If you could describe Marc Ribot's career with one word, it would have to be “storied”. The veteran electric guitar and acoustic guitar player made his start transcribing jazz solos, and earned $50 a session recording novelty albums for kids' characters, such as Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake.
Joining the eclectic outfit the Lounge Lizards in the ’80s opened up the doors that Ribot had relocated to New York for, and the move eventually lead to a long spell with Tom Waits. As Lounge Lizards bandleader John Lurie later wrote in his memoir, “Marc is a musical genius. So many ideas are coming out of that guy that it is actually often a problem.”
The “problem” Lurie jokingly referred to manifested itself in a session for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s 2007 album Raising Sand, which came by way of T Bone Burnett. Ribot tells The Guardian that he was “totally intimidated” by the gig – so much so that he went to the session slightly over-prepared.
“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, however, turned out to be a folk record, and although the direction caught Ribot off guard, his versatile chops were still well-suited for the job at hand.
“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 had previously spoken about his work on Raising Sand with Guitar World, detailing the gear he ended up using on that record and speaking about composing parts that captured the spirit of the music and “whatever they wanted and whoever they were trying to be.”
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