‘I wanted to make people dance, or cry, or puke': Marc Ribot, the wildcard sideman for Tom Waits, Robert Plant and more

The Guardian

27-05-2025

'I felt like a warrior for this viscerally powerful music I heard all around me. I heard it in Richard Hell's band at CBGB. I heard it at block parties, in the Cuban music bleeding through the walls of my Lower East Side apartment. I heard it in Haitian rara, in Croatian wedding music. I couldn't figure out yet what all this music had in common, but I was ready to go to war for this cause. I wanted to reach people's souls and make them dance, or cry, or puke.'
Marc Ribot is on a phone call remembering the kaleidoscopic sounds of the New York he moved to in the late 70s, in an acerbic New Jersey drawl that melts with the warmth of the memory. In the decades since, Ribot has gone on to become a wildcard sideman treasured by icons and iconoclasts including Tom Waits, Marianne Faithfull, Robert Plant and many more. He teaches at the New England Conservatory, and has released dozens of collaborations and solo albums exploring his various fascinations with Latin pop, jazz, avant-noise, protest folk and much more. Now, he's made his first vocal album at the age of 71: Map of a Blue City, which has been in the works for three decades.
But 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. 'He would fix me with his infamous death-ray glare across the bandstand every night – I was not, and have never been, a good bebop player.'
He persisted, his nights spent transcribing solos by freethinking jazz artists such as Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler, his days spent earning $50 a session for novelty albums starring kids' characters such as Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake. It wasn't until he saw jazz-adjacent No Wave groups – James Chance and the Blacks, DNA and the Lounge Lizards – that he found the kind of scene he'd moved to New York for, and Ribot ended up joining the latter band.
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. Waits invited Ribot to play on 1985's Rain Dogs, and amid a starry cast of guitarists – including Keith Richards – Ribot was the most idiosyncratic, duelling ribcage-rattling marimba on Singapore, etching the gothic Cemetery Polka and channelling southern soul on the sorrowful Hang Down Your Head.
Waits wasn't interested in musicians who simply played the parts he assigned them. 'We were all involved in the process of creating,' Ribot says. 'There were no written charts or orchestrations; Tom would play guitar or piano or congas, set a rhythm and a vibe, and then we'd come up with parts. He conceived his songs theatrically, asking the listener: who is the singer? What kind of bar are they singing in? Are they breathing their disgusting breath into your ear? It's like as a guitarist, you're always making choices: play loud or soft, simple harmonies or discordant tone clusters. Are you a remote god atop a mountain, bellowing commands to the faithful? Or are you whispering in somebody's ear? We always tailored our playing to support the stories the songs told.'
Ribot also joined Waits's live band. 'We rehearsed 60 to 70 songs. And Tom could call off any one of those, or something we hadn't rehearsed, and you had to roll with it. Tom was a demanding bandleader – he needs stuff to groove, and if the band is being wishy-washy, it wounds him personally and physically. You've seen footage of him in concert, banging the mic stand on the stage? That's not a gimmick, that's him telling us to get with the program. But he was always respectful. Tom understood the difference between a musician and a servant.' Ribot has continued to work with Waits over the years since, though Waits hasn't put out an album since 2011. 'Tom's processes are a deep mystery to everyone, probably including himself. But he knows that if he wants to jam, I'm here.'
After Rain Dogs, Ribot's session career blossomed in myriad directions, working with Elvis Costello, Madeleine Peyroux, proto-industrialist Foetus and many more. 'The few people who've hired me as a one-size-fits-all player or asked me to play like I do on Tom's records have been quickly disabused of their concept,' he says. 'What I try to do is make sense of what I'm hearing. I didn't play what I played on Tom's songs because I think that's 'good guitar' – it made sense on those songs.'
He has the unflappable confidence of a hotshot sessioneer who's held his own alongside absolute legends. But when T Bone Burnett invited him to play on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's 2007 album Raising Sand, Ribot was 'totally intimidated', he laughs. 'My junior high rock band was called Love Gun! Like every other guitarist in the world, I always dreamed of playing Whole Lotta Love! I took 20 different fuzzboxes in with me: finally, I get to play some metal!' Raising Sand was, however, an exercise in Americana, which nevertheless suited Ribot's playing perfectly. 'Still, whenever I'd hear Plant's voice in my headphones, I was like Dr Strangelove when he can't stop doing the Nazi salute, my foot twitching towards the fuzzbox. But Alison's such a great singer and storyteller. I was so carried away by her voice and the story she was singing that I straight-up forgot to play. That had never happened to me before.'
Ribot then jumped aboard The Union, Elton John's 2010 album with legendary musician and songwriter Leon Russell, who gave Elton's career a crucial boost early on. 'Leon was ill, it was towards the end of his life,' Ribot says. 'But towards the end of the sessions he came out of surgery and overdubbed his parts. Elton was very much in the room all the time. I remember walking into one of the isolation rooms to find Elton playing bebop piano, and he had great chops. And that's why that record made sense, because you could hear the strong New Orleans roots in both their playing. Elton's absolutely a closet jazz musician!'
When not sharing the rarefied air of rock royalty, you can find Ribot downtown, shredding with the likes of far-out composer John Zorn. 'John really understands extended technique,' he says admiringly. 'It's one thing to ask someone to play guitar with a balloon, and another to actually make music playing with a balloon, to own that language, as we did on The Book of Heads'. And his interest in Latin and Caribbean music – which began when he was a 10-year-old, taking guitar lessons from family friend Frantz Casseus, 'the father of Haitian classical guitar' – has become another area of specialism, as he's recorded albums of Casseus's pieces, played for Latin stars like Caetano Veloso and Marisa Monte, and won a passionate following in South America with his band Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans), reinterpreting the music of Arsenio Rodriguez, who Ribot says 'was both the Duke Ellington and Jimi Hendrix of Cuban music'.
'I usually play better on other people's records,' he says, 'because on my own records I'm dealing with so much more than playing guitar.' Map of a Blue City began in the mid-90s as sparse demos recorded in his apartment. Rejected by punk-rock label Epitaph Records for being 'too dark' (Too Dark for Epitaph became the album's title for a while), the project was later helmed by legendary producer Hal Willner, who secured a budget and a string section to fully realise Ribot's early sketches. 'But I liked the demos better,' Ribot winces. 'It got shelved, and I paid Hal back over seven or eight years.' Ribot then lost the original multi-tracks – but another producer friend, Ben Greenberg, used modern technology to recover the lost music.
'It's like chamber music: intimate,' he says, of the album. 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. 'The song is about not trying to impose a romantic narrative on history,' he says, 'and instead looking upon it like the disaster it is.'
The ongoing disaster of the present is increasingly occupying Ribot, who in in 2018 released Songs of Resistance 1942-2018, featuring friends including Waits, Steve Earle and Meshell Ndegeocello. 'I don't often go in for straight-ahead agitprop, but Donald Trump is a fascist,' he says, gravely. 'We are on the edge – or over the edge – of a crisis of legitimacy.' In response, he's seeking translators so he can publish Italian-language 'histories of what the Italians call la resistenza lunga against Mussolini. We're searching for a language of resistance, and that's a good place to look.'
But even during wartime, life goes on. Marc has to set off for that morning's class at the Conservatory, and after that, no doubt, begin work on the next additions to his epic discography. I tell him that Discogs.com lists Ribot as having performed on an astonishing 576 individual releases, from Barbie's Country Favourites in 1981, to this year's Music for Roads by Finnish duo Tuomo & Markus. When does he sleep?
'I like playing on records. I've been lucky, it's how I pay the rent,' he chuckles, softly. 'There are corners of what I've done that even I'm not familiar with.'
Map of a Blue City is out now on New West Records