It's been 24 years since Stan Ridgway [ tickets ] and Wall of Voodoo released "Mexican Radio," an instant radio classic that also helped usher in the pop-video age via MTV.

In the long intervening years, Wall of Voodoo has vanished (possibly to the same alternate dimension where MTV still shows music videos), but Ridgway never went away. He's been watching us and taking notes the whole time.

Ridgway turned up Saturday night (3/18) at Threadgill's, a "surprise guest" at the unofficial CD Baby showcase. The singer/guitarist looks a bit quizzically rumpled these days--sort of like a high school biology teacher wondering where his reading glasses went off to--but the offbeat wiseguy voice is still there, and Ridgway's talent for left-field musical hooks is still apparent.

Ridgway has always invested heavily in a particular set of source materials in his music. Endless roads and driving at night, potentially violent confrontations and mysterious signals from unknown sources: this is the world Ridgway is the most comfortable living in, and his short but satisfying set Saturday found him settling into his favorite settings like a well-worn chair.

A Tex-Mex version of "Mexcian Radio" set the tone for the stripped-down set. Ridgway brought with him his frequent touring companions, keyboardist Pietra Wexstun and guitarist Rick King (occasionally known as the Stan Ridgway Acoustic Trio), and the band stretched with out several relaxed versions of some of Ridgway's best-known songs, including a rousing version of "Camouflage." A casual listener might have even thought they were hearing a normal band.

But they would be wrong, as Ridgway demonstrated with the closing number, the old Wall of Voodoo chestnut "Call of the West," a weird enough song to begin with, but one which on this night the singer embellished with an improvised narrative section involving some kind of range war between two Austin restaurants, the transformation of nearby I-35 into a toll road, and the seemingly inevitable expansion of Austin into a megacity which eventually will swallow up Houston.

"But ... I don't care," Ridgway summarized. "Because I don't live here!"

And then he vanished again.