When Ry Cooder and I got to El Mirage Dry Lake, it was 110 degrees and heading to 117, hot enough to cook your head inside your hat. The Mojave Desert in daylight will cut the gizzard right out of you, Tom Joad once said, which is why the Okies crossed it at night.
I put away the map and Ry pulled the SUV through the gate and stopped. The gravel road fell away below us and vanished into the bone-white lakebed. The mirage was working: A shoreline shimmered wetly in the distance, made of bent sunlight and sand.
El Mirage Dry Lake sounds like a place one step away from nonexistence, but it’s about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, out among the Joshua trees. It’s not far from Edwards Air Force Base, in the Mojave’s military-paranormal sector, where secretive government installations lie low among the jackrabbits — a land of spy planes, space aliens, off-road vehicles, sturdy reptiles and people with freaky desert habits such as racing vintage hot rods on dry lakebeds.
It is, in other words, a critical stop on Ry’s California trail.
Ry Cooder — the rock and blues guitarist, roots musician, record producer, songwriter and composer — is a son of Santa Monica who has spent nearly 40 years exploring all corners of the musical planet, like a sharp-eared extraterrestrial on a lifelong voyage of discovery. (His two-CD career anthology, released last month, has a perfect title: “The UFO Has Landed.”)
But even that barely covers it — it’s strictly from his solo albums and the haunting scores he wrote for such films as “Alamo Bay” and “Paris, Texas.” If you add all the records he has made with other musicians, you can only wonder where on earth he could go next.
The answer: his own backyard.
Ry’s latest project may be his strangest and most ambitious. It’s a trilogy of concept albums, plus a short novel, that resurrects a lost California of places and people that Ry, who is 61, remembers from growing up in the 1950s. It was a drier and poorer place then, but rich in things he likes, such as simplicity and ingenuity, good musicians, cool cats and hot cars. Time and neglect have bulldozed most of it into oblivion.
“I like beautiful things, and things that are tough and serious,” he told me.
We were headed to El Mirage, the site where he posed by an Airstream trailer for his first solo album.
From the ’20s to the ’50s it was a magnet for white, working-class hot-rodders, the kind of people who form the core of his California trilogy, along with steel-guitar players, Okies, Arkies, Mexican-American dance-band leaders, zoot-suited Pachuco hipsters and the occasional space alien.
Ry talks the way his song characters do, in quick, fluid bursts that smack the ear and linger there, all strange and memorable, both sardonic and sentimental.
“We’re going to El Mirage, which is still El Mirage and will always be El Mirage,” he said. “You can’t do anything with it. You can’t exploit it. You can’t figure out any way to make money on it.
“It’s terribly dry but beautiful,” he said as we hit the high desert. “It sure is good for the eyes; it sure is good.”
He had brought CDs for the road: country-and-western guitar pickers and late-’40s Chicano dance music. .
In a few minutes we were all rolling onto the lake bed. The ride was bumpy and then less bumpy and then smooth and then real smooth: a pool table in all directions. A Predator spy drone, out of Edwards Air Force Base, buzzed overhead, presumably checking our faces against terrorist databases.
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