Burnt Offering
This month’s M.I.A jewel: fugitives on the lam, hardboiled ear-movies and a ghostly Marine.
Stan Ridgway
The Big Heat IRS, 1986
BARSTOW-RAISED Stanard Ridgway fronted LA eccentrics Wall Of Voodoo, whose malarial MTV hit Mexican Radio promised great things in March ’83. But two months later at Steve Wozniak’s US Festival folly in San Bernadino – a few hours before The Clash’s last gig with Mick Jones – Ridgway played his final show with the group.
“I felt the band had been taken over by the record company,” says Ridgway today. “They put us on the road for nine, 10 months, and then said, ‘Do it again’. Everybody was pretty burned out, and I felt a lot of weirdness because of my status as the singer, you know – ‘Who does he think he is?!’ There was lots of dysfunction and things just weren’t fixable. I remember going to the label and saying, I think we need a break. And I just got crickets.”
Ridgway resigned from the group, but he could not so easily leave Miles Copeland’s IRS imprint, who weren’t pleased he’d walked from Wall Of Voodoo. Consequently, recording sessions for his first LP stretched over two years, though his first name release would be Don’t Box Me In, a co-credit with Police drummer Stewart Copeland from the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Rumble Fish in late ’83.
In April ’85 his debut single The Big Heat/ Drive, She Said registered on the UK indie charts. Taut, sinister rock with synthesizers, both presented panicked vignettes, respectively
of a possibly post-apocalyptic manhunt and a hapless taxi driver with a lady bank robber in his cab.
“[UK studio eminence] Hugh Jones produced those two songs at The Lighthouse in north Hollywood on the record company’s dime,” says Ridgway. “I was ver y happy with what he was doing and said, Let’s get Hugh Jones back here and finish the rest of this record. There was just silence from the record company.” One memorable response did come back, though. “In Drive, She Said there’s a breakdown in the middle, a kind of surrealistic fever dream that our narrator is going through,” says Ridgway. “Someone said, ‘Gosh, do you think that part should be there? Won’t people stop dancing?’”
Instead, work on the album that became
The Big Heat continued piecemeal, with production credits going to Joe Chiccarelli and Mitchell Froom as well as Ridgway and his studio partner Louis van den Berg, at LA spaces numbering Fiddler’s Studio and J.C. Studios as well as The Lighthouse. Guest players included Minuteman Mike Watt and Gang Of Four’s Hugo Burnham (“great chaps all!” says Stan). Before The Big
Heat’s spring 1986 release, album track Pick It Up (And Put It In Your Pocket) appeared on the Miami Vice episode Phil The Shill on December 13, 1985. “I had to battle and push a lot to get things done,” says Ridgway. “In fact, I think I’m still suffering from some PTSD from the whole experience!”
Yet, named for Fritz Lang’s celebrated movie of 1953, and with moody sleeve art photographed by the late Scott Lindgren in the industrial town of Vernon, California, The Big Heat would transcend its troubled creation. Its authorial stance has been compared to Raymonds Car ver and Chandler – or maybe it’s like the American grotesques of artist Drew Friedman as scripted by roughneck crime novelist Charles Willeford – with desperate situations chewed over by seen-it-all yet empathic narrator Stan. Following the title track’s paranoid chase, Pick It Up (And Put It In Your Pocket) (“or somebody else will”) is a Reaganite middle finger to everyone; Can’t Stop The Show finds voyeurs, small businessmen and strippers trying to figure things out at a down-at-heel peep show, while luckless jazz mooch Walkin’ Home Alone, as memorably performed on Channel 4’s The Tube, anatomises a relationship that died. “The best stories are about people in desperate straits,” says Ridgway. “One of my favourite movies is The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, those people are pretty desperate. It’s how people prevail – bad things have happened, but I’m going forward anyway.”
It closes with combat ghost story Camouflage, a relative of Red Sovine’s spectral tr ucker fave Phantom 909. Ridgway says it was partially inspired by An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone based on an 1890 Ambrose Bierce short story, and by a relative who’d ser ved in Vietnam. In August ’86, it was a surprise Top 5 entr y in the UK. “I’d never thought that it was going to be a, quote, hit,” says Ridgway, who played the song twice on Top Of The Pops. “At first all that was great, you know, but it kind of went a little too far. At one point, I found myself on some sort of morning show, baking cake or something… I remember thinking to myself, Would Lou Reed do this?”
There were no more chart hits, but with his partner Pietra Wexstun, Ridgway continues to explore and refine his cine-noir approach, and all of his albums are worth investigating (intrigued? Try ’89’s Mosquitos or 2004’s Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads &
Fugitive Songs). Yet he grants that The Big Heat “was really a ver y important record for me. I had a lot to prove. I worked ver y hard on the writing, so, you get into that space where the music itself can provide pictures in the mind, which then enhance the music.”
But how adjacent has he been to those last-chance scenarios he writes about? “I can tell you unequivocally that I’ve never robbed a bank,” says Ridgway, “but I have driven a cab.”
“The best stories are about people in desperate straits.” STAN RIDGWAY