Unglued and Glad : Stan Ridgway, No Longer ‘Stuck’ With His Label, Seems to Be Running on an Adrenaline High

“Work the Dumb Oracle” is the new album by Drywall, a band led by Stan Ridgway, the former Wall of Voodoo singer-guitarist whose career has been long and distinguished, if less than overwhelmingly rewarding commercially. At once futuristic and bluesy, “Oracle” is a collection of industrial, ensemble musical improvisation over finely honed lyrics, sung in Ridgway’s amusingly tweaked signature vocal style.

Ridgway, 39 (“waddling into middle age,” as he puts it), says he is proud of his latest effort--his last for the I.R.S. label, which has dropped him after more than 15 years. Instead of being disappointed about that, he seems to be running on a creative adrenaline high.

“I’m really happy to be a free agent again,” he said in a recent phone interview from his Los Angeles home. He performs with Drywall tonight at the Coach House. “It’s like a piece of gum that was on my shoe that I can finally take off. I’m glad to get out of there. I’ve been stuck there from 15 or 18 years, ever since the beginning of Wall of Voodoo.”

He couldn’t sound more enthusiastic about his work with Drywall.

“When I first started [working with Drywall], I was getting mail at my P.O. box from old fans who were telling me, ‘Stan! What are you doing ? Don’t do this!’ ” he said. “When I first got one of those, for about 10 minutes I went, ‘Ohhhhhhh, God!’ Well, then I got real angry and started to think, ‘Well, I guess an artist has to take his audience kicking and screaming into a new room to make them realize that this is exciting, this is what you’re supposed to be doing.’ ”

Ridgway, keyboardist Pietra Wexstun and drummer Ivan Knight utilized a number of electronic gadgets and industrial machines as well as more traditional instrumentation to create “Work the Dumb Oracle.” (Dumb Oracle is the name of a racehorse Ridgway once bet on--and lost.)

Their approach to recording the album was very organic--it was performed mostly live in the studio, with a good deal of improvisation. This is perhaps what accounts for the album’s warm, bluesy feel--it owes more to Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix and Howlin’ Wolf than any techno-industrial groups.

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“We filled a room up [with instruments and electronic gear] and just kind of spread the microphones around until it sounded right,” Ridgway said. “I’d build a loose sonic structure in the room, and we’d go in and play with it, and we kept the tape rolling.

“It was something like a series of Polaroid snapshots--something caught on the move, as opposed to sitting down and picking it apart,” he said. “I enjoy the mad-scientist aspect of playing with a lot of these electronic machines and attempting to make them go south or break them or make them do things they weren’t designed to do.”

Thematically, the songs deal largely with Ridgway’s ambivalence toward his native Los Angeles. He paints lyrical pictures of the city that are sarcastic and repellent, but there’s an undeniable, morbid fascination with his surroundings as well.

“I have a love-hate relationship with Los Angeles,” he said. “I really enjoyed living here when it didn’t have any pretense of high culture. . . . Now, it’s like the belly of the beast. It’s not a good place for artists; it’s a town where what you see is what you’re sold. ‘Jaded’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. But still, I know that if you put me in a cabin up in the mountains, I’d go crazy--so I’m gonna stay here.”

Ridgway views “Work the Dumb Oracle” as “the first in a series of apocalyptic documents that we’re gonna be putting out until the year 2000.” Each album will be accompanied by a half-hour film.

Ridgway expects the first of those--”The Drywall Incident,” written and conceptualized by the group and directed by Carlos Grassi--to be released to art-house theaters next month. Truly a multimedia outfit, Drywall also has its own site on the World Wide Web and can be reached at https://fuji.ucsd.edu/Drywall.

One thing’s for certain--Ridgway is enjoying himself these days, and to him, that’s vastly more important than big-label backing or a bulging bank account.

“I don’t let the commerce thing influence what I’m doing,” he said. “Whenever I make something, I don’t think purposely of alienating anybody, but I will make something that is very interesting to me and catchy and entertaining and has some information and some teeth to it.”

* Drywall, Insight and Bone Pony perform tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $12.50. (714) 496-8930