stadium to gringo-ize our neighborhood. Do you dig me? Pick up your goats, and let’s go real quick, because our neighborhood, it’s going to change man. They are going to bury our homes.” The smooth female voice comes in singing (again, in Spanish originally) that “none of us believed him. We live in America. We are land owners with rights in this place where we were born.”

By its style alone “It’s Just Work for Me,” a stripped down R&B number, reflects the impending destruction of Chávez Ravine. The song is from the point of view of the bulldozer operator who explains that although he might not like sometimes what he has to do, “you gotta go where they send you when you’re a dozer driving man.” Cooder continues to illustrate all of his characters throughout the album. Nobody is one-dimensional, as the dozer man talks about his troubles and how fixing his problems will lead to the construction of the stadium: “Now this old truck is getting tired. This old bank account is gettin’ low. Don’t even own our old house trailer in Fontana , so I gotta’ do this work, you know. Some of you may like baseball, well I guess baseball’s alright with me. Someday there’ll be a big ballpark here where your little old town used to be.”  The dozer man later recognizes that “this ain’t your world, tell ya, buddy. Sure ain’t my world. Just a job, a work – just work for me.”

A more personal vantage point is illuminated in “In My Town.”  The track starts off and maintains, for the first half, a description of a melancholic, music-box-world of delicate nostalgia. It’s mournful like a Nico song with the kind of pleasant, mundane observations of Randy Newman. Slowly the observations become more poignant but maintain their dreamlike quality. “And there’s a freeway coming soon, right through this dirty old room. Can’t you see a fifty-story building where palm trees used to be?” Just as soon as those lyrics are softly chimed, the tempo, instrumentation and perspective of song take a radical shift as staccato derivative of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is looped hypnotically on the piano (accompanied by an angst inducing shaker). It is every bit as menacing sounding as when Hans Beckert whistles it in M, especially considering the aforementioned gentle, elegiac first half of the song. Our new narrator proclaims: “I want a town that’s clean and I want a rule that’s maintained: If you’re brown, back down; If you’re black, get back; Better white than right; Better dead, than red. Better keep it contained in my town. Now, in my town, I’m the big cheese – don’t like all those commie rats in the palm trees, up there in Chávez Ravine.” The song is now an evil, poppy, Latin-jazz number detailing, at times with deft wordplay, the corruption that went down at city hall that dictated the fate of Chávez Ravine: “I write the rules, I call the game. Here’s the pitch – it’s good! There goes your old neighborhood…Cement mixers spreadin’ the word around. This here is my town. It’s my town.” As a diabolic piano riff meanders off, as if it had been here all this time, the docile style of the first half returns, and leaves us with an image suspended in time, Chávez Ravine on the eve of demolition.

Not all the images conjured up are bittersweet and sepia toned. Some are hilariously offensive, like “Chinito, Chinito” in which the Chinese tendency to mispronounce the letter r as the letter l parodied relentlessly: “Chinito, Chinito, toca la “malaca” [maraca], chinito. Chinito, no “plecupes” [preocupes – worry] más. Chinito, chinito, me lava la “lopa.” Other Spanish words such as arroz (rice) and trabajo (work) find their Chinese counterparts as “aloz” and “tlabajo.” The song continues, with very little variation, for nearly 5 minutes.

The reverberations of Cooder’s intent, his reasons for telling this story of Chávez Ravine have their significance in our daily lives as communities throughout the world continue to be displaced, fractured and destroyed by powerful interests. Indigenous tribes in the Amazon at the behest of oil companies; residents on the outskirts of Chicago whenever the city decides to expand O’Hare International Airport; and back to Brooklyn, which figured into this Chávez saga’s ironic denouement.  (Finally, Brooklyn will get its own stadium, but for the incoming basketball team the Nets, which will take its incalculable toll on neighborhood where the construction is slated to take place within the next few years.)

Chávez Ravine is a cool, gritty, seamless marriage of songs that typified this time and place in American history.  Cooder’s own musical invention and interpretation begins with the genres of ‘50s L.A. , but he also applies his own historical, cinematic perspective, and insights gained from his more recent explorations of Cuban music. The end result is a haunting image that lingers – be it the melodies, the diverse rhythms, the eclectic array of characters that weave in and out of this hazy, human – and in the case of the space vato, alien – portrait of a community destroyed and then forgotten.

Contributed by: Zev Frank for www.afropop.org