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IVH: Wall of Voodoo / 1980-1982 [1]
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Date: 2025-02-27
Tonight’s selections from Wall of Voodoo’s early career, spanning the years 1980 to 1983.
Every once in a while, a band creates an album that is truly unique, an album so starkly original and wildly creative that nothing before or since has sounded similar to it and likely never well. Truly this is the case with the group Wall of Voodoo's first LP, Dark Continent. Best remembered for their Top 40 1983 hit "Mexican Radio", a staple on most new wave and alternative rock stations as well as being a favorite in the early years of MTV, Wall of Voodoo is a group that's gained a cult following over the years but still remains unfortunately underrated by most it appears. So underrated in fact that a page for this very album did not exist on Sputnikmusic when I searched for it, and had to create the page myself, leading me to this review here. This is a damn shame, and I suggest anyone with an interest in new wave, punk, indie, and college rock as well as synthesizer-driven music with wildly absurd lyrics, really I'd suggest anyone with an interest in music in general to pick this album up. [...] But allow me to get to the song that initially got me interested in Wall of Voodoo and remains my favorite track of theirs to this day, and that's "Back in Flesh", which you may recognize from a brilliant performance the group did of the song for the 1982 punk/new wave documentary "Urgh! A Music War", which you can find here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeh69Myi9fI This is truly Wall of Voodoo at their best, Stan is at his best vocally, the lyrics are as absurd and hilarious as always, Moreland's guitar is plucked at such perfect places while an INCREDIBLE bassline and drumming so raw it sounds like the drummer was using a pair of rusty pots as a bass drum ties together the whole song. They even use a triangle in the song, and not in a contrived way at all. Truly a classic song. — Sputnik Music
Mexican Radio
In the world of rock frontmen, Wall of Voodoo’s Stan Ridgway is one-of-a-kind. He sings in a voice like a nervous gangster in a 1930s Mob movie, and the songs he writes are film noir pictures of sad-sack characters in a tough world that doesn’t give a shit. If all you know of Wall of Voodoo is “Mexican Radio”, you’d do well to catch up with their first two albums, Dark Continent and Call of the West, just so you have a frame of reference for what comes next. Suffice it to say, the band that got its start as ACME Soundtracks, with two guys, a Fairfisa organ, a guitar and a rhythm box [1] would go on to make music so idiosyncratic that nobody’s even approximated it since. This even includes the band themselves, once Ridgway packed up and walked out. The year was 1983, and Wall of Voodoo was riding high on the success of Call of the West and the big single, “Mexican Radio,” written by guitarist Marc Moreland. They were touring, they’d had big gigs, they’d opened for the ill-fated 3-DEVO concert in ’82, and now they were at Steve Wozniak’s US Festival. Thanks to a circulating bootleg, one can relive the final Ridgway-era Wall of Voodoo show, and it’s a doozy. They’re tight and they’re sharp, and there’s no clue that Stan would call it quits. According to interviews, the critical moment happened backstage, as Stan watched Joe Nanini dump a bowl of potato salad on a scantily clad girl backstage. The girl freaked out, and Nanini got arrested and flown out by helicopter. Realizing the rock and roll life was too much, and the drugs and touring had made his life “a walking nervous breakdown,” Ridgway split. Nanini went into drug treatment, and took his assortment of unusual percussion instruments with him. Backing keyboardist, Bill Noland, also split town. — Kitty Sneezes
Back in Flesh
The original configuration arose from a sideline occupation of Ridgway’s, “ACME Soundtracks”, a cheap’n’cheerful scoring business, accompanying whatever scuzzy flick approached him. (In a 1986 TV interview – on Get Fresh! of all places – he recalled that he’d change the name of the “band” to such pseudonyms as Dead Cops or Pulsating Pudenda, depending on the gig, and Gaz Top’s face was a sight to behold). A lounge guitar player also, Ridgway met & utilised the all’italiana twang of Marc Moreland to beef up his robotic backdrops. Add Marc’s brother Bruce on bell-end bass, plus Chas Gray on apposite one-finger keyboards, & percussionist Joe Nanini engaged in a perpetual one-man war with the drum machine, et voila. Always more Randy Newman than Joey Ramone, nevertheless Ridgway’s carny-barker takes on wage-slavery, brain magnet and the pedagogue grind fitted beautifully into the post-punk world. This is the band Rod Serling would’ve been in had he been born twenty years later, a B-movie musick to ward off darkness, fearfully alert. Their first LP, Dark Continent, is a 35 minute headlong plunge into distemper, but somehow with humour intact at the death; the interior not broached, yet. [...] But back when success and the spotlight still beckoned, they spent the summer of 1982 working on their curious masterpiece, the LP Call Of The West, their heart of darkness, a song cycle imagining what would happen to John Muir these days, with his “Go west, young man” gung ho. He’d be screwed, is what. A meditation upon the frontier spirit splintered into anomie and self-protectionism, the album remains an astonishing depiction of how the wide open spaces of the USA are carved, gnarled and gutted by pettiness and fear of the other. And if you think this seems abstract, I take it you’ve not been watching the news lately. Some things, sadly, never date, and the crazies are forever fast-laning alongside or over us. — We Are Cult
Callbox 1-2-3
In college I used to listen to this album all the time. At some point I went through an 80’s one-hit wonder phase, scanning through all the great songs I’d heard on VH1 back in the day and grabbing the albums, mainly because the ones I’d gotten from Devo and Gary Numan were excellent. Perhaps these acts were one-hit wonders to the outside world, but if you’re a fan, you know what’s up. It occurred to me that Wall of Voodoo might be the same. Though “Mexican Radio” is a bit different from “Cars” or even “Whip It” – it’s so stylized, with spaghetti-western licks, a wild synthesizer line, clanky percussion, and a singer who sounds like a film noir actor with a lobotomy. It was like pieces from four different bands that somehow coalesced into one. If you watched the “Whip It” video with the sound off, this is the sort of music you would imagine them playing. I had no idea what a full record from these guys would sound like. It took about ten seconds to quell all my fears; the opening track features a tremendously catchy synth riff, followed by clanging guitars and a thick, breakbeat-style rhythm. “Wake up in the morning, pull myself out of bed/Think about the night before and everything I said/I made lots of promises, I know that I can’t keep/So I’ll do it tomorrow…that seems like a pretty good idea to me”. Stan Ridgway, like Springsteen or Ray Davies, had a real knack for these slice-of-life character studies, though Ridgway’s somehow felt more real. On “Factory”, the man is not an idealist or an everyman hero, but rather an apathetic abuser whose purpose in life has been completely whittled away. Call of the West is an album about dreams going to die; dreams about a new life falling flat (the title track) or simply not getting started at all (“Lost Weekend”), procrastination (“Tomorrow”), and above all, rejection (“They Don’t Want Me”). Even “Mexican Radio” has that theme; get me anywhere else, because everywhere is more interesting than here. That sense of alienation follows through to the music, which clicks and clanks along; everything from the Morricone-style guitar to the pots n’ pans percussion to Ridgway’s warble has this nervous twang to it. There’s a sense of cool to them but it’s easy to picture the band twitching and convulsing around as they play. Is it New Wave? Zolo? Cowpunk? Perhaps Wall of Voodoo’s origins help explain this a little; Ridgway ran a small film scoring company right across the street from a punk club, and soon enough the two worlds collided. That explains the guitar, and the fun instrumental “On Interstate 15”, the only tune on here without a brooding undercurrent to it. The whole thing sounds rooted in this world of noir; nearly every track feels like a short film. — Critter Jams
Tomorrow
This morning I was listening to Stan Ridgeway’s first solo album, and it got me thinking about how I first encountered his music back in 1980. It was a Friday evening and I was holding the antenna to my stereo so that I could boost its gain enough to receive the undoubtedly paltry signal of WUSF-FM, the student radio station at the University of South Florida in Tampa all of 90 miles away from Orlando. Friday nights were the New Wave ghetto and since jiggling with the analog dial [good luck tuning in a signal you weren’t “supposed” to receive today with your digital phase lock loop claptrap!] and coming across the program one evening, I made it a point to listen each Friday from 9 PM to 12 AM as WUSF spun musical gold. One evening, while airchecking, I heard Wall Of Voodoo’s brain-melting cover of the classic Johnny Cash tune “Ring Of Fire.” This heavy deconstruction of the song was based around a throbbing, industrial organ riff that was probably looped in an AMS digital delay unit while Marc Moreland’s guitar explored whole new realms of menacing feedback. Ridgeway added his dry, voiceover-influenced vocal over the top of it. Flat out, this was the most powerful cover version I’d heard at the time, and 32 years later, when considering what makes a classic cover version, this song is still the first thing to spring up in my mind. I immediately hit the store [Record Mart Warehouse in Orange Blossom Center] and found a copy for sale within days. It was the fall of 1980 and it was a time of 12″ EPs by New Wave acts hitting the stores with 4-6 tracks and a $5.98 list price attempting to tempt virgin ears with the lure of low price since no commercial radio stations were touching this music with a 20 foot pole. Side one began with “Longarm,” a post-industrial folk song that, like all of Wall Of Voodoo’s early music, was built around chugging rhythm boxes abetted by human percussionist Joe Nanini. Ridgeway offered business-speak clichés as lyrics. — Post Punk Monk
Ring of Fire
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Lionel Richie, Kelly Ripa, Mark Consuelos, Smokey Robinson
Jimmy Fallon: Mark Ruffalo, Gabriel Iglesias, GIVĒON
Stephen Colbert: Bob Odenkirk, Paul Mecurio, Father John Misty
Seth Meyers: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, James Austin Johnson (R 1/29/25)
After Midnight: Bob the Drag Queen, Drew Afualo, Tefi Pessoa
Watch What Happens Live: Michols Peña, Salley Carson
LAST WEEK'S POLL: ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 5 (LOW TO HIGH), HOW MUCH DO YOU ENJOY THROWING THINGS?
1 30%
2 10%
3 10%
4 10%
5 10%
Pie 30%
[END]
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