Ry Cooder, who hardly plays live, performs rare S.F. shows strictly for a good cause

September 29, 9:25 PMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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Photo by Susan Titelman.

Ry Cooder doesn't get out much. By my reckoning, it's been eight years since the legendary guitarist/producer played much guitar in public for a general audience in the Bay Area. That was in February 2000 when he sat in with the Buena Vista Social Club at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland.

So, it's a huge deal that Cooder is playing two nights, Thursday and Friday, Oct. 2 & 3, at the Great American Music Hall in a "guitar-bass-drums" trio with Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner. Granted, it's a huge ticket price, too. But the $100 tariff is for a good cause—the Richard deLone Special Housing Fund, which aids folks afflicted with Prader-Willi Syndrome.

Last year, Elvis Costello reunited with Clover for the same cause in the same location, likewise on the eve of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. (You can read Joel Selvin's detailed 2007 preview here.)

Unlike Costello, however, Cooder's name won't be found in the Hardly Strictly lineup. Notoriously reclusive, the Santa Monica–based Cooder has essentially limited his most recent Northern California appearance to signings for the CDs (and books) in his trilogy of 21st-century recordings—Chavez Ravine, My Name Is Buddy and the latest, I, Flathead.

Taken together, the three CDs reveal Cooder as an imaginative storyteller, able to weave historical truths, political intrigue, and cultural mythology into magical-realist narratives populated by characters of striking depth and complexity. Meanwhile, while retaining Latin tinges, he has eased comfortably into a blues-based sound that recalls such early recordings as Into the Purple Valley and Boomer's Story. But now he's playing original music—and fewer slide solos. Almost none.

When I interviewed Cooder in his work space at the Santa Monica Airport in 2005 in advance of the release of Chavez Ravine, he claimed that "people don't want hear me playing goddamn bottleneck guitar," and he's arranged his career as if that's true, even though it's not.

Just what he'll play with Lowe and Keltner remains to be seen and heard. (Without John Hiatt out front, don't expect much Little Village or Bring the Family material.) But that it's happening at all is one of those brilliant surprises that compassionate intention can bring forth.