Ry Cooder:
“Everyone was looking for the next Byrds. So Taj and I formed a band, because that’s what you did.” Except that this band, given the pair’s propensities, was unerringly off-target. The singer sounded like a 50-year-old bluesman, the guitarist played electric slide, an approach then unfamiliar to most rock ears, and both swore by a genre thought to be long dead, to the extent that anyone knew it had ever existed. Signed by Columbia Records, the Rising Sons, as they called their quintet, represented Taj and Cooder’s attempt to set their beloved Mississippi Delta, Texas and Piedmont blues to a rock ’n’ roll beat.
“All we wanted was to play some blues with rhythm, with drums and bass,” Cooder says. “Which wasn’t what the record company was interested in, at all. So the whole thing fizzled out, and that’s the long and the short of the Rising Sons.” Some of the band’s music was first-rate electric blues; the rest was pretty sterile pop-rock. Columbia issued a single in 1966, comprising covers of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Candy Man” and Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman,” and shelved the other 20 songs. (They were finally released in 1992.)
by Tony Scherman
Ry Cooder: “People tried to teach me to read the page and understand theory,”
“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be taught. I think there was something about me that resisted being taught anything.I didn’t like school, I didn’t like the teachers, I didn’t like the whole set-up. I wanted to do it myself. So I found that I could. The only thing is – it takes longer. If you’re going to go on your own, it’s going to take you awhile.
The Rising Sons - Dust My Broom (Johnson)
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