The title track's opening notes are enough to convince us that Ridgway immediately has found his niche on this, his 1986 debut solo release. Far richer and more focused than the Voodoo releases, The Big Heat teems with low-lifes, and misfits and lives in crisis, but all are drawn with a crime novelist's sense of tension and mystery and a keen eye for compassion. All the trademarks are here and finally crystallized; (the pregnant atmosphere, a sense of impending dread, deeply spooky electronics, and an alchemist's approach to genre and instrumentation) while anchoring them firmly in a rich tradition of American literature, film, myth and popular culture. A stark portrait of a haunted country.

No less than esteemed music critic Greil Marcus wrote in Artforum that year..."Ridgway is playing with the possibilities of the flat, dead - pan tone Raymond Chandler identified - he's also looking for the way , as Chandler wrote, that American language comes 'alive to cliches,' seeks naturally to make them, to make a language everyone can understand without a second thought.The stories are made as ordinary as dirt - and yet The Big Heat is probably the most compelling portrait of American social life to appear on a rock 'n roll record since Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska."

The album blasted off with an unlikely top 5 international hit in Europe, with the ironic, 7-minute long, Vietnam ghost saga, "Camouflage". Ridgway and his band Chapter Eleven set off on a world-wide tour over the next two years, which took them through the U.S., Great Britain, Europe, Scandinavia, Puerto Rico, Australia and points in between.