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‘I wanted to make people dance, or cry, or puke’: Marc Ribot, the wildcard sideman for Tom Waits, Robert Plant and more
He started as a jazz guitarist making Barbie albums on the side, and has ended up on over 500 releases. From bebop with Elton John to Americana with Alison Krauss, Ribot recalls the richest of careers
Photograph: Frans Schellekens/RedfernsBut this restless and charmed career would have seemed a pipe dream during his early days in New York, when he was a 24-year-old jobbing guitarist clinging to his belief that “jazz was the music of freedom” and gritting his teeth through gigs with veteran bebop organist Brother Jack McDuff. Led by painter John Lurie, the Lizards charmed the hip cognoscenti of New York, and on New Year’s Eve 1984, Tom Waits clambered on stage for their punk-jazz rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Alongside his own songs, Ribot covers the Carter Family’s apocalyptic vision When the World’s on Fire, and adds music to Allen Ginsberg’s Sometime Jailhouse Blues; For Celia is inspired by Heinrich Heine’s poem The Lorelei, and Holocaust imagery.
Or read this on The Guardian
