Stan Ridgway
Sound
Biography
Stanard "Stan" Ridgway (born April 5, 1954) is an American singer-songwriter, and film and television composer known for his distinctive voice, dramatic lyrical narratives, and eclectic solo albums. He was the original lead singer and a founding member of the band Wall of Voodoo. Stan Ridgway was born in Barstow, California, in the "high desert", and raised in Los Angeles. He claims to have been a budding ventriloquist who spent his first night in jail at the age of 12 for stealing street signs. Ridgway also had a childhood fascination with folk music, pestering his parents until they bought him a banjo at the age of 14. The band was named over-linking by Ridgway before their first show, in reference to a comment made by a friend of Ridgway's, while recording and overdubbing a Kalamazoo Rhythm Ace drum machine, which was a gift from voice actor Daws Butler. While listening to some of the music that created in the studio, Ridgway jokingly compared the multiple-drum-machine- and Farfisa-organ-laden recordings to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, whereupon the friend commented it sounded more like a "wall of voodoo" and the name stuck. Wall of Voodoo's music was a mix of New Wave and Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks of the 1960s. Adding to the music's distinctiveness was percussive and textural experimentation, i.e. mixing drum machines with unconventional instruments such as pots, pans and various kitchen utensils, raw electronics with interlocking melodic figures as well as twangy spaghetti-western guitar. On top of the mix was Ridgway's unusual vocal style and highly stylized, cinematic narratives heavily influenced by science fiction and film noir, sung from the perspective of ordinary people and characters wrestling with ironies inside the American Dream. Ridgway embarked on a solo career in 1983, shortly after Wall of Voodoo's appearance at the US Festival that same year. After collaborating on the song "Don't Box Me In" with Stewart Copeland from the Police for the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, starring Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillon and Dennis Hopper, he released his first proper solo album, The Big Heat (1986), which included the top 5 European (including UK) hit "Camouflage". This was followed by numerous other solo recordings: Mosquitos (1989), Partyball (1991), Black Diamond (1995), and Anatomy (1999), The Way I Feel Today (1998), a collection of big band standards, and Holiday in Dirt (2002), a compilation of outtakes and previously unreleased songs. Ridgway's album Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs (2005), features the narrative song, "Talkin' Wall Of Voodoo Blues Pt. 1", a history of his former band in song. Ridgway's album Holiday in Dirt was a quasi-cinematic project, with the release of the album accompanied by a showing of 14 short films by various independent filmmakers, each film a visual interpretation of one of the songs on the album. A compilation DVD of the films was released in February 2005. ... Source: Article "Stan Ridgway" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Known For
The story of the Miami Police Department's vice squad and its efforts to end drug trafficking and prostitution, centered on the unlikely partnership of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs - who first meet when Tubbs is undercover in a drug cartel.
Miami Vice
No description available.
Champs-Elysées
The long-awaited rebirth of the greatest superhero team of all time: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Hawkgirl, Green Lantern, and Martian Manhunter.
Justice League
When the Thanagarians visit Earth, Hawkgirl is forced to choose between loyalty to her people and love for her friends on her adopted planet Earth.
Justice League: Starcrossed - The Movie
Amanda, an employee at an upscale clothing store, is leading a relatively lonely and unremarkable life. All this changes when an alien that's been held a secret military installation excapes by taking over the body of one of the base employees. Amanda finds the fugitive alien and decides to help it hide from the government agents chasing it, a seemingly easy task, as the alien must change host bodies every few days. Will she be able to help her new companion make a clean getaway?
Amanda & the Alien
A naive drifter runs away from his army father in hopes of making it on the car racing circuit. In Las Vegas, he meets a young scam artist, who develops a crush on him. He is then introduced to a whole gang led by a young hustler. The racer-to-be then gets a lesson in the wild side, getting involved in one situation after another.
Speedway Junky
In the far-flung future of 2025, where man is a victim of his own technology and corporations deal to a black market that trades in human body parts, a cyborg bounty hunter is hired by a wealthy woman to find out who murdered her husband.
Future Kick
Eric's art gallery is losing money, and even though his psychiatrist wife wants to help, she can't do much to cheer him up. When a young, sexy woman named Toni accepts a sales position at the gallery, she instantly brings it back to life, jump-starting Eric's troubled marriage in the process. But the marital problems soon come back, prompting accusations that Eric is having an affair with Toni.
Error in Judgment
This comic drama examines the relationships and addictions of a group of twenty-something friends with very dysfunctional, yet interesting lives.
$pent
Urgh! A Music War is a British film released in 1982 featuring performances by punk rock, new wave, and post-punk acts, filmed in 1980. Among the artists featured in the movie are Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), Magazine, The Go-Go's, Toyah Willcox, The Fleshtones, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, X, XTC, Devo, The Cramps, Oingo Boingo, Dead Kennedys, Gary Numan, Klaus Nomi, Wall of Voodoo, Pere Ubu, Steel Pulse, Surf Punks, 999, UB40, Echo & the Bunnymen and The Police. These were many of the most popular groups on the New Wave scene; in keeping with the spirit of the scene, the film also features several less famous acts, and one completely obscure group, Invisible Sex, in what appears to be their only public performance.
Urgh! A Music War
14 short films by 14 different filmmakers, from the music of Stan Ridgway.
Stan Ridgway's Holiday In Dirt
Filmmaker Larry Weinstein stages a wide range of performances in tribute to the compositions of Kurt Weill.
September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill
"A collage of B-movie science fiction, surrealism, film noir and cinema verité, the 1995 tragicomic film purported to serve as a promotional piece for Drywall and their record release 'Work The Dumb Oracle'. It instead devolved into a stream-of-consciousness kidnapping and murder story involving extraterrestrials, a ventriloquist’s dummy (the band’s conniving manager Jackie), a confused and emotional private eye and a band quickly losing patience over the whole fiasco." - Carlos Grasso