Ry Cooder’s critically acclaimed album, first released on Nonesuch Records in 2005, make its vinyl debut. The two-LP vinyl edition was remastered by Martin Pradler from the original high-resolution source files and pressed on 140-gram vinyl at Record Industry in the Netherlands. The set comes in a gatefold tip-on jacket made at Stoughton Printing with a twenty-page, full-colour booklet. The first in his California trilogy, the album is a post-World War II–era American narrative of “cool cats,” radios, UFO sightings, J. Edgar Hoover, red scares, and baseball. A tribute to the long-gone Los Angeles Latino enclave known as Chávez Ravine, using real and imagined historical characters, Cooder and friends created an album that recollects various aspects of the poor but vibrant hillside Chicano community, which was bulldozed by developers in the 1950s in the interest of “progress”; Dodgers Stadium ultimately was built on the site.
