WALL OF VOODOO’S OFF SOUND TRACK BETTING

“Sift.” That’s Stan Ridgway’s big word of the-hour as we gab away a spring afternoon in a dull Holiday Inn lounge. Maybe it’s the beer (he’s buying), but “sift” just keeps rolling off Stan’s clever tongue. Because of the rockbiz circumstances under which we’ve met, he suspects me of being a “rock critic,” and inquires whether practice of that discipline involves having to “sift and balance” records and other rock effluvia.

Later he tells me that Wall Of Voodoo’s music is about “sifting and balancing” all the sensory impressions flooding in upon an American of the ’80s. “Our songs are a balance of all areas—‘Let’s examine this,’ they say.” Wall Of Voodoo’s music strikes me as more interesting than boring ideals like that would imply, but as we loosen up on the grain, the true origin of Stan’s siftobsessions finally emerges.

We’ve discovered a mutual passion for Henry Miller and his books, and Stan is recounting his wacky experiences in applying Millerian precepts to his own anti-career, i.e., taking absolutely any kind of job just for its momentary dough, and then purposely screwing up on it to get fired and free again.

Stan landed a job in a lunchtime deli in his native L.A., couldn’t keep up on the sub sandwich assembly line (“I was overloaded like Lucy”), and was thus demoted to the lowly task of “sifting” the fresh-from-the-

farm chili beans each morning, to remove the fresh-from-the-farm rocks and grit. One day Stan chose to forego his humble winnowing, and that very noon hour a number of prominent L. A. businessmen broke teeth and lost fillings on that day’s batch of particularly crunchy chili. Stan was given the axe pronto, and he landed on his can in the street again, as happy as a proverbial Henry Miller clam. The rest is Wall Of Voodoo history.

Maybe, maybe not. Like millions of other American rockfans, I knew nothing of our own Wall Of Voodoo, except for their cat-

chy semi-hit single/video “Mexican Radio,” until just recently. When I found out Wall Of Voodoo would be playing my city, I acquired their two I.R.S. albums, Dark Continent and Call Of The West, to find out just what did they say, beyond the iguana barb-q’s and baked-bean orgies of “Mexican Radio.”

The nasal, neo-Groucho Marxian lead vocal of that song turned out to belong to one “Stanard Ridgway,” a double-surname handle so resonant with generations of preppie inbreeding, that I feared the worst (New England boarding schools and their deadly folk music). And, without fishing for ancestry this afternoon, I find that I might be partly right. Even though he comes from Los Angeles, (he’s just) “Stan” confesses to a “purist” musical background a la those highfalutin’ folkies. When he was in his early teens, in the late ’60s, Stan was obsessed with blues guitarists like J.B. Lenoir and B.B. King, mainly for the purism of their fingers, and dreamed of becoming “the Ornette Coleman of the guitar” as soon as he harnessed his own disciplined digits to the task.

Many purebred purists fell for the voxpop of rock ’n’ roll at the point they discovered B.B. King, but Stan was further detoured when he came of age just in time for the early ’70s, an era he remembers for its excessive, “conspicuous consumption’’ pop music. (Living in L.A. just might have given Stan something of that impression of the rock scene.) Stan laid low, fell back on his purism, and studied up on his Babbitt and Schonberg while listening to his Stravinsky .

Come the punk explosion of ’76-’77, and Stan got interested in pop again, this time for keeps. Not quite a Johnny Rotten nor a Joey Ramone punk'(no Stanard nor no Ridgway has ever worn a ripped T-shirt, in 200 years of American life), Stan was nevertheless much attracted to the Do It Yourself philosophy suddenly abroad in pop, after so many years of crustaceous professionalism. Stan’s pop awakening was probably akin to that of fellow refinee David Byrne, on the day Byrne realized that D.I.Y. would enable him to bypass the vulgarity of commercial rock, and get right to his buttondownprophet point. Goodbye art school! Still somewhat wary of plunging right into r’n’r performance, Stan and his pal Marc Moreland first formed a soundtrack company, “Wall Of Voodoo,” which they hoped would receive commissions to score horror and other cheapie flicks. But their only major film job, a travelogue for the Canadian Tourist Board, ended up being yanked at the last minute. So Wall Of Voodoo developed from a soundtrack mill into a mail-order business, as the hapless Ridgway and Moreland kept afloat by merchandising (so claim1 their autobiographers) “sea monkeys and giant telescopes” to the masses.

Stan and Marc had to be smacked in their faces with the D.I.Y. concept a few more times before they realized that they actually had a rock band on their hands. Stan considered himself a keyboardist and a harmonicat, and Marc had spoken fpr guitar, so they advertised for a lead vocalist. But after even their rhythm inachine, “Ace Kalamazoo,” had refused the role, God (who eerily resembled Phil Spector) appeared to Stan in a dream, and commanded him: “D.I.Y., schmuck!” So Stan agreed to put his tonsils on the line.

Wall Of Voodoo worked their way along the horizontal hold of the L.A. rock scene, playing for the “art monsters” at picturesque joints like the Masque. They also took on further keyboard tinkler Chas Gray and percussionist Joe Nanini. By mid-1980, Wall Of Voodoo were able to release their own debut EP, also known as* Wall Of Voodoo, on their own Index label, but distrubuted by Miles Copeland’s I.R.S., just starting its longplaying death & taxes run at the time. U.S. & European tours etc., plus the two albums cited above, followed for Wall Of Voodoo, not to mention interviews with major rock journals, which is where Stan and I come back in.

Stan has done a lot of interviews on this tour, and he’s feeding me the existential cliches he figures we all have to live by,

sooner or later: “I like playing music, and.

I hope to make a living by it while I’m at it.” “Wall Of Voodoo’s music is about moving oh to another room when somebody else moves in.” Yeah, Stan, all well and good,

I know you’re a purist at heart, but I’m more interested in the quirks that led me to write up you guys rather than, say, Golden Earring.

I like Wall Of Voodoo’s sound as I’ve heard it on the two albums: Stan’s and Chas Gray’s multiple keyboards lay out big stairstep cubes of dark-but-not-doomy synthesizer pulse, which Joe Nanini works over your ribs with human & electronic percussion probes^ and Marc Moreland twangs away at a sagebrush-echo fat guitar worthy of any of the late Marty Robbins’ dustychaps, wagon wheel melodramas. And the lyrics, all written and sung by this Ridgway chap, in a muted sarcasm that gets downright caring at times, suggest almost a more humanist version of Devo.

1 picked up the Devo-connection from Wall Of Voodoo songs like “Me And My | Dad,” all about willed rebellions in the midst c of suburban plenty, and I can’t help guffaw| ing over both hands’ involvement in direct5 mail marketing in their times. But Wall Of Voodoo’s mail order jaunt was just a goofy moneymaker interlude, whereas thfi oncepromising satirists of Devo have devolved (as it is written) into cutthroat album-liner merchandisers, who rake in the bucks selling their adoring fans silly plastic hairpieces, and ”spud-ring collars,” which only make said fans look stoopid enough for Devo to make even bigger fun of ’em next time around.

I warn Stan that I don’t, intend to tolerate such audience-exploitation from Wall Of Voodoo, but his predilection to “sift & balance” has already kept W.O.V.’s hands out of the4 mail-order till. Stan may admire Henry Miller, but his own compositions echo Nathanial West more closely. As a career Angeleno, Stan knows first-hand about all those nutty refugees from “the other” America, washed up on the final frontier of West’s Day Of The Locust fire & brimstone L.A.

As you might have guessed from “Mexican Radio,” Wall Of Voodoo gently satirize all these humble miscreants in songs like “Lost Weekend,” the epic “Call Of The West,” and even the all-instrumental “On Interstate 15,” which manages to evoke some level of potato-love compassion from its listeners via its surfin’-Lonely Bull guitaring, and its wide-open spaciness of hotmojave void.

Over at the club, Weill Of Voodoo’s soundtrack origins persist, as their songs bring on a widescreen feel from the first twinge of the massed keyboards. The stage set is anchored by the trapezoidal door of perseverance from the cover of Call Of The West, while >Stan Ridgway’s cheerful preppie-wiseguy stage presence makes a nice contrast with the group’s viscous darkscreen synthesizers. He races from his mike to his toy-piano keyboard back to his squeezebox harmonica. Stan’s Americanpieface stage voice makes me think much of the Tubes’ Fee Waybill, from when they were still into satire, while Teresa calls him “a rock Spike Jones,” another champeen. soundtracker, of course. Wall Of Voodoo open with Johnny Cash’s “Ring Of Fire,” but the crowd seems just as familiar with the group’s own “On Interstate 15” and “Red Light,” so their records seem to have filtered their way into the heartland. For someone who once studied Babbitt, Stan knows how to work a barband crowd. He tells the cheering throng being stuck in the Midwest is no fatal flaw, because “It SUCKS everywhere!” (That last statement a dopey hophead throwaway, of course, for a good-guy band like Wall Of Voodoo, but Stan nips off the thought there, that other band in matching suits would probably print up that credo on bumperstickers and charge their fans for the privilege of blowing off steam. So there are levels & there are levels.)

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27

Wall Of Voodoo do up their “Mexican Radio” hit with strobe lights & smoke generators, so nobody’ll notice the beans are missing, and a hot evening was had by all. Sift me, baby!