POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ridgway Mines World of Downtrodden : The most effective songs in his appearance at the Coach House deal with plain, tattered people just trying to cope.

It was fitting that Stan Ridgway opened and closed his show Friday night at the Coach House with songs about beleaguered miners. After all, the characters who inhabit his dimly lit musical world always seem to be getting the shaft.

Ridgway began with “Overlords,” a science fiction story that could have been taken from Isaac Asimov or Harlan Ellison. Set in the aftermath of World War IX, it cast the Los Angeles rocker/role-player as a pressed laborer dreaming of escape and resistance against sinister galactic powers.

A closing rendition of the fatalistic “Sixteen Tons,” dedicated to Tennessee Ernie Ford, gave the show a fearful symmetry. Ridgway didn’t have the vocal heft to make the Merle Travis song’s economically trapped coal miner as imposing as Ford did, but he captured the character’s underlying desperation and powerlessness.

Ridgway’s latest album, “Partyball,” is mainly about the fearsome distortions that come from dominance, power, and an unwillingness to acknowledge weakness and vulnerability as our common human lot.

The newer songs often featured blunt, hammering beats--a departure from the unsettled, ambient, complex music that marked much of the Wall of Voodoo veteran’s first two solo albums, “The Big Heat” and “Mosquitos.” Such new songs as “Jack Talked” and “Uba’s House of Fashions” were good vehicles for the pliant-faced, mime-gesturing Ridgway to play characters driven daft. But they lacked the resonance of more detailed, closely drawn earlier songs.

“I Wanna Be a Boss” was a ham-handed ironic power fantasy, far from peak output for a performer who has been justly praised for bringing the eye of a dramatist or short story writer to his rock songs. But even at his most simplistic or his most allegorically fantastic, Ridgway’s songs were thought-provoking sketches of how life is lived. He’s far too valuable a player to be left, as he is at the moment, without a record deal.

The best of Ridgway’s new songs was “Harry Truman,” which he and his five-member band, Chapter Eleven, put across with a tense, controlled burn (guitarist Pete McCray could have fired it up more during his solo--this is a song worthy of the stormy fury of Neil Young & Crazy Horse). It was a gripping number that didn’t merely bemoan the destructive use of power, but probed for the underlying psychological flaws that erupt in aggression. Ridgway tartly dedicated the song to the newest U.S. Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas.

If Ridgway’s outlook seems dire, his presentation was far from it. No somber, angry bard of doom, he was more the wry jester (an ideal stance from which the powerless can jab back at their masters).

Ridgway put across his songs with his typical flat, nasal, but animated sing-speak, delivered patter in the voice of a mid-American huckster, or quipped dryly for a full house that included many fans who were able to recite song lyrics as he sang.

At one point, Ridgway invited fans to call out chords for the band to play as it tacked a mock-stentorian coda onto “Drive She Said.” After complying with suggestions for chords that actually exist on fret-boards and keyboards, Ridgway got a request for the chord of P.

“P? There is no P in music,” he said, in one of the rare instances in which he fell into conventional thinking. As long as Ridgway was playing around, it would have been fun to let his band have a go at discovering the as-yet-uncharted chord of P.

The audience whooped it up as Ridgway re-enacted such older favorites as the martial ghost story “Camouflage” and “Drive She Said,” the delightfully detailed story of a buffoonish cabby’s chance dalliance with mystery and intrigue. Ridgway and band also took a crowd-pleasing gallop through his Wall of Voodoo hit, “Mexican Radio.”

Ridgway’s talent for creating evocative characters and resonant stories was clearest on “Can’t Stop the Show” and “A Mission in Life,” two quiet songs reserved for encores. Both featured characters on life’s fringes who try to find niches where they can survive failures, pressures and indignities with a measure of pride intact.

The songs involved none of the more grandiose stuff of “Partyball,” with its rebellions plotted, presidential bombing orders handed down, and fantasies of wealth and power entertained. But these small vignettes of plain, tattered people trying to cope represented Ridgway’s most truthful and poignant work.