Stan Ridgway
Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs

Stan Ridgway is the Ray Bradbury of American song.
An underrated minstrel of provincial nightmares who, live, looks like a history professor. He's a man of corduroy jackets, slightly dusty: you imagine him scented with pipe tobacco and fireplace smoke. His ideal place could be one of those charming, 19th-century British men-only clubs with comfortable leather chairs and fine wooden bookshelves.
His adventure begins in the '80s with a very odd musical project that merges new wave with country western: Wall of Voodoo. Listening to them today, they sound rather dated, electronic drums and Morriconian guitars don't always work well together… but his voice, metallic and slightly ironic, makes the difference. After the success of “Mexican Radio,” it all ends, Ridgway continues solo and releases a true gem: “The Big Heat.” From there on, Stan gets a bit lost, alternating good records with average flops until 2004, the year of release of “Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs.”

In this sort of concept on the theme of escape, Professor Ridgway plunges his hands into the material he knows best: the shadow zone of the American dream, the epic of suburban motels, cheap horror comics, abandoned drive-ins, losers seeking any kind of revenge. A series of narrative places very close to those of Richard Matheson, episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” the already mentioned Bradbury, the best Stephen King, the one from “It” and “Different Seasons.”
There's a scent of marshmallows and cotton candy in the tracks of “Snakebite” (especially in the circus-like “Running with the carnival”), but after some careful listening, the shadow of Pennywise the clown and Tod Browning's melancholic circus freaks is much more than a sensation.

“Crow Hollow Blues” and “Monster of the Id” are quirky and rickety, they sound like an autumn amusement park, with dead leaves rotting next to rusty rides. Even when the mood brightens, like in “Wake up Sally (the cops are here)” or “That Big 5-0,” the cheerfulness is only apparent: the text is tense, telling of desolate state roads and escapes doomed to catastrophe. We are at a neighborhood barbecue, among identical two-story houses like Donald Duck's house, beer cans and checkered shirts. Life is beautiful, America is the promised land, everything is fantastic… so why are we all screaming, why is something that's not a steak cooking on the barbecue, why is your wife bleeding from her eyes?

But you pretend nothing's happening, you think it's just a nightmare: if you keep smiling and talking about baseball, soon you'll wake up, and everything will be like before.
Too bad it's not true.
Too bad there's no typical Hollywood ending around the corner, just the awareness of a curtain falling (“Classic Hollywood Ending”).
Too bad the old band is gone along with youth, and there's only time for a song to remember it (“Talkin' Wall of Voodoo pt.1”).
Too bad the only possible answer comes with “Throw it Away”: the shadows of the past rummage in your mind, and you wonder what happened to the people you cared about, what price you paid for your mistakes, and exactly where your path went crooked and wrong. The chorus, one of the most poignant of the so-called “zero years”, offers no hope: away with the sufferings, away with lost loves, away with memories. Abandon your old self on a street corner and start over: “there's nothing else to do but throw it all away.”

And God bless America.