It’s been a great season for fans of avant-garde guitar at the Wexner Center, with Gyan Riley’s sensitive accompaniment of Arooj Aftab and a barn-burning 35-minute solo set by Arto Lindsay closing the “performative lecture” by Jacqueline Humpries, Felix Bernstein, and Gabe Rubin in a gallery full of Humphries’ dazzling paintings.

We’re treated to one of the true contemporary masters of the form when Marc Ribot visits the Mershon stage for a solo performance on Sunday, November 14th, at 5 pm. I’ve been a fan of Ribot since the first time I heard those Tom Waits records he was a vital part of in the ‘80s - classics like Frank’s Wild Years and Rain Dogs - and spent much of college devouring whatever of his work I could find, even using his name as a beacon to guide me to singer-songwriters I didn’t know.

I’ve been lucky enough to see him in a variety of contexts over the years – an impromptu trio as part of a benefit for longtime collaborator John Zorn’s venue The Stone; leading a trio including legendary bassist Henry Grimes in the storied jazz venue The Village Vanguard; in duo with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo; providing a live soundtrack for Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid; an assemblage at Winter Jazzfest working through some of the material that ended up on his all-star Songs of Resistance; and with his riotous current trio Ceramic Dog. Every time I’ve been blown away, and that doesn’t even get into the dozens of recordings I’ve listened to obsessively.

In addition to his music work, Ribot’s been a published author for years and many of those pieces – along with previously unpublished work – appear in a new collection Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist. I was lucky to get to talk to him by Zoom last week about his long career and the new book.

That conversation (edited for clarity and length) is below.

I also put together a primer playlist linked to at the bottom to give you all a taste before the show – with the caveat that it’s limited to what was available on Spotify, so some of his best work, including the collaborations with Zorn and anything on Zorn’s Tzadik label, is not represented. But I cover his interpretations of composers ranging from John Coltrane (“Sun Ship”) to Duke Ellington (“Solitude”), Albert Ayler (“Spirits”) to Dave Brubeck (a Cramps-y “Take 5”), Jimi Hendrix (“The Wind Cries Mary”) and Frantz Casseus (“Hatian Suite: Columbite (Merci Bon Dieu)”, Chris Smith and A.J. Neiburg (“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)”) and Cecil Womack and Gip Noble Jr. (“Love TKO”). I show his playing behind some of the most iconic voices of the 20th century - Tom Waits, Marianne Faithful, Allen Ginsberg, and Steve Earle. He adds crucial color to songs by voices of more recent vintage - Richard Buckner, Tift Merritt, Layla McCalla, Chocolate Genius, rapper-poet Mike Ladd (in his band project Anarchist Republic of Bzzz). And stretching from his mid-‘80s work with Waits and John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards to one of my favorite records of 2019, Kris Davis’ (also a frequent Wexner guest) Diatom Ribbons, and his brilliant 2021 release with long-running trio Ceramic Dog, Hope.

My dear friend Melissa Starker from the Wexner Center also put together a playlist here and when I looked at it after mine I was pleasantly surprised to note there isn’t a lot of overlap, speaking to the breadth of his work.

Marc Ribot appears at Mershon Auditorium this Sunday, November 14, at 5 pm. At the request of the artist, all audience members must provide proof of vaccination on entry, either in the form of their vaccination card or an image of their card, along with their valid state-issued or university ID. For tickets and more info, visit https://wexarts.org/performing-arts/marc-ribot

Marc Ribot interview by Rick Sanford

I think the new book is beautiful. I knew you as a guitar player for a long time, but I think the first writing of yours I ever saw was that piece on Frantz Casseus in Bomb that's reprinted [in Unstrung] which sent me into his work, so beautiful.

Yeah, have you checked out his stuff on Smithsonian? Frantz's own work on Smithsonian.

Yep, the first thing I had was that record of you doing his pieces, and then I went and found one of the Folkways records. There are two Folkways records, right?

Yeah, there's actually three. The best one, the masterpiece is Haitian Dances, Haitian Suite. There's also Haitian Folk Songs with the singer, Lolita Cuevas. There's another one called Haitiana, in which the sound is pretty unbelievably bad, but a lot of the composition is amazing. There's a lot of vocal and guitar stuff. Yeah. Also, we put out one of my [remastered] recordings of Frantz's music on vinyl this year. Hearing it on vinyl, I was so happy. It finally sounded like Frantz.

There was also a quote you had in the Casseus piece that I remember reading many years ago and struck me again [reading it in the book], "I believe it's the artist's function to render articulately with beauty, the soul and the land of his origin, and also the world he experiences." That line from him felt like it could easily speak to your work too.

Ah, interesting. I never really thought about it. For a long time, I thought, okay, Frantz is just this guy who I happened to study when I was a kid because he happened to be a friend of my aunt & uncle and my parents, kind of like a family member, really. He was always there at holidays. My aunt and uncle lived on the same block as him. It was one of those New York kind of weird extended family things. I guess I picked up a lot. I did learn a lot from Frantz. I hope I absorbed that. Frantz had a much more particular idea of rendering. Let's put it this way: I understand why Frantz wanted and needed to create a great Haitian classical music.

[In] my case, the soul of the land of my origins is a little more confused. I was born in Newark, but my family didn't live there for very much time. I think others have rendered Newark better than I possibly could. I don't know if I could render with beauty the land of South Orange, New Jersey.

[But] there's a lot of options open. Sometimes I've rendered it. You can render the absence of things too. In the beginning, everybody thought music was about creating mimesis of nature, like the flute is a bird. I always thought that was a lot of nonsense. What's the Sex Pistols mimetic of? Then I realized you could also be mimetic of the absence of nature.

That reminded me of your quote [in the book’s essay “Guitars”], "My relation with the guitar is one of struggle. I'm constantly forcing it to be something else.”

[The last interviewer asked me about that too] and I had to tell him what I'm going to have to tell you: I'm not sure. It's definitely a question of choice. It's very literal. Some people use extra super-slinky strings. I tend to go for, I'm not using the heaviest strings, but I tend to go like a notch or two heavier than the average rock guitarist, let's put it this way. I like that sound. It's what you get when you hear early rock records, Rosetta Tharpe, or a lot of people from that period. I don't think super slinky strings existed then.

It's great, on early Chuck Berry recordings, you hear people struggling with rhythm sections that were still used to playing swing. You hear people struggling to play rock, working towards something new, and struggling with guitars that were built to play jazz or at best jump blues. I guess that sound meant something to me, but also, I think that people were struggling in another sense too.

I don't know. Maybe it is mimetic. People were struggling in their lives, the people I'm talking about were black musicians on the early rock scene and the jump blues circuit. Yeah, I think they were struggling with a lot of things. Really, I can't explain it. I can't explain why I have my guitars set up so that the act is just not too, too easy. It also has something to do with the economy.

I'm a left-handed person and I play guitar right-handed. First of all, it was a bit of a struggle. Then it also was clear from the very beginning that I was never going to be the fastest boy on the block. I tended to listen to, partly because of that and partly just because I loved the way they sounded, I listened to guitarists who played with a lot of economy: BB King, Cornell Dupree. Yeah, people who could say a lot with a little, that's who I listened to. Hubert Sumlin. Keith Richards, to be sure. And Steve Cropper. [Steve Cropper was also Ribot’s two-word answer when I asked him about his long association with the Telecaster.]

That leads me into something else that I kind of highlighted from that lovely Robert Quine tribute in the book. You talk about him giving you this Lester Young late session disc. You phrase it as, "Young, nearly dead from alcoholism, could hardly get the notes out, while the muscular rhythm section behind him didn't cut him an inch of slack. The disconnect was almost total, and still Lester won. He cut them all, his soul bleeding through that cold machine. Moments Quine lived for while he could."

Not only [is that line beautiful] but as a writer and a critic, and a fan, sometimes I worry that I expect a little of that too much. I tend to prize that kind of struggle a little too heavily. That also, again, vibrated with that line from the “Guitars” essay. Is there a distinction between productive and non-productive struggle? You have outlived a good number of your heroes. Clearly, you found a way to find something sustainable in that. I'm sorry, that's kind of unformed for a question.

No, no. It's a good question. I'll give an unformed answer. First of all, I think that yes, I do think that there is a difference between productive and unproductive struggle. I think what it comes down to is this idea of duende. I felt this long before I read Garcia Lorde's essay. What it has to do [with] is a constant consciousness on the part of whatever kind of art you're doing, that it ain't weightlifting, that it's about being fearless. Fearless in the face of things that we're all facing.

I was struck by [the sense that the] first section of the book could be read almost as, not exactly memento mori, but a series of almost elegies, right? There's that beautiful piece about Hal Willner, and there's that beautiful piece about Derek Bailey, which includes your line notes from the Ballads record but also was kind of almost a poetic essay. Was it important those people were paid tribute to? Was it important those pieces are together in the book?

When I went to look at previously what I had already finished. It turned out that a lot of what I had written, partly through my own laziness and partly through the way things worked out, is that what finally pushed me to finish a piece was when I got called to write it. I was called to write things when friends died, or I was moved to write things when friends died, and they got published. Otherwise, I was pretty lazy about writing. I never thought I would write a book. I never thought I would finish a book. Those pieces were there because I guess they got published because they were some kind of news, or it was necessary.

It was also necessary; it was also good for our community of people who knew my friends. When people I knew who were important to me musically died, I wound up writing things that got published, and there they were. That's how that happened. It wasn't really a conscious attempt to make that section of the book be about death. It was just to write. That's when I'd mostly written about music.

I'm glad they did. Every one of those gave me a new perspective on, whether it was someone I got to see a few times; like Derek Bailey, or Quine, who I loved on records but never got the chance to see in person, I'm glad those pieces are out in the world.

Trying to drag this off the subject of death. I'd like to talk a little bit about collaboration. I saw you play with David Hidalgo at Big Ears a couple of years ago. It was wonderful. It was wonderful in a lot of ways. You stayed out of each other's way so well. You complement what the other one was doing, and you never stepped on ... How much of that was organic? How did that collaboration come about? How much planning was involved?

I can start with the planning part. Basically, we just showed up. I think I announced it at the beginning of the gig. I said, "If we sound like a couple of dudes jamming, it's probably because that's exactly what we are." We basically show up, do a sound check, say, "Well, what do you want to play? Okay." Take turns calling tunes. We both know a lot of tunes.

I make no claims for myself, but David is absolutely just a master guitarist, a master musician. It's a pleasure to play with him. You hear it live, but you can hear it in the recordings too. Everybody talks about Brian Wilson, but David Hidalgo is just one of the great studio people of all times. He has such an ear and such an inventiveness. That's what it's all about: a staying out of the way, not just to other musicians, but of placing the tones, giving each sonic expression its unique place in the sandwich, its own level.

You've played with a lot of guitarists who I think of as your peers, your generation, like Bill Frisell and Buddy Miller. What's exciting about that to you? Is there a certain level of effort or a certain skill set you bring to that that you don't necessarily bring when you're playing with John Zorn, or you're playing with a singer? Buddy Miller and David Hidalgo are both amazing singers, but I'm thinking of it in terms of the space your guitar takes and their guitar takes.

Yeah. First of all, I've just been lucky to get to play with people who are amazing. The two-guitar format, it's a great format. When you get three guitars, it can become difficult. Then you have to put some thought into it. There's a lot of roles that you can kind of walk into with the two-guitar format. I have to say, I'm talking about three guitar records, but an amazing record that I did with both Bill Frisell and Buddy Miller, and Greg Leisz on pedal steel, was this Majestic Silver Strings record. Not a lot of people heard that, because we could never get it together to tour on that. The people involved were all so busy in their solo projects or other rest of their careers. It's a fucking amazing record.

Oh God, it's a terrific record. I was just playing that version of [George Jones’] “Why Baby Why” as I was walking to lunch the other day. And the Chocolate Genius version of Roger Miller's “Dang Me” that he turns into a slow jam.

I played that with Chocolate Genius - Marc Anthony Thompson - before the record. I said this has to go on the record.

Talk to me a little bit about that relationship. I feel like those Chocolate Genius records are still kind of underappreciated. [When] I saw him open for Medeski, Martin, and Wood, I had no idea who he was. [This was during] the late '90s when [the debut record using the Chocolate Genius name] Black Music had just come out. I was like, Who is this? I was blown away immediately.

Well, Marc Anthony Thompson, is one of the great singer/songwriters of our time. In fact, he's so good that I think he had some kind of major label record deal by the time he was 18 or 19. He was playing catch up; most people do it the other way around. They spend years and get a show together, and then eventually learn to sing, and then maybe eventually learn how to write songs. Marc came out fully formed writing great songs as a teenager.

By the way, his daughter, Zsela Thompson is doing great stuff and really getting a lot of play. Check her out.

Anyways, Marc is still out there doing it. He dove in at the deep end of the pool and was in the studio and writing, composing first, and then trying to deal after with putting a band together and dealing with audiences and dealing with all that stuff. He's still working, writing great stuff, totally under recognized. People should cover his tunes; people should check out his records.

Also, it's a funny moment. The title of that record, Black Music, it would be interesting, because that came out in the '90s. I think it would be politically interesting to go re-listen to that now. What it was, it was Marc Anthony claiming a lot of different things, saying, "Yeah, I'm black and I like this, so this is black music. I don't have to conform to somebody else's idea of what that means.” I think that was powerful then and it's very interesting, I think it's powerful now. Obviously, it's not for me to define black music [but] I like that kind of questioning, no matter who it comes from.

Like a lot of people in my generation, I originally got into you through Tom Waits. Before I was quite processing your solo work, or your work as a leader, you were on so many Elvis Costello records, and so much of the stuff David Byrne put out on Luaka Bop, Susana Baca, the Vinicius Cantuaria record that came out when I was 21. I knew you first as this empathetic voice on all these singer/songwriter records, to the extent that there were singer/songwriters I got into because you got name-checked in a blurb or review. Jeff Finlin comes to mind [and] Richard Buckner.

Oh my god.

Yeah, I got Devotion and Doubt because it said Marc Ribot and Howe Gelb [from Giant Sand], you guys were both named in the review, and "Well, I need to hear this.”

I think the Richard Buckner thing was produced by JD Foster who produced some of my records and is also a very underrated producer.

He was another name who I saw a lot show up on, again, kind of out there singer/songwriters, not exactly Americana, a little more diverse than that. If he produced it, I was likely to pick it up. Then I think the first jazz record I ever saw him do was your Spirits. Talk to me about that relationship.

JD married a friend of mine, Lisa Rinzler, a cinematographer, and moved to New York. He'd been working a lot as a producer down in Austin but didn't quite get his footing in New York. He was around [and] I realized he had this incredible skill set as a producer. That is not a job that most people understand.

Most people who are listeners don't understand what that means. Also, a lot of people who claim to be producers don't understand what it means. It's really a remarkable thing, and it's what has made English and American music, really pop music, kind of unique. In a lot of other places, in a lot of other countries, that role wasn't really defined, or else it meant executive producer, in other words, somebody who was paying for it could sit there and tell you what to do.

A great producer is a remarkable thing. I've been lucky to work with a few: JD, T Bone Burnett, I did a record with Mitchell Froom. Craig Street is excellent. Marc Anthony, by the way, produced some records of mine. The conditions were very trying, but he did his best. Yeah, it's the strangest mixture of psychological and technical skills. Hal Willner, to name a producer who worked in a very different way than the others.

A great producer is really responsible for the sonic results of a record. Musicians play the notes, but the microphones, the mix, the compressors, all the important shit: the board, the room, the decisions on how to mic, how to separate, whether to separate.

Some producers are mostly about casting, putting a great engineer in the room with great musicians. Then a few ideas about the mix. Others jump in with both feet and get into the arranging, say, "Okay, this just needs an organ pad on the chorus." Or it needs all kinds of crazy tricks: "Why don't you use the reverb from that really angry take on the dry sound of that really laid back take you did?" I think I've heard T Bone Burnett do stuff like that, or JD say, "Oh yeah, it's a little boring. Why don't we have it go mono for the bridge? Then when it goes stereo again, people will think, ‘Wow, this is fabulous.’"

The main thing about being a producer, and the reason I never did it, other than not being the world's greatest pro tools person [is] it demands [certain] psychological skills. At every record, almost without fail, there's a point at which the artist says, “This is a bunch of bullshit. I'm faking it, this is phony, this is wrong. I got to start from the beginning. We can't put this out.”

That's the moment that the genius producer leaps off the couch and says, "You're out of your fucking mind. This is the best fucking record ever made. Go home. Get a good night's sleep. I'll do some rough mixes." They stay there and do some rough mixes. Person comes back the next day, "Oh, I sound pretty good." They compress it, they put the right reverb on it. Whatever they do. They do their thing. It's that psychological skill to not get sucked into that moment of despair.

That's the skill I lack. [If it were me,] “You're right, let's both go jump off the bridge. We can hold hands.”

That kind of leads me into a more oblique question: how do you avoid despair? I'm thinking about your work with various social causes, you getting arrested in front of [NYC Venue] Tonic, and that artist's rights in the essay in the book where you have this perfect line about, "The ethics of the system reside in the structure that predetermines the math," which is specific to publishing, but applies to so many things. How do you keep fighting those fights and not despair, not give up?

Well, I don't know, who says I don't despair?

All right, how do you not give into despair I think is the question. How do you fight that?

It's very difficult to pace yourself. And I've done a very bad job of it, actually. I've skirted with and gone over the line of burnout several times and may be in the process of doing that right now. What's kept me going is I try just to focus. What I realized is I do it as a way of avoiding despair.

What I discovered is that if I can avoid magical thinking, if I can avoid magical thinking and just do a couple of things that are effective ... Join an organization that's actually doing something. For example, on environmental stuff, everybody's talking at every dinner party about the fact how fucked we are.
I joined a group called New York Renews, which is a big coalition of other groups. I made some phone calls, did a few other things, but nothing enormous.

I found that just doing a few real-world things is the way to avoid being overwhelmed with what's happening. That's part of the answer. The other answer is that I don't know.

I'm probably from the last generation for whom, as I wrote in the Willner essay, like, Hitler and Stalin still are in the mix and ping the dials, pinging the VU meter. I just know for my father, I remember he was much calmer than me [and] he always said, "Well, history is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth." For him, that meant that things would always swing back and forth between the conservative and the liberal commentator in the New York Times editorial page. I kind of agree with him about the pendulum part, it's just my pendulum swings in a much wider arc.

I see it swinging back right now, still covered with all the blood and soil of 1938. That's what I can't get out of my head. The only way to avoid despair, again, is to try to do what you can do. I had my analysis, I had my understanding of what can be done, what are the root causes of that, why there has been this tectonic drift to the right that's gone on way before Trump, and way many more places than the US.

My framework has been I read David Harvey. At a certain point, I picked it up because it was called The Condition of Post-Modernity. [I thought] “Oh, they're using that word about me and Zorn. Let's see what it means. It turns out it's about more than pastiche composition and using a lot of quotes. I developed my understanding and I tried in whatever ways I could to act on it, doing what I could.

Sorry, I'm jumping all over the map.

No, please go on.

I've been reading [collaborator] John Lurie's autobiography, History of Bones. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that, all that recently When I was traveling in Japan years ago with the Lounge Lizards, we happened to meet this guy on the train called Akio Suzuki. Turned out him and his wife, I'm trying to remember her name, but they had the misfortune of winding up in the same train compartment as us. We got to talking to them, and it turns out he's an amazing composer who was friends with John Cage.

I don't even know if he's still alive, really. We stayed in touch with him, or Roy Nathanson and I did. Got in touch with him a couple of other times on other tours. I visited his apartment in Tokyo where he had all kinds of wires coiled, springs stretched across it so that acoustic, it was like a natural spring reverb, so acoustic sounds would generate all these weird reverberations. Just being in there was kind of a composition. The apartment was a composition.

The last I heard he had gone, I didn't see him, but his wife came to a gig somewhere in Kyoto. She traveled two or three hours. He was in the middle of the country somewhere in the middle of nowhere in a small farming village. What they'd done is gone down there with no money, and just started to build this curved wall, a curved wall that was gently sloped so that people could lean against it and listen. Not necessarily to music, but just a curved earthen wall in the middle of nowhere, so people could sit back against this wall and listen.

They're incredibly dedicated, Akio and the people he was working with. Eventually I think the people from the village had started to support them and bring them food. I found this idea of creating the environment in which sound, and including music, could be heard very beautiful. What I realized is that I think about that a lot. Everybody's writing about this golden age of creativity in New York City during the '80s. Like I say, John describes a lot of it in his book.

I also think about what the wall was, what the institutional context that made that possible. What made it. John lived in Cooper Square housing across the street from the men's shelter. There were several blocks of housing where people got apartments that were under 300 bucks a month. Also, we toured, what made that happen? It didn't just happen. We toured Europe and we played all these gigs. We never toured America. We toured Europe. These gigs were subsidized.

Somebody put it in the Constitution of Europe, something called the European Cultural Exception, which meant that “Okay, western Europe, okay, we're going to have a market economy. It ain't Russia, it ain't Yugoslavia at the time. We're going to have this market economy, but a few things are going to be exempt: healthcare, education, and culture.”

My musician friends, if you asked them, "Gosh, how come we play in Europe all the time? How come we get paid more plus really expensive airfare and hotels to get paid to play here than we do in New York?" If you ask my friends, they'd say, "That's because people are smart here. They know it's good." [That's] not true. It was fought for. It was consciously [created].

We showed up and played at these places, but [the circuit] existed for a reason. When that reason goes away, the wall against which we lean to listen goes away. Kids who are moving to New York now, who are as nuts as Lurie was in the '80s, are not getting to experiment that way. I mean, not that it was fun to live across the street from the men's shelter, but it was a whole lot more fun to live across the street from the men's shelter than it fucking was to live in the men's shelter, from what I understand. That's where people who aren't able to cut $3,000 a month in rent are winding up.

Not as artists doing brilliant pieces. I think that's, on some level ... there's a Nicaraguan poet, I forget the name, who wrote a poem, Now is the hour of the boring committee meeting. There's an aspect of all this political shit that is just boring as hell, and you have to work not to become an asshole.

Not to let it kill your soul. On another level, it's kind of an active love towards music.

That love of music and collaboration comes across so strongly when I go back through your work. Like the most recent Songs of Resistance. A question [occurred to me] a little while ago, how did you find your singing voice? I think the first time I actually heard you sing was one of those Shrek records, I think maybe Yo! I Killed Your God, which would have come out when I was in college. [For example] You and David Hidalgo, you've got one of the most beautiful tenor voices over the last 40 years on stage with you. What drives you to sing? How do you decide what to sing? On Songs of Resistance, you've got such a wide network of great singers you work with. How do you decide what to sing yourself versus what you give to somebody else?

Well, I had to sing for one reason only: desperation. Things that nobody else will sing, or I couldn't find somebody else to sing. I think somebody once reviewed one of my records and wrote, "Whoever told Ribot he could sing should be shot."

Jesus!

Fortunately, nobody told me I could sing. I hope it works at the times I do it. I'm mostly a guitarist. I'm more kind of like on the last record, I'm doing more ranting than singing, singing with a capital S. The way it started out with me, I never really wanted to sing, per se, but I'd been working in a trio format for awhile. Then it always starts out this way, I'm doing the trio thing, and I think, wouldn't it be great if there was another instrument? Then I think, wow, we can't really afford another instrument. Okay, I'll just do something with my voice, I'll make this sound.

Then before you know it, I'll make this sound, and instead of an accordion, or instead of a strings section, or instead of a croaking frog, I'll have another sonic element, and I start to make vocal sounds. Then the next thing you know, there's lyrics and I'm fucking singing them. It really just starts out always very innocently with a desire to have another instrumental voice.

In other words, I sing because I'm cheap.

If you would talk to me a little bit about [your current trio] Ceramic Dog as a thing, how did that project assemble? I guess a larger question, do you know when something is going to be a band, that it's going to be a working unit that has legs instead of just a one-off?

It just kind of happens. There's a moment at which it's a band. It's a tricky thing, this thing, band. Band is a personal thing. It's a group of people who do something together and not necessarily because they fit together or like each other.

As it happens in Ceramic Dog, we happen to have a blast on tour and just like hanging out. We're always laughing about something or other, usually things that other people wouldn't consider funny at all. Sometimes bands can be great because of conflicts and tensions. In fact, I would say always bands that are great are great in part because of conflicts and tensions. We have ours too.

On the other side of it, and one of the things that creates the conflicts and tensions sometimes, is sometimes bands are real collectives that begin with people who are all on the same level economically and professionally and skill set wise. More often, one or two people are putting it together and bringing in other people, and it's tricky.

Let's put it this way: the word “band” has no meaning. It's a meaningless word, has no definition. There's an awful lot of young people, and I speak as a former one of them, running around who think that the words, "You're in the band," mean something. They discover after one or two or five- or 10-years' work, that it doesn't mean shit. Saying, "You're in the band," doesn't give you a right to equity and the work you've done.

I'm okay, I have no regrets, but it's not fun for somebody who's driving a cab to be listening to the radio or watching an HBO special and see work that they played on, hear work they played on on the score like that.

Young musicians in bands should make sure that if people are using the rhetoric of we're a band -

Something just flashed on my screen: Steve Bernstein is inviting me to a Sex Mob birthday party. Speaking of bands, now there's a band. Great band.

Anyways, if people are using the rhetoric of bands, make sure they back it up with something that you all own together, either the name or the publishing company, or points on the records. The word alone doesn't mean anything unless it's backed up.

Guitarist Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, T-Bone Burnett, Tift Merritt) brings solo performance and readings to the Wexner Center

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