stan ridgway’s wrong people
As leader of the Wall of Voodoo, Stan Ridgway was nearly despicable: He didn’t so much reduce hard-boiled cynicism to a cliché as he reduced it to a sneering inflection—which might have been a kick if the attacks hadn’t all been delivered in a slurring monotone. In other words, Wall of Voodoo’s gambit was a mean-minded, dead-ended one, and apparently even Ridgway realized this, for just as the band reached an audience large enough worth insulting, the singer “fired himself” from the enterprise. The joke, it seems, was up.
Maybe so, but the hard work had just begun. In 1986, two years after checking out, Stan Ridgway checked back in with The Big Heat (I.R.S.), and damn if it wasn’t among the best L.A.-founded albums of that year. Perhaps what made The Big Heat work so well is that, instead of viewing his characters from the outside and laughing at their uneasiness and their seeming dispensability, Ridgway now crawled inside their skin—and discovered that it’s actually kind of an intriguing place to be, a place that lends itself to hauntingly, rollickingly effective storytelling. In any event, instead of sneering, Ridgway now shudders a bit as he relates the accounts of people in flight—people running from or chasing after murder and deception, people who seem horrified and enthralled by their own admissions, people who have been forgotten but sure won’t leave life that way. They are, in fact, California characters like those in the works of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson (mean and damned), or of Kim Nunn, Robert Siodmak, or Fritz Lang (rugged and redeemed). Either way, they are people you give a full hearing to—and as a result, The Big Heat also demands no less than a full hearing.
In The Big Heat, the wrong people—hateful, bored, lost, hurting, dangerous people—not only are given a voice, but, here and there, are given a shot at victory. Somehow, it’s an exhilarating victory. “You gotta watch the ones who keep their hands clean,” sings Stan Ridgway in the title song. On The Big Heat, the artist gets his hands dirtier than ever. Hence, he’s maybe, just maybe, worth our trust. One thing’s for certain: There are few artists who can be so scary and unaffected at the same time as Stan Ridgway.