Everything Is Weird: Taking inventory of Ry Cooder's guitar collection

This article originally appeared in the Fretboard Journal's 2018 Electric Guitar Annual 

By Jason Verlinde

Photographs by Reuben Cox

“No more snare drums,” Ry Cooder sighs. That’s the dictate Joachim Cooder gave to his father. Ry’s Gear Acquisition Syndrome hasn’t slowed down, and his son would like him to apply the brakes. “I’m his curator,” Ry explains and then adds, with all the parental pride one can muster, “Get this—I got him a set of Elvin Jones’s hi-hat and ride cymbal!”

We’re sitting in the music room of Cooder’s Santa Monica home. It is exactly how you’d imagine it. Cramped with cases, vintage Fender and Standel amps, drums (Joachim may have a point), weird Japanese guitars and, leaning lazily on a rack, two of the most iconic instruments recorded since the ’60s: Ry’s two, endlessly copied, never-quite-finished Fender Stratocasters. 

It’s a bit of a mess right now, something the 71-year-old guitar hero simply shrugs off. “I’m a one-man shop. I don’t have little guys who come in at night like elves and take care of things for me. My wife says, ‘Can’t you get an assistant?’ I said, ‘What do I tell them to do? It’s all me.’”

During the time of my visit, Cooder had just unveiled one of his finest albums ever, 2018’s The Prodigal Son. It’s filled largely with gospel and bluegrass tunes that Cooder has transformed into his own thanks to his usual stellar guitar playing, some great vocal work and incredible percussion accompaniment from Joachim. It’s a triumph. The problem at hand now, on the day of our talk, was how Ry could re-create the damn thing on the road. As we sort through his gear, old and new, during this interview, Cooder is cracking jokes, describing how the album came to be, and most importantly, calculating just how many flight cases he owould need to custom order.

Fretboard Journal: Based on the material found on the new record, I have to ask: Have you found religion?

Ry Cooder: Yeah, they said I would be asked that. I’ll put it this way. It’s 2018. In 2015, Joachim and I went on tour with Ricky Skaggs and the Whites. We’re going to do quartet singing and country songs, so we spent about a year—Joachim and I would fly to Nashville and rehearse with them once a month—it took about a year to get that repertoire together. I found that the most interesting of all the songs, just Hank Snow, Hank Williams, but the best fun is the gospel songs, because they’re the most rousing, I guess you could say the most involving. You get into it. That’s what it’s all about, that music. You feel it. I’d always liked it.

It’s what got me interested in bluegrass when I was in high school. And I went and got a banjo back then, I was going to learn banjo and play the music. But it didn’t work out, I didn’t end up doing it. But I had learned all those songs and I knew them, I had memorized them all. I used to think the bass part is the most interesting, that’s the fun stuff. I don’t have a bass range or anything, but when we were rehearsing they said, “Well, sing down there. It sounds good,” because they all sing up high. The sisters and Ricky, they’re all tenor singers.

We got going on this, and then as we went along the highway, doing shows, I said, “You know, you guys want me to sing this Hank Snow song or this Lester Flatt song.” I said, “I don’t have any business singing this stuff. I don’t think I can pull it off.”

“Oh yes, we like it. We like your sound on that, so go ahead, do it.” I said, “Yeah, I just don’t know. I don’t think I’m there.” And they said, “No, do it.”

“Okay.”

So, I persevered and I kept doing it, and especially singing the quartet stuff. By the end of the tour, I had gotten to where I began to think, “This is okay.” I used to shy away from that. I used to sneak “Jesus on the Mainline” or something onto one of these records, for all these years, some [Blind] Alfred Reed tune… just to have a little extra fun without making a big deal out of it. It was just there.

I also would say that I always remember the audience liked it—they would respond to these tunes. [The songs] have a lot of traction or something. It’s very appealing music, naturally. People wouldn’t have been drawn to it through the years if it had been boring. It’s anything but.

By the end of the tour, then I thought, “Well, you know what? I’m going to think again about doing these tunes. At my age and station, who’s to say it’s wrong? I’m just going to give this some serious thought.” And then Joachim came and said, “It’s time to make your own record.” You could see the audience was there, they liked what you’re doing. That tune “You Must Unload” was the one that the people would go crazy for, they’d stand up.

I said, “Well, okay. Should I be singing this stuff? You mean, make a solo record?” I said to him, “Make a solo record of that kind of material?” He said, “Yeah, if you like, it play it. Just play it. You don’t have to worry about accordions and banda horn players and whatnot. And forget about politics.” He said, “That’s hopeless. It’s no good. It’s a lost cause. You’ve done all that.” I said, “Yeah, I agree with you.” It hurt my back, I used to get so mad. My acupuncture doctor said, “No more of that stuff.” She was Chinese, she was very strict.

Then I thought, Okay, but I’m not the Singing Rambos. I’m not going to be able to do that the way it was done. Or the Stanley Brothers or the Foggy Mountain Quartet. We don’t have that here in Santa Monica. And it really doesn’t exist. Ricky [Scaggs] and the Whites are kind of it, in terms of quality. In terms of living in that world and growing up with that music, and being that. But when you’re from Santa Monica, everybody talks about, “Uncle Billy Bob taught me how to do this, and sang in church.” And as I always say, there’re no uncles in Santa Monica to speak of. There isn’t that lineage and that DNA here. It just doesn’t exist.

This is strictly a backwards ball cap, Range Rover town. Although, it used to be an aircraft worker town. Those people were transplanted boarder Southerners and did like Merle Travis and so forth, but that world is long gone. That’s the Kash Buk world. Joachim said, “No more Kash Buk.” He goes, “You did that. You can’t keep going down that road.” He said, “People don’t know what that’s all about. Skip it. Just sing these good tunes that you like to play and we’ll do it.”

That was the initial thought to the record. Gospel music, yes. Simple music, beautiful, I really love it very much. Then one day I came in here and Joachim was here, sitting with his tracks on the screen, and he had this little watery kind of fluid dapple light effect sound that he was working with, that he had created. And I said, “Is that a new song of yours? Is that something you’ve got lyrics to or something?” He says, “No I’m just fooling with it.” Then I said, “Well, can I borrow it, because ‘Straight Street’ will go right over top of that easily.” “Straight Street” by the Pilgrim Travelers was a real flat-footed walking rhythm gospel tune from the ’50s. 

If you’re smart, you don’t say, “I will be the new Pilgrim Travelers.” It’s not going to happen. And for that matter, African-American people today don’t sing like that, either. Nobody does, or almost nobody. More about that later. I said, “But I can resing, I can redo ‘Straight Street.’ The lyrics are good. And this thing that you’re doing,” I told him, “suggests this kind of a slightly more ambient, easy way of doing the song. It’s not shouting and stamping, and it’s certainly not Mavis and Pops [Staples]. It’s more in my hands, something I can do.”

So, I did that. We took the track out to the engineer’s house, I sat there and put earphones on and sang it, and then played the guitar at the same time. I said, “That’s good. That’s an idea. Let me do some more like that.” So there were other tunes on the record that were done in that way, and it was encouraging and I could see this is fun and I like it. Then we said, “Well, let’s cut some live stuff.” So we did that too, in the studio.

Also, based with a playback of these ambient tracks of his also in there, giving us something to just surf along the top of. So you don’t have to do everything from just brutal scratch. That’s hard, because it gets to the point where you just don’t know anymore. “I just don’t know. What’s the right thing to do?” You know what I mean? “Do I like this groove? Do I like that groove? Do I like this key? Do I like this other key?” I just can’t take that and it’s too much, it’s too hard. But he already has the key, then, with the playback.

It’s a nice key, he’s figured this out. He’s sensitive to keys. “Harbor of Love” is the best example of that on the record. That song is light years away from Carter [Stanley]’s original, which was 3/4 time. Now it’s vaguely in 4/4 time. But it gave me some place to occupy, to sit there. So, back to your question about religion: It doesn’t really have too much to do with religion. It’s just the songs that I like, that I feel ... What’s the word I want? I’m not sure what the word is. But it is a long-time thing. I’ve known these tunes for a real long time. And I’ve always liked them through the years, decade-in, decade-out.

“Harbor of Love” is the perfect example. The lyrics are good. Carter Stanley was a great songwriter, in that back-porch style of his. He’s not a Nashville pro. He wasn’t. Wherever he had come up, through church or his mountain man experience, he was able to really compress it into something. He had a lot of good tunes. Funny, sometimes, and terribly sad…  “Mother’s Not Dead.” Did he write that? I’m not sure. I think he did. It’s like, “Whoa, what a brain up there.” It isn’t something I grew up with, like Ricky did from birth, in the house, in the community, in the village. Church on Sunday? Nothing like that here. This is, as I say, a ball-capper town. An artisan, olive oil town. Whatever people are into.

It’s not a question of faith for me or anything like that. I’m strictly just outside the tribes. I’m not a tribe member of any tribe. But I like to play this stuff and sing it. Now it’s been so many years of trying to make records, and learning to do that…it takes a lifetime. To learn to play and sing something that’s good, I guess. Unless you’re born into it like, say, Ira Louvin. God help you, but if you are Ira, it’s a tough road. But you could be that great in that one particular way that he was very great.

But we of Santa Monica can never do that. That could never happen. I also have seen that a long way. Whether it was Hawaiians or Mexicans or blues people that I wasn’t one of. But of course, I will also have to add, with Joachim with me, now we’re a sort of duo. That whole record is just us, with Aubrey Haynie on one tune. Young Robert Francis on bass on one tune, but the rest of it is just me and him.

FJ: Did you record in this room?

RC: No, this is kind of a research and development room. [From here] we go to the engineer’s house, Martin Pradler out in Chatsworth, and do the piecing together, the assembly-type songs. Or we go to this little studio in Hollywood and actually record together for a little bit more air and drum resonance. But it’s just the two of us. And that’s doable…it’s fun. It’s what I know how to do and he knows how to do. And then you sit and say, “Well, is this a record?” Who the hell knows what a record is anymore? I’m not sure. What purpose does it have? Again, I don’t know, except I can tell you that now we’re fated to go out on tour.

FJ: What does that look like?

RC: Well, at age 71, to assemble a tour machine from scratch—you deserve everything you get! I mean, you really have to work at it. Which amp? Which cord? What bass? What flight case? What shoes? Let alone the people! After the record was done, so like, say, August [2017] or so, Terry Evans got sick and passed, my main singing partner for almost 40 years. What? Terry’s gone and Bobby King, basically preaching in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is not traveling for music. Arnold McCuller is under contract with James Taylor for the rest of human history. I said, “What am I going to do? How do I find people to sing that way?”

FJ: Because it’s a real singing record, as much as it is a guitar record.

RC: We can play as good as we want, but you have to sing. These songs call for this, and rely on it, you must have it. So, Arnold being resourceful, said, “There’s only one way.” He said, “That’s this trio called the Hamiltones. Young Southern black guys from Charlotte, North Carolina.”

I looked them up. “Aha, I see what you mean.” A real group, a real singing group. Young, but different. They still have that church feel, so they didn’t just come up through hip-hop. I could tell this. But then finding them and getting them into the mix…that took months and months and months. I began to panic. That tunnel of panic. Because you could see I’m stuck in this tunnel and I don’t get through. We’ve taken all these dates and we have all these commitments, and what happens then? It’s a nightmare. I started to really not sleep and everything. But then it all worked out.

I went down there, met with them. We sang, it was good. I said, “Okay we’re sharp.” It’s not going to be the same as it used to be; it’s a different feel, a different vibe. But, hey, they’re it. And I think it’s going to be okay.

FJ: Had they heard of you before?

RC: No, no. But then they did, then they saw what I had done. There again, YouTube is very handy.

FJ: You’re checking them out, they’re checking you out.

RC: Yeah, that’s how you do it. That’s how you demo people. I don’t know, I was scared. Am I going to have to actually audition? That’s insane, I can’t do that.

FJ: And will this be a tour of just that material?

RC: No. I can do a lot of these old tunes with them that I haven’t been able to do for a long time. And going back to similar-styled songs, we did some down there. They just got a hold of it, and just nailed it. I thought, “The people are going to like this because it’s from the archive, so to speak.” Fun to play, easy though. I don’t want any hard songs. We’re a stripped-down kind of thing. It’s not a big band. There are no keyboards, there are no gangs of people.

Robert Francis is on bass, and he’s really good. We’ve known him…Joachim and Juliet have been together since the seventh grade, so I’ve known Robert since he was a tiny kid. He is a really good bass player. I had to show him some of these patterns. And being half Mexican, he’s got enough of that DNA to get the Latin riff down where you don’t play one. Stay off the one. That was a big lesson of mine when I was young. Somebody laid that down on me. Said, “You will like it if the bass player doesn’t come in heavy on the one.”

It’s like everybody’s got glue on the soles of their shoes, why is that? Milt Holland said, “Go to the Latin side, you’ll be a lot happier,” and it was true. So I have to school him a little bit, but he can do it. And then we have this young friend of Joachim, Sam Gendel, who plays saxophone through weird harmonizing effects, so that he gets this kind of cloudy, tone center thing. And he’s really good, and suddenly it sounds almost like, not an organ drifting through, but sort of Jon Hassell-ish, that kind of stuff. Very interesting, especially on the ballads. He’s real good there. I also gave him the bass saxophone. I say, “You’re going to want to play this.” That horn, which is about his size, through those pedals, should be so amazing.

FJ: I see what you mean about the woes of heaving to tour with all this stuff!

RC: Well, it’s a funny collection. Everything is weird and everything is individualistic and has character, which it should. Nothing off the showroom floor. So we’ll see. 

FJ: What guitars were on the record, and what are you going to take on the road?

RC: All right, Well, of course we all know this is the favorite bottleneck guitar, of course. It’s been worked, reworked yet again. [Ry holds up his sunburst Coodercaster.]

It’s a Valco [pickup]. I had the Valco in there and it was good. But I found out that the earlier generation of this from the ’40s, the way they made it, each string had its own coil,for Christ’s sake! Each pole. Each one has its own winding instead of one thing like this. Now this thing is the shit. I mean this thing is real raw and powerful. It’s beautiful. It’s really something. So I got [a pickup] thanks to Reverb. I’m one of their best customers.

I had this put in and it’s much bigger now. The other one was pointy and kinda yanky. I was not happy. This was always good, but this is now really ready. It’s like having a super charger on your 390 Ford or something. Pretty cool. Then I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do. Several of the songs have that long-neck eight-string Vox-bodied mando-thing. 

And then this one is the old Strat from ’67, reworked yet again. I think it’s good now.

FJ: What’d you do to this one?

RC: I always had trouble with this one, because it doesn’t have the open sound that the other Strat does. I don’t know why. Different wood or whatever it is. It’s good, but it was always kind of just clanky. So I’d taken the stock pickups out years ago, way back. And then put the Bigsby in, but I wasn’t satisfied, so I kept trying different things and finally got this nice Guyatone pickup in here that’s really sweet.

FJ: And the horseshoe pickup?

RC: I think it’s re-chromed. What’s in there is not the Rickenbacker magnet. It’s a Fender Telecaster magnet, if you please, that Rick Turner rewound and mounted inside the horseshoe for more high end. It’s like something in the dentist office. But it’s wired in series, it’s pretty rich. The beauty of this guitar is that it’s so playable, the neck is so good. And I had this since ’67. I know what it is.

[On] some of these guitars, especially the Japanese ones, their necks were not their best deal. They were great at electronics, I thought, but sometimes you go and play and say, “Oh Christ, where is it?” The linkage on a Nash Metropolitan, “Oh, it’s there…somewhere.” I’ll use this because it’s real solid. It’s really there for you. It may not be the prettiest—if the prettiest ballad guitar is the Gretsch Country Gentleman with the single pickup. But this is serviceable and it’s also pretty, but it is really easy to use. It’s just a Fender. It’s solid, doesn’t feedback. I never worry.

FJ: I love the tuners on it.

RC: I don’t know what those are. [Truetone Music owner] Paul Flynn put those on at some point, I think. Who knows? Fender tuners are like…[sighs]. No offense to anyone, but it’s impossible. You’re going, “Excuse me, folks, while I get my pliers out and tune.”

Me and Roseanne Cash are going to do this all-Johnny Cash program. So I said to her, “Where is Luther Perkins’ Esquire? I bet you know where it is.” And she said, “Yeah, my brother has it.” John Carter Cash has it.

So, I went down there to see him and borrowed it. Let me tell you, that is a Fender. It’s not even the black pickguard fancy deal, but a white pickguard. It’s a ’55. So, it has a very narrow round neck, which I like. People didn’t care for it, so they went back to the “V” shape, I guess. But the sound of it… It’s Luther Perkins, but only that. I don’t think that guitar is any use for anything else, but it will do that.

I sat here playing it. And you can really say, “Yes, it’s very solid.” Like when I was in the fourth grade and I heard that stuff, Johnny’s records, I thought, “Man, I like that sound. That sound is interesting. Who’s playing that? What is it?” I had no idea what it was. Eight years old, I didn’t know. And that’s the guitar.

What [Leo Fender] did was he made a Ford Maverick or a Pinto version of what Bigsby was doing. But Bigsby had the bar all through the body, from the nut contact to the bridge contact. Well, Fender wasn’t going to do that. That costs money. He took a lot of the cosmetic and visual ideas, but considering it’s a Ford Pinto, it’s pretty good what Fender came up with. It really is. Not everybody can want something as peculiar as a Bigsby, I guess. They don’t. But this is a very versatile idea. I don’t like the Telecaster as much as I like the Esquire. I don’t know why. It seems like it’d be the same guitar, but somehow it’s different.

Then, let’s see, what do I take. I don’t know exactly yet. [He grabs a brown archtop with three pickups and a Bigsby.] This thing…this is fun. This was in Ben Harper’s family’s music store in Claremont. Somebody had taken it all apart and put weird homemade pickups on it, and it was bad. He was going through the store one day, so he said, and found it up on a shelf so he gave it to me. They had shaved the neck way down, which they did a really good job [on]. It’s too big and it’s too much air, but I put these—these are Premier from back in the day, which means they’re probably D’Armond. But they’re funny somehow. They’re real good. They’re twangy. Put the Bigsby here…

This is great. This thing is like real Country & Western. I may take that. Although, we don’t—I’ll probably use it at the Johnny Cash show, but I don’t know if I’m going to need it at the touring show. It’s a good guitar. It’s real loud. It’s fun-looking.

This would be a ’50s, what they call the ES-5 because it had the middle pickup, too, which is useless. Absolutely useless. I don’t know what the hell they thought they were doing. We just took the P-90s out, because it just sounded terrible. It was so thick and fed back like crazy. So, we put these in and blocked it here. It’s ugly, but it’s real good-sounding. Put the Premier switches in there. So, that’s a nice guitar. That’s all right.

And then this thing [Cooder grabs a long-neck Fender Bajo Sexto Telecaster.] On the record, maybe you listened to the thing about the guy who gets evicted? You know, “Gentrification”?

FJ: Yes.

RC: That’s this. I’ve had this for years. This is a prototype they made with a long neck. I think they meant for it to be a baritone guitar. This was at the NAMM show one year. This was way back, the ’80s. I walked in saw it. I said, “I want that.” And the guy said, “No, you can’t have that. That’s the prototype.” I said, “No, I am going to have that.” I really like it. It’s beautiful, wrapped in this drum pearloid and spray-painted. I mean look at this thing. It’s gorgeous. And the neck is really good. Whichever guy in the custom shop made this, he did a beautiful job. It’s really finely done.

They made a few production ones, but it didn’t catch on, so they stopped. But I did get the prototype, and it had, of course, Telecaster electronics, proprietary. So I took that out, naturally. This is an eight-string Fender 1000 pedal steel pickup, for that kind of Ralph Mooney sound. And these… This is two String Master pickups that go together, where the tone knob just dials either one or the other or both in the middle, wired up in series. Then I gave it to this fella in Nashville to put in the B-bender. It’s very hard because of the length. So he had to put this extended arm, but it allows you to do all those crazy B-bending things. This thing’s fun to work out on. It’s really good.

That’s what’s on “Gentrification,” making all those fun things happen. It’s a nice instrument now. It’s a bitch to handle because of the B-bender thing, and it’s heavy. It’s work to pull, it’s like a valve spring from a Peterbilt. I asked, “Can you make it just a little easier for me?” He said, “No. It’s a leverage thing.” It has to have it. So, I’m going to take that. And partly for variety and partly for fun.. You have to have fun.

I don’t end up playing the same thing all the time because I do end up playing the same thing all the time. That’s the problem. I got like three basic different things I do, and if I just keep doing them, then I keep doing them. Pretty soon the audience is going to be looking at their watch and so forth.

FJ: Tell us about this Bigsby-looking guitar.

RC: [Builder] Eric Galleta loaned it to me. This is amazing. He X-rayed [Bigsby’s] No. 1 and 2 so he saw what was inside. And the way it was made—look at this seam. This is joined. It’s all one, the outside and the top, but it’s hollow. The back is like a tray. It fits in. This bar is in there. See, this here is a volute-like thing? The bar goes that far up, and it’s big. It’s like a rectangle. It’s like a rail, and it contacts inside the…underneath the nut and down in here.

Some of the first electrics were like that, and they sustained forever if you have nothing else to inhibit it. Because [Merle] Travis had said to Bigsby, “I want to sound like Speedy.” What is that? That means short scale, like a steel, and then endless sustain. When you play, there’s hardly any difference between the strings, but they have this real tremendous explosive velocity. They go off like mad, right away. Bang, they go. That’s what Travis was after. He wanted to sound like Speedy West. And this does, if you play it a certain way. Eric does a beautiful job, quite aside from the cosmetics, which are cool. This is a prototype. I said, “I like any kind of prototype, because somehow I feel…it’s like birth.” But he’s not going to sell that to me, I don’t think. No reason why he should. He said, “If you want one, I’ll make you one.” I said, “Well, what if it’s different? Then what do we do?”

Now, here’s a great guitar [holding a silver triple-pickup Teisco Del Rey]. I got this on Reverb and paid hardly anything for it. Look at this thing. Super high-end Teisco, really fine. You could get rid of all the guitars and just play this. I’ll honestly tell you, this thing is amazing. If you play it just the bass end, it’s just Duane Eddy. There it is. You can sound like Hound Dog Taylor. You bottleneck this thing and it just rips your fucking face off. Very elegant. Pear-gray paint. Probably piano paint.

I’m telling you, this guitar for $500? I saw this. It was a little more than five but it was under 1,000. I said, “What, are you kidding? I want that.” Rosewood fingerboard, of course. But this thing sounds so good. [Guitar tech] Paul Flynn had to do some work on it, sure. He had to set it up better and re-fret it and everything, but I mean,Jesus, and put new pegs on it. This thing kills. Through these amps, it is so ferocious. Yeah, it’s real dramatic. People are going to say, “Jimi who?”

So that’s going. All these things need flight cases. We’re working on which bass drum. Which this, which that. It’s crazy.

Have you heard “Shrinking Man” on the record?

FJ: Yeah.

RC: This thing is a bad boy [holds up an electric Kent mandola]. This thing just screams. It’s so big and loud. It’s no good acoustically, obviously, but when you fire it up, let me just tell you. And it doesn’t play in tune. You can barely tune it. Mandola scale. I played it on the Ricky tour. You want to really rip the audience apart, you go after them with this. It’s like, “Oh my gosh.” For blues, it’s something. It’s a hell of an axe. That’s going to go. That needs a flight case. A little tiny flight case.

FJ: This is getting expensive!

RC: Oh, it’s so true. I have so much to do. And it is so expensive. Everything costs a fortune. Look it. This is Joachim’s equipment. This box and then a bunch of flight cases that he does his stuff…because he’s going to open the shows. He sits there with a one-man band effect, with these array instruments that he plays. And Robert’s going to play bass with him and Sam, the horn player is going to play with him, and then we go. So we have to carry everything, of course.

FJ: [Looking at a Harmony Strat clone.] These cheap Harmonys are amazing.

RC: Well, this was a cheap Harmony, but now it’s got a Lloyd Green steel pickup, a real one with a Super Guyatone there. Flip Scipio did that, and man, this is a nice guitar. This is a real twanger. I mean I’ve got all these instruments, right, that are all specialized. They do something really good. If Merle Haggard were to call me and say, “Come on with me,” I’d say, “I got what you need.” Or if Hank Snow were to say, “Come on with me,” I’d say, “I got what you need.” But that’s not going to happen. Nothing like that ever happened.

FJ: At least you’re ready.

RC: I was always trying to be ready. [Cooder grabs a nine-string acoustic parlor guitar.] This weird nine-string Lyon and Healy blues guitar, from the ’20s, it’s made out of pear wood, I think. It’s total crap, but it’s what I played on “You Got to Treat a Stranger Right.” It’s good. This is your basic Big Daddy Stovepipe guitar, if you know who he is. He played one of these. This thing really honks. But this pickup, that’s a story all by itself. You will never hear this or see one of these. Do you know who Kim Sinh is?

Hanoi, I believe, is where he lives. Blind. The main form of music in Vietnam is called Cai Luong. It’s this long song form, endless, unrepeating. I don’t know how they learn it, because it’s not verse-chorus, but they sing and they play, and it’s this weird scale. They have the scalloped fingerboard and they press the string down. You see it all over YouTube. It’s just fantastic, just so wicked. I was crazy about this music and it’s impossible to learn, unless you’re born learning it.

Here came this guy, blind, really old, had never fought in the war, so all his friends died in the war. But he had been a lap steel player in nightclubs in Hanoi where they had the swing bands, which were then outlawed, of course, by the new regime. He became a national treasure. He can play the Cai Luongand he can play all the Cuban stuff on lap steel. Fantastic, just fantastic. You can even see him on YouTube. 

So, we brought him over here one time. It’s a long story, but we brought him over here to record. It was quite impossible. That’s a whole saga. But while he was here, and he had a translator—who was no translator—but while he was here, he had one of his guitars and it looked like this, a small guitar. And he had this pickup. It sounded so good. I said, “What on earth? Ask him what that is.” And they blabber away for a while. He made it. “What did he make it out of?” Well, the parts of an electric fan and these screws… “He assembled it himself out of parts?”

“Of course,” he goes. The wire and all this—he made it out of nothing!

I said, “Well, I’ll be damned. Tell him it’s one of the best electric pickups I’d ever heard. So he gets a screwdriver and he goes like this: “Here.”

So, I put it in this guitar and it’s sensational. I wish I had a hundred of these things. I wish I had many more, because it’s far better than any damn hoity toitypickup that’s for sale at any music store. It’s just big. It’s just real barky. Real exciting. Kim Sinh!

FJ: Is this on the latest record?

RC: “You Better Treat a Stranger Right.” That’s what you’re hearing when you hear that. Now, this guitar is horrible. Look at this. The thing is a mess. It barely holds together. It’s all buckled, and cracked, and broken. I got this from Reverb, but it plays.

If you crank it up, it won’t feedback. Beautiful sound. Big without being all midrangy and horrible. I’m scared to even have Paul work on this thing. I said, “It needs so much work, but why do it?” If it’ll just sit like this and not go south on me, it’ll be all right. Yes, pickups by Kim Sing, I tell you, I wish. I wish I could get more.

So I’ll take this so I can play “…Treat a Stranger Right.” It’s real good. All this changing guitars is going to wear me out. Now, the big question is, do we sit down or do we stand up to do this. Standing up is so hokey. It’s all right for bluegrass players, but to do this in a semicircle would be a little more interesting. The horn player has to sit down. Drums sit down. I don’t want the drums in the back. I got to see him. If you look at this video maybe they’ve put up yet, I’m not sure if they have, it’s good, you see exactly what it is. The singer’s not in it yet. You see the four of us. Joachim and me are like in sight lines. I don’t want him back there because then he can’t see what I’m doing. He’s got to see. He knows by movement. Joachim knows here comes the chorusor here doesn’t come the chorus. Or here comes the breakor he’s going to play some more. Or now he’s going to sing. But if he can’t see me, at least from the side, he won’t know. He won’t like that.

The business of standing up pop music with the drummer a mile away is crap. I don’t like it. No reason for it to have to be that way. Classical music, you sit down. What the fuck is wrong with that? They have for a long time. We’re going to see about that. And it would save the wear and tear on my back, if I don’t have to stand. Standing is good, too. It has its place. It’s nice. Easier for people to see, but I’ve got so much to do. I have to be able to think. When you stand up, you don’t think. You’re just responding all the— Just go, go, go, go.

FJ: Do you feel you play differently standing?

RC: Oh God, yes. I can’t go to the same place standing up, because I can’t—the leverage is funny. Even if I wear the guitar like Riley Puckett up here, it’s still the difference between the contemplating of the thing and the just strictly like the delivery of the thing is going to be the real difference. I’m 71, so I have to think about that. If the singers don’t care, they don’t care what they do. I’m thinking it might work. It’ll look nice. Blues guys always sat down. Too tired to stand up, I think. That was Jim Dickinson’s theory. You’ve got to be tired to be a blues player. I mean really tired.

FJ: What’s the story with the Green Man? What’s going on in there?

RC: Green Man solved all my problems, basically. Not all the life problems, but almost. One day, I said, “Danny [McKinney], you know, my problem is these magnetic electric guitars, magnetic pole pickup electrics, and these amps. Everything is so goddamn forceful. I feel like someone is tying me down, making me eat something I don’t want to eat. It’s just so maddening. I can’t come at the note. It’s like you’re attacking the note. I don’t play that way. I try so hard to back off my hands, and to back off the thing. But it doesn’t quite work.” “Oh,” he says. “You’d like stereo…  Spread the source out so it doesn’t always have to be one-point source, which is so annoying.”

I said, “Yeah, I’ve tried stereo, but the machinery is bad. It’s not good. I don’t like the way they operate.” He said, “Well, people make stereo pedals that aren’t good. They’ve got the wrong kind of stuff in them.” He knows all this. He said, “I’ll make you something with a transformer, the right transformer, the right tubes, and a volume for when you have one guitar that’s loud and one guitar is soft.” Like that old [guitar] there. It’s got hardly any output. Well, if you go and you crank up the Green Man, turn the volume up, Iif it’s a loud guitar like one of these Fenders, you have to turn it down a little bit. It’s all where you feel good.

Then it’s got stereo output, but it’s also got phase switches. Let’s say, for instance, this would be out of phase with this and they don’t sound good. You can correct for that. Not only that, it has EQ. It has tone control, which he devised, which he simply made to roll top on or off, if a guitar is so bright, if it’s really so bright. And he put it in this Variac container. I had seen it in his shop, and I said, “Will the guts fit in that thing?” He said, “Well, with no room to spare.” I don’t know how he did it. You ought to see what’s inside. It looks NASA-grade, like a Sputnik-type thing. It’s really funny to look at the inside.

Well, then, there it was. That was the whole point. It softened it and broadened it, which was exactly what was needed. Fantastic. I’m never without it.

FJ: Before Joachim broached the subject of doing this record, were you over the concept of doing an album?

RC: No, you never say that, because you know something is going to come up. But I had not figured what it would be to get started all over again. Let alone, forget about the public, because the public doesn’t buy records. I’m not saying they wouldn’t. They just don’t. They might, but then again, they might not. I don’t think in those terms. “Okay, we’ve got sales in Fargo, North Dakota—it’s pretty good, but it’s falling off in Bismarck. Why is that? Get on the phone. Call the program director.” Nobody does that anymore. So, I can’t honestly say. For me, I just thought, “Well, we’re all playing good.” The idea being that me and Joachimplaying together is a real accomplishment, that really is something. The rhythm and the sensitivity is unprecedented for me. I can’t call up “Big Sid” Catlett and even if I could, he’d be bored to death at what I do.

As Steve Earl said, “Oh, you grew yourself a drummer.”

FJ: Pretty much. That’s got to be the coolest feeling in the world.

RC: It’s the best. And of course, when he plays, what’s interesting about his playing is that it’s humorous, and it keeps me from losing that. You have to keep that. Lightness is good. Swing, but light. Like an old-time swing drummer, but funny. He plays funny things. When he does that, it gives me something to work off of, of course. Almost like jazz. I thought I would record, but I had no idea. If he hadn’t prompted me, I might be still sitting here looking at amps and guitars.

FJ: I love that thanks to Reverb and your brain, you’re still on the hunt for great gear.

RC: That’s the wonderful thing. I’ve always loved instruments almost more than anything else. Joachimused to say when he was a little kid, he’d say, “You don’t ever do any work. You just mess around with your equipment.” I said, “Don’t say that, now.” I do do work.

“Well, you’re always home.” I said, “Well, that’s true. I like it at home. Actually, going out there is awful tiring.” But I had so much fun on the Ricky shows that I thought, Well, now there is a way to have fun. This could be good. This doesn’t have to be just a nightmare of overwork and bad food. We could make this happen.

I guess I have no hobbies. I don’t play golf or raise bees. Although, we should all be doing what we can for the bees, but it’s just this. It’s all I know.