Into the Purple Valley by Ry Cooder (Vinyl record album review)

Album name: Into the Purple Valley

Artist name: Ry Cooder

Year: 1972

Number of discs: one

Label: Reprise Records

Collection: Friedman

Buy it on Amazon: $44.99

My review

Level of familiarity before listening

I’ve never listened to this record before, but it’s the second that I’m reviewing by Ry Cooder. The first, conveniently also called Ry Cooder (1970), was pretty good

What I expected

Blues and rock.

What it was actually like

Like the previous Ry Cooder record, this one was mostly covers of songs from the traditional, folk, blues, country and rock traditions. His schtick evidently was to reimagine those songs, often as harder country-rock songs with electric guitar distortion; Taxes on the Farmer Feeds Us All was quite representative of that, and I thought it was good.

How Can You Keep on Moving and On a Monday were both a little Oompa Loompa, but worked great as rock songs.

Hey Porter was the song that I was most looking forward to hearing, since I love the original so much, but Cooder’s version was quite unrecognizable. It was much slower with mandolin and piano, and weirdly lacking in the whole train atmosphere. This was definitely one that should have been taken from country-rockabilly to rock.

Billy the Kid sounded like it was just a mandolin and an electric guitar, with no drums, and I felt that it also came together really well. I also thought that Denomination Blues was great, especially the unobtrusive horns part that added a lot to it.

Most of the rest of the songs fell apart in one way or another, such as the two guitars on Vigilante Man that sounded like they each didn’t know about the other, making it less of song and more a few tracks laid down on top of one another.

The worst, though, was definitely F.D.R. in Trinidad, a sort of acoustic folk-calypso with rhyming couplets, which I found really horrible.