Tom Waits’ go-to guitarist on his journey through blues, punk, jazz and beyond: “The musicians are caught up in a ritual”...
Tom Waits’ go-to guitarist on his journey through blues, punk, jazz and beyond: “The musicians are caught up in a ritual”…
WILSON PICKETT
“Land Of 1000 Dances”
ATLANTIC, 1966
“…Midnight Hour” was one of the first three tunes I learned with my junior high school band, which was called, by the way, Love Gun. We were very ambitious 15-year-olds! Wilson’s music, in particular “Land Of 1000 Dances”, worked to get people into a dancing frenzy. It’s about dancing, it’s self-referential. But there’s something about it that transcends itself. On Horses, Patti Smith quotes an entire verse of “Land Of 1000 Dances”, and she was also somebody who’s aiming for this ritual hallelujah. That said, Wilson Pickett was not a nice man. I toured with him for a month in 1982 and I witnessed him and his bodyguard being violent with members of the band. I escaped through my ability to play country music licks on guitar.
ALBERT AYLER
Live At Slug’s Saloon
ESP-DISK, 1982
The Lounge Lizards, the band I was working with from about 1984 ’til 1989, kind of aspired to be Albert Ayler. But we weren’t ready to perform with that degree of freedom. We came up with something else nice, but it wasn’t that. Ayler was getting away from the cliches of jazz, but he was not going into more and more complex changes. He was simplifying it harmonically, almost to the same language as rock. The musicians are caught up in a ritual. Live At Slugs, no-one is going to win any awards for the best-recorded audio of the century, but you know something is going on. It’s like being at the back of the room at a voodoo ceremony and seeing the knife go up, seeing some red stuff squirt, hearing the chicken squawk.
ALLEN GINSBERG
The Lion For Real
ISLAND, 1989
This is a record I’m very proud to have played on. It kinda changed my life. Hal Willner produced it, and he was famous for putting people from the beat generation together with punks and no-wavers who they would never have ordinarily met. This record was one of the most successful of those collaborations, and it was really loony. Allen loved working with musicians. Like a lot of the beat poets, he envied improvising musicians’ ability to create in real time, and he tried to write like that. It was a great experience – Allen couldn’t have been more open. Let’s face it, he was a dirty old man. But to his great credit he continued to be a good friend, even after it was clear I wasn’t going to sleep with him.
CARLA BOZULICH
Evangelista
CONSTELLATION, 2006
I see we’re developing a theme here, the theme being ritual, and Evangelista has got to be in there as a key example. It’s just a brilliant recording, and almost everything she’s done has been great. Carla is one of the most underrated performers ever, I think she’s just a genius. She was a really tough street punk who went through a lot of shit we can’t even imagine, who managed to get some connection with the LA poetry scene. She was close with Nels Cline and wound up listening to everything, including jazz and contemporary music, and processing it all somehow in her brain. So if [her music] doesn’t fit into any single genre category, that’s because it can’t.
TOM WAITS
“King Kong”
ANTI-, 2006
Of the Tom Waits stuff that I played on, it’s one of the lesser-known tracks [from Orphans]. In fact, it’s not a Tom Waits tune, it’s a Daniel Johnston tune. For those who don’t know Daniel Johnston, he made these wonderful recordings on cassette that managed to channel the deepest rivers of American music. He could take a very familiar story and retell it in ways that were not familiar. This tune is basically a recounting of every single scene in the Fay Wray movie King Kong, except it’s recounted as tragedy, and from the perspective of King Kong. Tom’s version is one of the heaviest tracks he’s put out. It’s one of the ones where I feel like we caught up with our blues influences.
PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO
Paquita La Del Barrio
SONY MUSIC LATIN, 2014
We gotta mention Paquita La Del Barrio, since she recently died, and since so few gringos know who she is. Now, it’s often the conceit of the Mexican romantic ballad that the singer is expressing a great deal of anger at somebody who has betrayed them, and this anger is motivated by a wounded love. But in Paquita’s case, the anger is so extreme that it really calls into question how much love was ever there in the first place. There’s “Que Me Perdone Tu Perro”, the lyrics of which say, ‘Please apologise to my dog for comparing you to him.’ Then there’s “Rata De Dos Patas”, which is ‘Rat With Two Legs’. It doesn’t exactly sound like punk rock but, man, she’s an honorary punk rocker.
BRANDON SEABROOK WITH COOPER-MOORE & GERALD CLEAVER
Exultations
ASTRAL SPIRITS, 2020
Brandon is doing amazing stuff coming out of the New York scene as a guitarist, an improviser and a banjo player – he manages to make this great music on an instrument that most of us usually want to run out of the room when we hear played solo. Boy, am I going to get in trouble for that! But most of his stuff is on guitar. When I improvise, I try to work off the motif. Brandon is also working off motifs, only he’s doing it with a degree of chops and sophistication that I could never imagine. Cooper-Moore is a very original player, amazing energy, amazing ideas; Gerald Cleaver is also a real thinker and a groovy player. And so the three of them together, it’s something that people should check out.
WILLIAM PARKER
Mayan Space Station
AUM FIDELITY, 2021
Ava Mendoza is another guitarist coming up on the downtown scene, and she has a real incredible range. She’s great as a straight-ahead rock player and she’s done some beautiful solo recordings. But my favourite stuff so far has been her recordings with William Parker. She and William improvise together beautifully. And William is not just a great bass player – he and his wife Patricia Nicholson Parker founded the Vision Festival, which has been a focus for a whole scene. If you’re looking for the organic, living continuation of Albert Ayler, you’ll find it at those gigs. People are still doing great things in New York. We’re in the process of a coup d’etat in the United States, so it’s up to everybody to resist by the best means available.
Marc Ribot’s new album Map Of A Blue City is out now on New West
