This week I’m checking up on some of my avant-guitar heros. I’ve been crawling around the attic of my musical memory ever since a friend burned me his 107+ hours of a certain kooky jamband that we were head-over-heels for in high school.

I’ve realized that for me improvised music was like a drug, especially in the way that I got interested in it. First it was the small time stuff: going to a hippy-ish rock concert, listening to the band go “way out,” dancing while flailing arms in the air, etc. Of course, as guidance counselors have been warning us for decades, these seemingly harmless intoxicating experiences are often “gateways” to harder, more dangerous substances.

Eventually I was a full-fledged junky, forming bands of my own (more on that in later posts, perhaps) and driving up to New York on school nights to catch my idols at Tonic or the 55 Bar. Since then I’ve gotten distracted by other music, and now I’m curious to see what some of these guys are up to now.

Part 1 of this series will focus on a man who is still one of my favorite players, bar none. Between his jangly, warped sound on Tom Waits albums, his incredibly inventive solo pieces, and his (mis)readings of Arsenio Rodrí­guez standards, Marc Ribot covers just about everything I love about music.

Harken back to the early nineties, when Ribot and his cronies got me hooked on their funky, inside-out, all-stripped-down anti-pop numbers like this one:

Clever White Youths with Attitude, Marc Ribot, Yo! I Killed Your God

Lately, Ribot has teamed up with Ches Smith and Shahzad Ismaily to form Ceramic Dog:

ceramic dog (noun): 1. chien du faience: expression: frozen with emotion, as in the perfectly still moment before a fight breaks out.
2. Ultimate kitsch object.
3. A free/punk/funk/experimental/psychedelic/post electronica collective, featuring Marc (Cubanos Postizos, John Zorn, Tom Waits, etc etc), plus two of the best young players on the New York/California underground improv/experimental rock scene, Shazad Ismailly (bass) and Chess Smith (drums)
4. Not a ‘project’: a real band.

Here’s a tidbit from their tour of Europe in 2006:

Midost, Ceramic Dog

It’s good to hear that things are still banging and clanging in his world. This tiny tidbit was just about all I could find - anybody got anything else to share? Will Ceramic Dog be releasing an album? We can only hope.

Stay tuned for Six-String Slinging Madmen Parts 2 & 3 (and maybe 4…).