The place where the river flows
There is such a thing as a flow of discovery. I once read a review of Ry Cooder’s Chicken Skin Music, a review that plucked the record out of the henhouse of obscurity and dusted it off for me to rediscover. As with all Cooder discs he had interesting guests, this time including the Tex-Mex musician Flaco Jiminez and the Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar legend Gabby Pahinui. I enjoyed the LP very much, and it spurred me into one of my slightly predictable retail plunges. I bought Chicken Skin Music. Then I bought his first and second releases, Ry Cooder and Into the Valley. Then I bought Paradise & Lunch, which is an all-time great in desperate need of a reissue. When I stopped sucking up the Cooder I re-listened to Chicken Skin Music. This time Gabby Pahinui really caught my ear, so I did some research and discovered that Cooder played on Pahinui’s LP The Gabby Pahinui Hawaiian Band Volume 1. I bought it and fell in love with it. This opened the floodgates and I began absorbing Hawaiian music like it was air. I also pumped up the Hawaiian music section in the store where I worked. I must have had the largest Hawiian section west of Maui.
