7/6/06: Stan Ridgway: Black Diamond (1995)

“I’m not really sure what I am—Republican, Democrat, Independent,” says Stan Ridgway. Sadly, most folks classify him as the guy coming out of a pot of baked beans in the video for “Mexican Radio.” Wall of Voodoo wasn’t the only interesting band to get doomed as a novelty via early MTV. Ridgway, however, has kept making great albums full of industrial Americana and rural noir obsessions.

That kind of thing leads to conservative content. Consider the fine Black Diamond, barely released in 1995 before getting reissued in 2001 on the New West label. It’d be worth owning just for “Wild Bill Donovan,” which can pass as a fairly straight tribute to the founder of the OSS.

There’s also “Down The Coast Highway”—which I like to think of as an answer song to Steve Earle’s “Billy Austin.” That moronic 1990 epic had Earle taking on the persona of a 29-year-old sitting on Death Row. All poor Billy did was kill a gas station attendant in cold blood. As Earle whines at the end:

So when the preacher comes to get me
And they shave off all my hair
Could you take that long walk with me
Knowing Hell is waiting there
Could you pull that switch yourself, sir
With a sure and steady hand?

“Hell, yeah,” replied Earle’s target audience, sending the troubadour into another drug-induced stupor.

“Down The Coast Highway” has Ridgway narrating the tale of another young man. He’s out of prison, and can’t think of anything better to do than commit another robbery. The ex-con knows he’s a disappointment to his mother, and he dwells on that while wandering into potential targets—“markets and drug stores”—along the road.

The song plays like a typically sharp character study, so we don’t know Ridgway’s working a persona until the end:

The last place he drove into
Had to be my place
They said he’d run out of gas, anyway
And as he walked up to the counter
With a blue steel gun in his hand
I took out my long rifle
And I blew him away

It’s not a punchline. “Down The Coast Highway” is a simply sad tune—but isn’t it nice to hear it sung by the good guy?

Make it your own: There are shining RightWingTrash moments on every Stan album available here. (We’ll be discussing other Wall of Voodoo veterans later.) Forget the Drywall stuff, though. It’s an artsy group project with predictable politics.

 

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