Twister Sister.

[Photo Credit: Brigitte Sire via MPD]

Ry Cooder has a new live record out. Alec Wilkinson has a thoughtful post about Cooder and performing live over at the New Yorker:

Absent disabling cases of stage fright, emotional reversals, or predatory addictions, performers who withdraw from performing—who liberate themselves straight into a private life—are rare. One of the few popular musicians I can think of who has done so happily (besides George Harrison) is Ry Cooder. Perhaps in Cooder’s case it isn’t surprising since he began his career as a studio musician, when he was still a teen-ager—he grew up, that is, in a context where music was made in rooms with only a few people present, not on a stage for an audience. He once said that the people who want the applause should have it, but he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t like being watched. He didn’t like the pressure of having to deliver a performance—as opposed to just playing music—and he didn’t like being analyzed by the guitarists who stood as close as they could to try and figure out what he was doing. The whole experience was draining. After a concert, he once said, he felt like a withered balloon under a chair at the end of a children’s party. About thirty years ago, he reached a point where he could no longer go out on stage and say one more time, “Ladies and gentlemen, and especially you ladies…”

…Another reason Cooder didn’t tour is that in middle age he felt he could no longer perform many of the songs he had recorded when he was younger. Some of them had relied on a jauntiness he no longer felt.

Check out this cool-ass 1990 interview with Ry Cooder by Jas Obrecht. The talk is Blind Willie Johnson and the Blues:

Q: What’s your attraction to “Dark Was the Ground – Cold Was the Night”?

RC: That’s the most transcendent piece in all American music, the way he used his voice and the guitar. This other tune that I love so much is “God Moves on the Water.” Oh, that thing is like a roller coaster, man. He’s got an energy wave in there that he’s surfing across the face of that tune so mighty! He hits the chorus, and to me it’s like ice skating or downhill racing – it’s an awesome physical thing that happens. But “Dark Was the Night” is the cut – everybody knows that lick. You can throw that lick at anybody nowadays. I threw it up inside Paris, Texas, you know, and everybody relates. And now you play that lick, and everybody knows what it is. It’s like an unspoken word. It’s really amazing. [Legally download these tracks at http://www.archive.org/.]

I’ll really tell you, Blind Willie Johnson is in the ether somewhere. He’s up there in the zone somewhere. But if he played flat . . . And at this point, after talking with you, I’m starting to feel that really would account for it. Because I know that if it was regular, I could be doing it. I can do what he did – I can play those notes now. I mean, I have learned. My co-ordination and understanding have developed to the point where I am capable of executing those passages, but it sounds really different when you play flat.

Here’s Cooder’s version.

Click here for more on Cooder’s recent book of stories about Los Angeles.