Ry Cooder

Walter would always get great scores in his movies.

You know, his big collaboration was mostly with Rai Kuda.

But those scores are all great and mostly fairly hard to come by.

I mean, I think Intrada released the 48 Hours soundtrack, both of them actually, many, many years after the movie came out.

Jesse Ed Davis, a very, very underrated guitarist from the 1970s, uh, on guitar.

Ry Cooder, you've heard of that guy.

Yeah, he's also playing guitar on that.

Uh, James Thomas on bass, Sanford Konkoff on drums.

blow you away.

I mean, Steve could have been Ry Cooder as well as the devil he played in Crossroads.

So as

I was there, I was at the set every day watching him play.

And I was out.

Ry Cooder would come to the studio at Steve's out his little garage.

And those guys would write songs.

and, and we would, and then I would leave, we would leave and they would write.

The Magic Band were the big hit of the event, which had multiple bands playing multiple stages.

But the man who was by now starting to become known as Captain Beefheart dragged Doug Moon to see The Rising Suns and pointed to their guitarist, a 17-year-old named Ry Cooder, and told Moon through gritted teeth that that was the type of playing he'd been telling Moon to do for ages.

"Now do you get it?" The Rising Suns were never very successful, but their members all went on to greater things.

The least successful was Jesse Lee Kincaid, who is now best known for writing She Sang Hymns Out of Tune, which was later recorded by Harry Nilsson, but did little else.

Beefheart spent much of the teen fair scoping out the competition, and he'd also noticed the drummer of another group, The Maltese Men, who were playing at the next stage along from The Rising Suns.

But he decided one thing straight away.

Ry Cooder was going to be joining the Magic Band.

Now all he had to do was persuade Cooder to go along with this plan.

hopefully there's other things you pick from other places that fill in the gap, you know.

And so like I love Ry Cooder, but I've never gone through, I've purposely tried to not sit and actually really try and sound like him.

Yeah.

But I've listened to him a lot, and he's a huge influence.

That's super interesting.

Really cool.

So from here, where did you go? Obviously, we just went through looking at Ralph Mooney, and then we talked about Ry Cooder.

Were there more influences that kind of inspired your playing from there? Or was that the pantheon?