The otherness of Marc Ribot's guitar is a familiar sound to fans of the off-centre. Best known for his work with Tom Waits, Ribot's inventive licks add an immediate essence of strange to any recording. Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, Tricky and The Lounge Lizards are among those who have had him reaching for his beeper - valuing him as someone always eager to meet a musical commission with a serious freshness quite rare in contemporary music.
Currently exploring the Cuban aspect of his orbit, Ribot has called his band Los Cubanos Postizos, the bogus Cubans - how else could anyone from Newark, New Jersey get away with it? That said, Ribot's musical education was certainly a broad one taking him from classical to garage band and beyond. While he has long striven to discover just where exactly his music comes from, and how it works, there has never been any question about the guitar itself, his chosen instrument from an early age.
"Well, guitar meant that I didn't have to deal with other people. If you play tuba or drums then you are eventually brought into contact with other members of orchestras or bands. But a guitar was something you play alone. At the beginning I wanted to be Hendrix and Keith Richards, but because my aunt was close friends with a Haitian classical composer and guitarist called Frantz Casseus, they decided I should study with him. He needed students and so it was decided, over my 11-year-old head, that that was how it should go."
Ribot moved to New York in 1978 and worked for various musicians passing through town, among them Brother Jack McDuff and Wilson Pickett. As part of a Stax sound-a-like outfit called the Realtones/Uptown Horns Band, he later found himself working in a more permanent pick-up capacity with everyone from Rufus Thomas to Solomon Burke. After that came The Lounge Lizards, as Ribot firmly established himself as a player in the New York clubs. But long before his days in the so-called Downtown scene and his work with The Jazz Passengers and John Zorn, he recalls earnestly cranking it up in that New Jersey garage, and getting ready to take on the world.
"I didn't know how to play with a pick, but other than that, I was ready. The first songs we learned were Green Onions by Booker T. and the MGs, Backdoor Man (which we thought was written by the Doors) and Midnight Hour by Wilson Pickett. And we didn't do bad. I'm not telling you that later on we learned Vanilla Fudge's version of Keep Me Hanging On! so our tastes were pretty much the same as any other moron in a garage band in New Jersey in 1968."
And so it seemed that the good intentions of his aunt and his teacher had come to nothing. Ribot, motivated by the usual teenage guitar-hero motivations, was simply intent on playing loud electric guitar. But the classical lessons had not been wasted. The legacy was that he couldn't use a pick - something which was to cause all sorts of problems when it came to flashy and extended solos.
"What it meant was a very indirect way to where I wanted to go. At first, I just wanted to get on stage and play really fancy stuff and make girls like me, but I couldn't even do that. Not being able to use a pick, and being left handed, was a technical impediment. But being technically impeded worked to my advantage in the long run. Not being able to play as fast as the others forced me to think a little better about what note to choose. And that saved me from a fate worse than death."
The guitar is perhaps one of music's most over-employed and yet underused instruments. There are any amount of guitar players. There are any amount of very good guitars players. And yet very few tend to do anything much different from anyone else. Having grown up hearing Django Rheinhardt and Jimi Hendrix, it must surely have seemed to the adventurous Ribot that most things, guitar-wise, had already been well and truly done. And in that context, what was it that led him him believe that anything interesting and new was even possible ?
"Where we get the nerve, you mean? Anthony Coleman, who is a composer and a member of Los Cubanos Positizos, has a son who was really into Green Day. Then one day Anthony gave him a Hendrix record and he got really depressed. The next morning he was still sullen and Anthony asked him what the matter was. He was only 11 years old and he said that nobody of his generation would ever play anything that significant. And he was kinda right too. But it's not just his generation, its my generation as well. Ten years ago I would have blabbed on about post-modern this and juxtaposition that, but now I just say that I don't even know it's a problem."
Guitarists and their antics have long been the cause of considerable alarm. Indeed, the whole idea of the guitar solo is, in certain circles, some kind of gross offence to good taste. Certainly the excesses of heavy metal gave the guitar solo a very bad name indeed - and rightly so - but it did leave actual guitar-playing musicians in a difficult place. Things have changed a little with the recent re-emergence of Santana, but for Ribot, it was the very oddness of his sound which saw him survive to become an integral part of only the very coolest records. It was his association with Tom Waits in particular which made him the thinking music fan's guitarist. He gave an edge to everything he worked on with a music which sounded inside-out, aggressive, spare and very, very different - unless of course you had already heard Howlin' Wolf's sideman, Hubert Sumlin.
"Both me and Waits are fans of Howlin' Wolf, and Hubert Sumlin is an enormous influence. But copying his licks is not the point. What's interesting is that he was willing to make the guitar be extreme enough to match Howlin' Wolf's voice. It's not a question of a good guitar solo or a bad guitar solo, it's whether the guitar solo does, or does not, make the text of the song. And I don't just mean the words either. It's everything from the snare drum to the mastering decisions. The intention with Waits was always to do something which made the lyrics make sense. With the last album, he just said to avoid genre altogether." Working with Waits gave Ribot a clearer insight into his own music. Much of it had certainly stemmed from those early days when, unable to use a pick, he was forced to invent a style of his own, peppered with those carefully chosen notes. But it was also a time when he began to produce what, in a pop sense, was his best work - something which led him to examine in great detail the actual components of the music itself.
"People talk about the downtown scene but, let's face it, one person in every 100 million heard the records people like me and John Zorn were making. But I basically had one moment where I played something that was useful in the pop sense. Maybe one solo on one Tom Waits record - Jockey Full of Bourbon. So that's what started it for me. I started thinking about it - what was useful and what was there. And I saw that it was a kind of myth made out of putting together gypsy music a la Django Rheinhardt, Cuban music and certain early rock things like Duane Eddy. These were all sort of mushed together into one sound so I wanted to take them back apart again."
The current project, Los Cubanos Postizos, does exactly that - with Ribot mixing his usual angular attack into all sorts of odd textures and bountiful Cuban rhythms. The CD Muy Divertido, his second for Atlantic Records, coincidentally arrives at a time when Cuban music is going through a revival in the US. While he admits to being a little put-off by the current trendiness of the music, he points out that his interest in it has always been more to do with its impact on the other music which informed him as a teenager. As he reminds the listener, Cuban music was part of the formation of rock 'n' roll.
"Louie Louie was a cha-cha - Chuck Berry also had a clear interest in Cuban and Mexican music and I'm not talking about Havana Moon - I recommend Hey Pedro. The Positizos is all about making people dance. And to tell you the truth, if I could go out on an endless tour where people got up and danced every night, I'd be happy never to play for a sit-down jazz audience again. How about that?"
Muy Divertido by Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos is on Atlantic Records.