A knife, an eyeball and the childhood accident that shaped Ry Cooder: “Hallelujah! Thank God!”
Nine times out of ten, most guitarists will regale how they first picked up the six strings after noticing their guitar-playing peers at school were frequently surrounded by a gaggle of adoring girl fans. In Ry Cooder’s case, however, a gruesome accident in childhood sowed the seeds of his eventual rock stardom.
We can’t celebrate such a traumatic episode in Cooder’s life, but the results speak for themselves. An authoritative miner of the Americana blues, folk, and country sediments, Cooder would find himself an in-demand session player for the late 1960s’ roots rock explosion, jumping from Magic Band duties with Captain Beefheart to lay down guitar parts on The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. Years later, after countless solo efforts and session credits, Cooder would help push Cuban music to the world as the co-organiser of the Buena Vista Social Club music collective.
He’s certainly left an indelible mark not just on rock and pop but as an explorer of the myriad terrains music has to offer across his decades-long output. Such an impressive CV was shaped by bizarre circumstances, however, reaching right back into his Santa Monica childhood at the sprightly age of four, when he was playing around with a knife.
It was never going to end well. Somehow, he’d got his little hands on the blade, with which the preschool Cooder began to pry loose a part from one of his many toy cars that slipped in the process, with the knife headed straight for his left eye and near-enough slicing the eyeball in half. It could have been much worse, but the young Cooder was now sporting a glass eye from then on.
“So I was despondent, quite withdrawn at that point,” Cooder recalled to Guitar Player in 1993, “I just didn’t know what to do. I was a sensitive little kid. It was pretty rough. It was terrible trying to adjust and make sense out of such a horrendous thing, because kids don’t think bad things are really going to happen, unless they’re from El Salvador or South Central Los Angeles.”
“They grow up knowing that down there, but your average little white kid, born and raised under more or less copacetic circumstances, cannot imagine personal danger like that,” he added, “So I kind of went into a tailspin.”
Losing your eyeball at such a young age would bring any four-year-old’s mood down. Yet, spirits would be lifted in the form of a Sears Silvertone tenor four-string, the budget alternative to a real guitar that orbited a ukulele and was typically ordered straight from the namesake retail catalogue. To Cooder, however, it was as if Christmas and birthday arrived at once.
Struggling to sleep late at night, classical viola player and friend of the family, Leo Brager, placed the four-string on Cooder’s stomach while in bed, taking one strum and altering his life there and then. “Hallelujah! Thank God!” he reflected, “That was a rare example of some kind of intervention, of getting what you really need. And it went on from there. It was a way to make myself feel good.”
It makes all the sense in the world. Suffering a nasty accident and lamenting the damage done, the proto-guitar’s hallowed entrance into Cooder’s childhood naturally would symbolise recovery, excitement, and a distraction from the slings and arrows life can throw your way. It’s likely served much the same purpose throughout the rest of his career, the strum of a guitar able to ward off the doldrums with the same optimistic glow over 70 years later.
