"Black Wings"

'Bone Machine', 1992

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“Black Wings” contains my favorite guitar solo in any Tom Waits song.

I’d always assumed it was played by Marc Ribot. If there’s a killer guitar part on a Tom song, Ribot’s never a bad guess. But it’s not. It is Joe Gore, who recorded on many Waits songs in the ‘90s and ‘00s.

The whole solo is weird and off-kilter, zigging every time you might expect it to zag. It builds to a knockout moment at the end. Where a traditional shreddy guitar solo might rise up the neck to fire off some high notes at the climax, Gore goes low. Really low. Lower than a guitar should be able to go. It comes at about 2:40 in the song, but start a bit earlier to build there.

I always wondered how Gore managed to play notes that a guitar should not be able play. Did he switch over to bass for just the last couple notes of the solo? Seems unlikely. Did he have some weird hybrid guitar with extra strings? Seems difficult. My guess was that he hit a pedal that makes the guitar jump down an octave. I remember reading that Jack White used one to play “Seven Nation Army” live. That’s how you play such a low riff when you’re in a band that famously doesn’t have a bass player.

So I emailed Gore to ask. And I was wrong again! Here’s his reply about the “Black Wings” guitar part:

“Black Wings” was a first-take solo. I played it on the same guitar I used for “Goin’ Out West” — a 1960s Telecaster strung with extra-heavy strings and tuned down to A, a fifth below normal tuning. (That extra-low note at the end of the solo is just the open sixth string, tuned far below normal.) The loose strings flop everywhere, and it’s nearly impossible to play in tune — and I didn’t! But in Waits World, that’s a plus. The guitar is plugged straight into a silver-panel Fender Super Reverb amp which I used for most, or maybe all, of my work on Bone Machine. The Ennio Morricone references are pretty obvious!

Thanks Joe! In our correspondence, Gore also shared info about a couple songs I already wrote about. I updated those entries with his anecdotes: “All Stripped Down” and “Back in the Good Old World.”

Coming up next: Tom gets covered in Swedish