Stan Ridgway

Stan Ridgway ranks among the singular figures in American indie music, distinguished by a nasal vocal style that conjures a minor hoodlum from 1930s Warner Bros. gangster pictures together with lyrics fixated on pulp crime fiction and film noir, establishing him as an authentic original. Most listeners know him chiefly as the vocalist for Wall of Voodoo on the 1983 new wave success “Mexican Radio.” He left the group shortly afterward and pursued a singular solo trajectory, releasing several acclaimed albums while frequently working with his wife, singer/songwriter Pietra Wexstun. Across the years he has assembled a substantial catalog that can appear opaque and progressively darker in tone.

Born Stanard Q. Ridgway in the desert community of Barstow, California, on April 5, 1954, and raised in Los Angeles, he recalls an early period as an aspiring ventriloquist who was first jailed at age twelve after taking street signs. During childhood he also developed a strong interest in folk music, pressing his parents to purchase a banjo when he turned fourteen. Although this affinity might appear inconsistent with his later directions, it surfaces in occasional interpretations of Johnny Cash and Tennessee Ernie Ford, while additional formative influences ranging from Kurt Weill to Peter Gabriel-era Genesis shaped the emerging songwriter.

In 1977, amid the punk surge, Ridgway assembled Wall of Voodoo alongside guitarist Marc Moreland, bassist Bruce Moreland, keyboardist Chas T. Gray, and drummer Joe Nanini; the unit had actually begun as a composers’ collective intent on scoring low-budget films rather than operating as a punk outfit. It was nevertheless absorbed into the local post-punk new wave milieu, where its fusion of Ennio Morricone, Lefty Frizzell, and crime novelist Jim Thompson elicited equally fervent admiration and dismissal. After the 1980 self-titled EP—whose brittle art-rock approach featured a striking synth-rock reading of Cash’s “Ring of Fire” that generated considerable attention—the band issued Dark Continent in 1981 and the 1982 concept album Call of the West, which examined the circumstances of marginalized Californians. Densely lyrical, almost novelistic tracks such as “Factory,” “Lost Weekend,” and the title song positioned Ridgway among the era’s most accomplished lyricists, while the ubiquitous “Mexican Radio” achieved massive exposure on MTV and newly receptive Top 40 stations. At that moment of peak visibility the ensemble fractured backstage following a troubled 1983 U.S. Festival performance, prompting Ridgway and Nanini to depart.

Ridgway resurfaced in fall 1983 with “Don’t Box Me In,” a jittery duet with Stewart Copeland of the Police written for the film Rumble Fish. His debut solo album, The Big Heat, did not surface until early 1986. Its songs, including “Pick It Up and Put It in Your Pocket” and “Drive She Said,” adopt an even more elliptical, novelistic tone comparable to Donald Barthelme narratives rendered as music. The seven-minute closing story-song “Camouflage” unexpectedly reached the U.K. Top Five. After The Big Heat he maintained a deliberate pace, waiting more than three years before issuing the still darker Mosquitos.

His third album, Partyball, followed in less than two years; although its lyrics are if anything bleaker than before—“Jack Talked Like a Man on Fire” presents his most unsettling character portrait to date—five short instrumentals temper the mood and confirm his ongoing interest in film scoring. That same year he supplied his first motion-picture soundtrack, for the low-budget indie Future Kick. Additional scores include Melting Pot, Speedway Junky, Desperate But Not Serious, Error in Judgment, and The Keening; the Australia-only collection Film Songs gathers six of these pieces. After leaving IRS Records following Partyball, the label issued the 1992 compilation Songs That Made This Country Great, which also contains Wall of Voodoo material. In 1995 Ridgway self-released the companion video set Showbusiness Is My Life: The Video Collection 1977-1982, titled after his customary stage sign-off from the Wall of Voodoo period.

Throughout the latter half of the 1990s he also worked with Wexstun and former Rain Parade drummer Ivan Knight in the noise-rock experimental project Drywall. The fourth solo album, 1996’s Black Diamond, represented an unexpected turn toward cocktail-style jazz recalling Henry Mancini’s 1950s and 1960s film scores. Still more surprising was 1998’s The Way I Feel Today, a direct set of nineteen pop standards from the 1930s and 1940s supported by full orchestral arrangements. Released in 1999, Anatomy—whose cover art echoes Saul Bass’s poster for the film Anatomy of a Murder—does not musically resemble Duke Ellington’s score for that picture, yet comparable concerns with justice and dishonor run through Ridgway’s characteristically incisive lyrics.

In subsequent years Ridgway and Wexstun sustained their productive collaboration, creating music for an exhibition of surrealist painter Mark Ryden’s work that appeared in 2004 as Blood. Also in 2004 he released the studio album Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads & Fugitive Songs. The reflective Neon Mirage followed in 2010, then Mr. Trouble in 2012. In 2017 he and Wexstun issued Priestess of the Promised Land, a concept album drawn from the life of notorious 1920s and 1930s Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.