Borderline

Precious and few are those who can take possession of the inanimate figures of Rock'n'Roll wax museum, get 'em on the good foot, and send them out to Boogaloo down Broadway. The Persuasions can do it, simultaneously preserving a lost vocal style and adapting modern songs to it. Willie DeVille can do it, with a voice so timeless to be utterly transcendent. Bruce Springsteen can do it, illustrating the isolation of the individual soul with panoramic lyrical and musical settings. The Cramps did it, briefly flirting the volatile root impulses of Rock'n'Roll before it consumed them.

The rest are mere curators and impermanent visitor's to the vaults.

And then there's Ry Cooder.

Listen… with your head, and understand the impeccable taste and consummate artistry of Cooder the craftsman, the master who rebuilds songs to his own blueprints, furnishing them with exquisite guitar noises: particularly on the instrumental that remains unidentified on the white label of this acetate, and on the slow-funk versions of 'Johnny Porter' and 'Made Your Move Too Soon' that close each side.

Listen again… and your heart knows what your head understands. Cooder can take a secondhand emotion and turn it into a showroom feeling, probing the wound and weaknesses you forgot to remember to forget. Cooder could take something as insipid as Jim Reeves' 'He'll Have To Go' and give it the intimacy of a confessional, or orchestrate the magnificence of Bobby King singing 'I Can't Win'. Here he exorcises the melodrama from Billy Joe Royal's Pop smash 'Down in the Boondocks', and then strolls up the castanet-lined avenues that are the domain of Willie DeVille with John Hiatt's tragic 'This Is How We Make a Broken Heart' – when will someone put Cooder and DeVille in a studio together? A Gospel-styled chorus enlivens 'Why Don't You Try Me?', and Cooder takes a poke at Tom Waits to remind us to…

Liston once more… with your funnybone, and there's Cooder singing songs with the talking bit in the middle, drawling about the dangers of Yellow Roses of Texas with 10" straight razors instead of thorns, and the undoubted social advantages of owning a car.

Listen also… with your motor nerves, and strut to Wilson Pickett's '634-5789' or the version of 'Speedo' (which is this album's failure – if there can be such an animal on a Cooder LP – the Cadillac's classic original now being so hackneyed that even Cooder's playful funk cannot restore the spirit of Earl Carroll's braggadacio).

Stop. Look. But…

Don't listen… to me anymore. There is a new Ry Cooder album afoot. Get it before it gets you.

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