Ry Cooder

IT MAY BE that American readers of this book may wonder ‘Why?’ And even perhaps, ‘Who?’ It is an unfortunate fact that Ry Cooder, a Los Angeleno born on 15 March 1947, remains under-appreciated in his native land, while a measure of his success in Europe, and in particular in Britain, is that at the start of 1982 he was able to sell out no less than eight consecutive nights at London's Hammersmith Odeon, thereby improving on the record set a few weeks earlier by Status Quo, a band whose appeal is much easier to fathom.