Wall Of Voodoo, The Ugly Americans LP Vinyl Rip

From my vinyl LP collection and lovingly ripped in WMA format to my hard drive years ago.

Andy Prieboy picks up nicely where Stan Ridgeway left off. Wall Of Voodoo's rendition of Johnny Cash's "Ring of fire" is awesome.

The Ugly Americans In Australia Vinyl Release 1988
Produced and mixed by: Barry Rudolph & the Band

Red Light (3:45)
Crazy, Crazy Melbourne (5:39)
Wrong Way To Hollywood (4:37)
Living in the Red (3:50)
Blackboard Sky (4:45)
The Heart Never Can Tell (4:35)
Far Side of Crazy (4:17)
Ring of Fire (5:47)
Mexican Radio (4:44)

The Band:
Chas T. Gray (Keyboards, Backing Vocals, Bass Guitar)
Roger Mason (Keyboards And Backing Vocals)
Andy Prieboy (Vocals, Keyboards)
Ned Leukhardt (Drums, Percussion)
Marc Moreland (Guitars)



The Review Below refers to the CD that has two more tracks than the vinyl LP.
There must be a law or something, because every live album seems to follow the same, clichéd order of events: crowd cheers, band takes the stage to a huge, crashing chord, crowd goes nuts, crowd noise fades, band plays a few famous songs, band digs up a relic from its backcatalogue, tired old men crank out a few more famous songs, end with biggest hit to date.

This is not your typical live album.

First aberration from the norm: instead of cheering, the Melbourne, Australia, crowd boos heartily-albeit in a friendly manner-and the first sound is not a grand chord in a major key; rather, it is a drum machine thumping the simple beats to "Red Light."

Second difference: "Red Light" featured Stan Ridgway, the band's original lead vocalist, on the album version, whereas this live version has Andy Prieboy at the mike. This is something akin to Sammy Hagar opening a Van Halen concert with a David Lee Roth-era song or Brian Johnson kicking off a show with a Bon Scott tune-i.e. an odd move, to say the least.

Third peculiarity: The second track, instead of being a barn-burner hit sure to rev up the crowd, is not a real WoV song at all. Rather, it's an amusing little lounge-singer ditty praising Melbourne for its cultural diversity-"you've got everything from restaurants/ to kiddie porn."

Fourth funky move: following this dubious compliment, the band rocks through two excellent, original numbers unavailable on any studio album. Original songs on a live album? And two of them in a row? This is heresy!…but I like it. Track three is one of the best songs in the WoV oeuvre, a musically catchy and lyrically evocative tale of harsh street life in Hollywood, and track four…I dunno what it's about, but it's mesmerizing and, not incidentally, a bit creepy. (Matter of fact, most of the songs on this disc are at least slightly creepy…)

The first (and second and third) expected song(s): the fifth tune, a hallucinatory quasi-love song, is the first appearance of a studio track originally recorded with Andy Prieboy. Oddly enough, out of the eleven tracks on the disc, only three (tracks five, seven [one of this reviewer's all-time favorite songs], and 11) are versions of album tracks featuring Mr. Prieboy on vocals.

Fifth unexpected track: track six is another previously unrecorded song, this time a Woody Guthrie cover tune. Perhaps it's not entirely unexpected…on a previous album the band included a more-than-slightly twisted version of a Patsy Cline standard, but it's one thing to record a version of another artist's song on a studio album and another thing altogether to release it for the first time on a live album. And who the hell rerecords 1930's folk tunes for popular rerelease anyway?

At last, the lone cliché: track nine is another cover, this one previously released, of Johnny Cash's famous "Ring of Fire," which originally featured Stan Ridgway. The reason this qualifies as a cliché is that it's an oldie in the band's repertoire; their first release, which was also a live recording, included this song on the set list.

And almost, but not quite, trite: track ten, WoV's lone hit, "Mexican Radio," is the next-to-last song on the album; if it had been last, that would have qualified as a live album cliché, but it is disqualifed on the grounds of not being the last song on the disc. That honor goes to the previously mentioned track eleven, a much lesser-known song off a nearly unknown album.

Sure is odd, eh?


44MB, WMA VBR, 37 Minutes

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