It took a year of lobbying the United States government in Washington and the intervention of Bill Clinton during his final week in the White House for Ry Cooder to get permission to make his new album in Cuba. Now the man who masterminded Buena Vista Social Club — the biggest-selling album in world music history — seems resigned to never being able to go back.
”I’d hate to say this whole Cuban experience is at an end for me. But I can’t see any way they’re going to allow us to do it again. We just got in under the wire. Since September 11 the door is slammed even tighter shut.”
Cooder is sitting in a suite at the Hotel Bristol in Paris talking about his new album, Mambo Sinuendo. A collection of twanging electric guitar duets recorded in Havana with local guitarist Manuel Galban, it is an album that almost never got made. Cooder won a Grammy for Buena Vista, but he also received a $100 000 fine from the US State Department for breaching the embargo against the communist regime. And he was ordered to undertake not to make another record in Cuba without permission.
When he applied three years ago for leave to return to Havana, he ran into a wall of bureaucracy. ”After we got into trouble for Buena Vista, we hired this team of lawyers that specialises in this kind of issue,” he says. ”They lobbied for one whole year. The lawyers made the appeal and did the paperwork and we went to congressmen and senators. The State Department sent us to the US Treasury. And then they sent us back to the State Department.”
That they got nowhere is unsurprising. Exemption from the law prohibiting any form of ”economic activity” by US citizens in Cuba had never been granted in the 40-year history of the embargo. And they certainly weren’t going to bend the rules for Cooder.
When he produced Buena Vista Social Club in Havana in 1996, the American guitarist probably did more to bring Cuba out of cultural and political isolation than anyone else since the blockade was imposed. Worse, from Washington’s point of view he has also inadvertently given the biggest boost to the Cuban economy since Soviet aid was cut off. Seven million people around the world bought the Buena Vista album. Many more saw Wim Wenders’s film. And a sizeable percentage of them have been sufficiently enchanted to visit the island.
By the beginning of 2000 Cooder’s lawyers were advising that the chance of him being given permission to revisit Cuba was non-existent. Then, at the last moment, with George W Bush about to enter the White House, Cooder appealed personally to the outgoing president. Clinton overturned the State Department’s ruling and directed it to grant the exemption.
Cooder got to make his record in Cuba. But his exemption lasted only a year and is now exhausted. ”I’ve got some great ideas for more Cuban records. But I can’t see this administration allowing me to go back,” he says.
Which leaves us with Mambo Sinuendo. Featuring a swinging sextet of two electric guitars, two drum sets, congas and bass, it is unlike any of the other records in the Buena Vista series — a twanged-out, rocked-up version of the kind of 1950s mambo jazz once played by the likes of Perez Prado and Stan Kenton.
”I felt we had to get off the road we’d been on because we’d been doing one kind of thing with those Cuban records,” says Cooder. ”So we decided to make an instrumental electric guitar record.” That alone makes it unusual in terms of Cuban music. Cuba is one of the few countries where the electric guitar has failed to take hold.
Rather than the guitar, Cuban musicians have always favoured the tres, an acoustic instrument with three pairs of strings and a quite different, harsher and more percussive sound. Cooder himself has taken tres lessons, and his immersion in Cuban music in recent years goes some way to explaining why Mambo Sinuendo is the first album in more than a decade on which we’ve really heard him play serious electric guitar. ”I haven’t had any reason to play electric,” he says unapologetically.
His long silence has been our loss, for he is one of the great rock’n’roll stylists on the instrument. Remember the spitting slide guitar on Mick Jagger’s Memo to Turner from the film Performance? The growling licks with Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band on Safe as Milk? The brilliant blues-based excursions of his solo albums such as Into the Purple Valley? No wonder the Stones considered him as a replacement for Brian Jones, after he had provided the central riff to Honky Tonk Women. He turned them down. Even then he wasn’t interested in being a rock star.
Nor is Cooder a fan of his own playing. ”I’m not one for travelling or performing. To make records is what I always wanted to do. Yet it never seemed to make me feel good. When I was making all those records in the old days it never felt real to me. I stopped doing it because I got so disappointed.”
Yet his 1970s albums such as Into the Purple Valley, Paradise and Lunch and Boomer’s Story were remarkable, and helped to introduce a new generation of rock’n’roll kids to the dustbowl ballads and depression-era blues of Blind Willie McTell, Woody Guthrie, Sleepy John Estes and Leadbelly. Wasn’t that a justifiable exercise in itself? ”It was a good concept. And it still holds water. But I just couldn’t quite get the execution of it,” he says.
He thinks even less of his later albums, such as Bop Till You Drop, Borderline, The Slide Area and Get Rhythm. ”That was fucking around. There’s no context to those records. They didn’t reflect my feelings. So I quit.”
That was back in 1988. After that he retreated into lucrative movie soundtrack work and formed a short-lived group, Little Village, with Nick Lowe and John Hiatt. Then he found musical happiness far away from rock’n’roll via a series of genre-bending world music collaborations.
Cooder had first flirted with world music on his 1976 album Chicken Skin Music, which introduced mariachi and Hawaiian sounds. But in the mid-1990s he made a trio of Grammy-winning albums that flirted with different musical cultures. A Meeting by the River in 1993 was a collaboration with the Indian musician VM Bhatt. Talking Timbuktu, made the following year, was a joint effort with the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure. Then he recorded Buena Vista in Havana in 1996.
Whereas Buena Vista was a ”turn-on-the-tape kind of experience, with a bit of buffing and polishing”, he describes the new record as ”machine-tooled”. The rough takes he recorded in Havana were taken back to Los Angeles, where he spent months in the studio refining and editing them. ”It’s as far-flung a piece of production as I’ve ever done because it really bears no relationship to anything we did in the studio. When you go to make a record that has a different design, it takes time. We had to find what we wanted. But we pulled it off.”
Mambo Sinuendo is the first release on his own label Perro Verde (Green Dog). He now plans to use the label to release ”all sorts of music which I love, but which is absolutely useless commercially”.
For his next project he has had to turn away from Cuba and back to his native Los Angeles. ”It’s a story about the burying of a little Mexican barrio community where the Dodgers stadium now sits. There was a town with a school and a church and they just covered it with cement in the 1950s and erased the neighbourhood.”
Cooder is putting the music to a documentary film about what happened to them. ”It’s a real LA story of corruption and greed,” he says.
Yet you get the feeling that musically his heart still lies in Cuba. However much they may disapprove in Washington. — Â