My Top 1000 Songs #980: Mexican Radio

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Wall Of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio," off their second LP (1982's Call Of The West), was among the jumble of New Wave-era songs I heard back in high school that helped me realize that there were a lot of things happening in rock & roll music that were much more interesting than the stale classic rock & Top 40 I'd spent my first half-decade as an avid music listener devouring. Like, say, Devo, or Trio, they weren't necessarily an act that inspired me to spend 40 minutes doing a start-to-finish deep dive into a single album... but the stray singles here & there were a real wake-up call.

I probably came across this one via the video on late night cable, or maybe in those early days of MTV--it wasn't the sort of thing you'd hear on Chicago-land radio--and I was at least as captivated by the band's visual aesthetic as by their music, Stan Ridgway's delightfully twitchy, David Byrne-like delivery an indelible part of the song. They also made an appearance (with "Back in Flesh," off their debut) in the Urgh! live music documentary which I obsessively watched back then, cementing their role as one of those bands opening me up to the far more adventurous musical route I'd take once I got to college. 

Live 1983:

Reworked as grungy 90s alt.rock by Polvo: