Marc Ribot - You May Not Have Heard Of Him, But You've Probably Heard Him
If you're a fan of Tom Waits' weird stuff, like Rain Dogs, Frank's Wild Years and his latest Real Gone, check out the above video. It's of two songs from a date in Amsterdam on the Real Gone tour. Take note of what is going on musically when Waits isn't singing. The drumbeat just sort of lurches on at the same pace, the bass isn't really a factor, but that guitarist...It wasn't until I watched this bootleg concert that I realized how much of Tom Waits' signature sound comes from the efforts of his guitarist Marc Ribot. It's sort of like a rapper working with a favorite producer, in the sense that the Rakim may be fine on his own, but if you ever wonder why he never achieved the heights of his first few albums again, you may want to take a closer look at the less heralded Eric B.
Now that I've pointed out how integral and distinct Ribot's work is on Waits' records, every time you hear a solo or distinctive guitar riff, it's going to stand out, kind of like how you never noticed the arrow in the FedEx logo until someone pointed it out to you. You can thank me for that later. For now, you ought to check out the large body of solo work that Ribot has amassed with various projects. In addition to playing with other artists as diverse as Solomon Burke, Elvis Costello, Medeski, Martin & Wood and Harry Shearer(?) he has released several very interesting solo albums that I didn't know about until yesterday.
My favorite, and infinitely the most listenable to the non-fan of crazy avant garde music, of all of his solo works are the two albums he recorded with the Los Cubanos Postizos. Translated as The Prosthetic Cubans, (rivaled maybe only by Keith Richards and the X-pensive Winos as the greatest backing band name in history), they interpret traditional Cuban music Ribot-style. So imagine that sharp, metallic guitar snaking its way across shuffling Latin rhythms in the kind of marriage so unholy that of course it ends up working. Anyone who all of a sudden realized two paragraphs ago that a big part of what they like about Tom Waits is the work of his guitarist would be advised to check these two albums out today.
MP3: Baile Baile Baile from Muy Divertido!
The first was simply titled The Prosthetic Cubans
Video of the group performing courtesy of archive.org
