Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder, like T-Bone Burnett and Tom Waits, is an American roots musician with an imagination dipped in Beat-inspired weirdness. I, Flathead, the final installment of his "California Trilogy," is a kind of sci-fi tale about Kash Buk and the Klowns, a fictional rockabilly/roadhouse band that also appears in Cooder's novella of the same name. None of this really matters, though. If you dig quirky American rock and roll with a dash of Doug Sahm's Tex-Mex pep, guzzle this brew right now.

Many of guitarist Ry Cooder's best albums are movie scores, including the folk-culture clash
of 1985's Alamo Bay and the purple-prairie atmospheres of 1989's Paris, Texas. So it makes
sense that, offscreen, he writes music like a film director. I, Flathead completes Cooder's
trilogy of albums about endangered subcultural California (following 2005's Chavez Ravine
and 2007's My Name Is Buddy), and a deluxe edition of this CD comes with a novel... More >