Jockey Full of Bourbon by Tom Waits (Patreon)

Hi everyone. For some reason I've never properly looked at a Tom Waits song, or any Marc Ribot on my channel. So let's fix that this week.

Hi everyone. For some reason I've never properly looked at a Tom Waits song, or any Marc Ribot on my channel. So let's fix that this week.

I'm looking at the track Jockey Full of Bourbon from one of my favourite Wait's albums, Rain Dogs. This one features some lovely Ribot guitar work which I'm going to be breaking down in a bit of detail.

Beyond learning the song and a few of Ribot's licks, I think this is also a really fun track just to improvise over (and an excellent way of practicing your triads, arpeggios and scales). My tab below is a - more or less - note for note transcription of the entire track. During the first couple of verses it's hard to hear exactly what Ribot is doing so I've done a little bit of guesswork in a couple of places.

The arrangement on the backing track is exactly the same as the studio recording and the tab although in the video I did a slightly abbreviated version where I played the intro, verse, chorus and went straight to the solo. There's a 2 bar shaker count-in.

Hope you enjoy playing along. 

I'm not going to be around next week. It's half-term holiday here in the UK and I should really get out of the studio and spend a bit of time with the family. Next video will be at the start of October.

Speak soon,

Adrian