The Marc Ribot solo every guitarist should hear
If you ask people to name the greatest guitarist of all time, a lot of them would reach for names like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Brian May, Eddie Van Halen or Slash, but when looking into the most interesting or innovative guitarist, those same names wouldn’t likely get a look-in from anyone anymore, but Nels Cline might, and Marc Ribot certainly should.
Thanks to his avant-garde and innovative style and his classical training, Marc Ribot is one of the most fascinating and enervating guitarists you could hope to listen to, and I’d rather sit through a hundred of his offcuts and outtakes than even one of Clapton’s so-called Greatest Hits.
Ribot is so talented that one of his former bandmates, John Lurie from The Lounge Lizards, once quipped that “Marc is a musical genius. So many ideas are coming out of that guy that it is actually often a problem”.
It’s hard to describe his style without reaching for clichéd words and descriptors like angular and biting, but he’s got as fantastic dexterity as any guitar great needs to, knowing when to wield it and when to hold back, as evidenced by his meandering, evolving and exploratory fingerwork on tracks like ‘Aqui Como Alla’ or ‘Natalia in E-Flat Major’.
We’d have a much more interesting musical landscape today if more of our contemporary players had been exposed to and inspired by people like Marc Ribot or Nels Cline, Eddie Hazel, Tom Verlaine, Carlos Alomar and Robert Quine than just sticking with Clapton and co. While there are still some incredible guitarists out there now, like Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram, Lloyd Reid and Courtney Barnett, it’d be nice if we had even more of them.
Perhaps every budding guitarist should be made to listen to Ribot’s guitar solo on Tom Waits’ ‘Clap Hands’, which modern day guitar-hero St Vincent once described as being “one of my top three favourite guitar solos ever”, or else, they should be made to listen to his cajun style and soulful, swaggering, gutsy and grooving guitar part on Waits’ later epic ‘Hoist That Rag’.
In fact, you could teach somebody how to master and manipulate the instrument using only examples from his work with Tom Waits, before you ever got to any of his own solo songs and bandwork, like on his guitar opus album with Los Cubanos Postizos where he alternately plays like Phil Upchurch, Carlos Santana or a Swordfishtrombone, or else his session work with artists as varied as Caetano Veloso, Allen Toussaint, Wilson Pickett, Diana Krall and Madeleine Peyroux or Marianne Faithfull.
Ultimately, though, it was that work with Waits where Ribot got to show off his most exciting and incredible, unrestrained and unadulterated playing, and one of the greatest examples of his talents being unleashed can be heard towards the end of ‘16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six’ on the live album Big Time.
Ribot attacks the song with controlled chaos, launching into an industrial and metallic-sounding scratch and scrape of notes, like he’s cutting the strings with a saw. He’s cutting into the song and shredding it to pieces, ripping it up in all the most inappropriate ways, which, of course, in a Tom Waits song, are all the most appropriate ways, too.
Maybe, though, with the way the world is right now, with Trump’s authoritarian SS-style Ice agents pulling both citizens and immigrants alike off of the streets of Minnesota and taking them to who-knows-where, Israel continuing to shoot, bomb and destroy their way through the ceasefire and the far right on the march in more than a few countries around the globe, we should all be listening to the most recent Marc Ribot and Tom Waits collaboration instead, and their 2018 recording of the anti-fascist anthem ‘Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful)’.
