I don’t do record reviews ...

... but I’ve been a fan of Ry Cooder's since before I knew who Ry Cooder was. How else to explain that Love in Vain is my second favourite song on Let it Bleed. Likewise Sister Morphine on Sticky Fingers, except that it is No. 3. and so on and so on.

And of course, all geeks everywhere know that the most salient fact about Bop Till You Drop is that it was the first ever DDD CD.

I’ve only seen him live once, at the Hammersmith Odeon, and I cannot remember the year.¹ I do remember that it must have been shortly after Paradise and Lunch, because half the audience had turned up in Hawaiian shirts. Ry came on stage in black. Oh, how we laughed. And that was the first time I heard him do the extended solo -- how long is it anyway? -- from How can a poor man stand such times and live, which still brings tears, or least a stinging prickle, to my eyes.

Anyway, I was a little disappointed by Mambo Sinuendo, it has to be said. I know there’s a kind of lounge retro chic thing, where cheesy is good. But cheesy is sometimes cheesy. Or as Huey Lewis said, sometimes bad is bad.

But Chávez Ravine is something else again. I know nothing about LA in the 1950s except what I’ve picked up from books, movies and such like, so the story of the destruction of the area to make room for a baseball stadium meant nothing to me. But the record as a whole is just so fine. There are, to me, one or two dud tracks, and of course this won’t get the exposure of Buena Vista social club, but it has the same feel, of old guys doing their thing and doing it with clarity and precision and, somehow, modernity.

One thing interests me. Chávez Ravine has as its central conceit (or do I mean trope? Damn tricky, this reviewing stuff) the idea of an alien landing in LA and looking for this place where the cool cats hang out. There's a great track -- El u.f.o. cayó -- celebrating that idea, and Poor man’s shangri-la does too. Back in 1982, on Slide Area, is a track called UFO has landed in the ghetto, which is certainly a funky little number. But has that idea been incubating all this time? And if so, what caused it to hatch?