Month: July 2019

On December 3rd, 1989, Robby and I attended a concert together: The Call at the Glenn Miller Ballroom on the CU Boulder campus. Now, I have been to many a concert over the decades, but to this day I count that show as one of the Top 5 I’ve ever seen. I was already a fan of the band, based on local radio play for “Everywhere I Go” and “The Walls Came Down”, but nothing prepared me for the phenomenal energy pouring off that stage, ricocheting through the audience like chain lightning. The ballroom is not big — it holds maybe 1000 people — and The Call stuffed a stadium’s worth of power into it that night. I’ve never felt anything quite like it.

They were touring on their brand new release Let The Day Begin, whose title track became their most popular song, peaking at #1 on the Mainstream Rock chart (albeit only reaching #51 on the Hot 100), but I am here to declare that the pinnacle of The Call’s staggeringly underrated career is their 1987 album Into The Woods. It’s a breathtaking artistic achievement, with one of the all-time great album sides, suffused throughout with passion, thoughtfulness, intensity, and one spine-tingling moment after another.

Here’s the sonic palette of The Call in 1987:

• Introspective electric guitar by Tom Ferrier
• Driving, crashing drums by Scott Musick
• Elegiac synths by Jim Goodwin
• Virtuosic bass and astonishing vocals by Michael Been

Been, the group’s primary songwriter, started out on guitar, then shifted to bass a few albums into the group’s career. The result is an aggressive, melodic approach to bass playing that puts the instrument in the foreground, shuffling guitar further back into the mix. Like Sting, like Johnette Napolitano, Been’s facility with the bass gives his band an anchored, thrumming style that provides deep roots for the towering emotions within his compositions.

The alchemy of this mix finds its fullest expression in the opening song of the album, and the best song The Call ever made: “I Don’t Wanna.” The opening seconds hook us with contrast, pitting a high, keening synth sound against tentative bass. Then Been’s baritone comes in with what seem like the words to an anti-love song:

I ain’t here to hold you when you cry
I ain’t here to hold your shaking hand
I ain’t here to look you in the eye
Or beg for you to understand
I ain’t gonna walk you through your dreams
Walk you through this life that we all know
I ain’t here to listen while you speak
I ain’t here to heal your broken soul

Been takes a breath, then sings an anguished question that takes the song around a sharp corner: “Am I here at all?” Suddenly, the music leaps to life. Drums propel us forward, the bass quests outward, and guitar fills in the colors. We fly into another verse of resistance:

I ain’t here to tell you what you need
I ain’t gonna take a noble stand
I ain’t here to look you in the eye
Or beg for you to understand
I can only tell you what I’ve seen
I can only tell you how it felt
When my heart is crushed so bad inside
Till I felt the hate that slowly built
I don’t wanna

Now the song is in full swing, the guitar creeping higher atop the swirling bass and drums. What is this about? “I don’t wanna” what? What is the character fighting so hard against? Is it an “It Ain’t Me Babe” song, pushing back against somebody’s idealization of him? Maybe, but what about this crushed heart? This character isn’t just giving somebody the brush-off — he’s in anguish, as Been communicates exquisitely in his rendering of the lines. So what’s happening? Listen:

I ain’t gonna watch your every move
I ain’t gonna dog your every step
I ain’t here to shape your every mood
I ain’t here to keep your secrets kept
Oh but if I held you in my arms
If I could squeeze you till we cry
I don’t wanna lose this love I feel
I don’t wanna lose this fight tonight
I ain’t gonna

And here it is. Just as the instruments take flight after the first verse, Been’s voice leaps to another level on “Oh but if I held you in my arms,” as the character’s true emotion comes to light. He wants nothing more than to hold that shaking hand, to heal that broken soul, but there is something in his way. The overwhelming love and desire he feels is smashing him into that barrier, crushing him, and yet he refuses to let it go. The drums are pounding now, a cymbal crash plummeting into huge tom hits, the guitar skating across the surface into urgent solos, the synths reaching ever higher. And the relentless bass drives more, more, more struggle, repeating the inevitable and praying for the impossible:

I ain’t here to hold you when you cry
I ain’t here to hold your shaky hand
I ain’t here to look you in the eye
I don’t want you under my command
I can only hope you feel your tears
I can only wish you’d feel the hope
I can only hope that I can see
Out beyond this skin that covers me
Oh how I wish that you were here
If I could hold you in my arms
Oh how I wish that you were mine
I don’t wanna beg for you no more

Once again, Been ratchets up the passion on “how I wish that you were here”, and finally at the end of this verse, we hear “I don’t wanna” connect with its object: “I don’t wanna beg for you no more.” Those words contain all the contradictions of the song so far, because obviously the character is doing the very opposite of begging — he’s been fighting like mad to get away from his feelings, but that refusal is a skin that covers over his true emotions, a skin that he wants to remove but that is the only thing protecting him from unbearable pain. Been is nearly shouting at this point, but he reaches his true peak in the next lines:

I ain’t gonna tell you how I feel
I ain’t gonna tell you how I feel
I ain’t gonna pray for you to love me
Because I know you will
I JUST KNOW IT!

Right after “pray”, Musick hits two enormous cymbal crashes and plays a crackling fill over “I just know it”, where Been really is shouting. You can hear the character writhing in pain as the song reaches its climax, and then Ferrier’s guitar starts playing arpeggios as a denouement, slowly winding down until the synths can descend, as our heart rates return to normal after an unbelievably intense emotional journey.

Now, it won’t do to give every song this treatment, but I wanted to go in depth on “I Don’t Wanna” so that I can explain the tremendous power of this band. At their best, they could go toe-to-toe with U2, Springsteen, or anybody you care to name in the realm of passion, emotion, and intensity. They engage with big themes, and they bring big music to match.

In “It Could Have Been Me”, Been explores the existential quandary of arbitrary fate, the notion that it is mostly chance that separates the privileged from the homeless, the dead soldier from the living prisoner. Jungle drums strain against (somehow) jangling bass to underscore these divergent paths. “In The River” starts with a dynamite bass riff (where The Call has riffs, they’re bass riffs) and dramatizes contrasts in a new way, with Been and Musick trading vocal lines. Its story of a river encompasses baptism, loss, mortality, and a literal flood that symbolizes humanity’s basic lack of control in the face of overwhelming forces. “The Woods” brings all the instrumental pieces together to paint a vivid portrait of “the night of the soul”, the title woods standing in for depression and despair whose only antidote is “the right word, said from the heart.”

Those four songs together make up Side One of Into The Woods, and it is a flawless album side. “I Don’t Wanna” is peerless, but every other song on the side hits its mark perfectly, and the whole suite of music blends together into an artistic expression nothing short of superb. Side Two is one or two steps down from this level, which is of course still amazingly great — just not quite the triumph that Side One achieves. (And yes, I’m ignoring the CD experience, because this is one of those albums that splits very clearly into vinyl sides.)

So where Side One of the album is incomparable, Side Two suffers in comparison by being merely very good. But every song on that half of the album still has its moments, many of them brought about by Been’s extraordinary vocals. “Day Or Night” bristles with energy, cresting with Been’s “I wanna know your mind’s on me,” and whenever he hits the title in the chorus. “Too Many Tears” lets Been belt out a wonderful image: “I’ve poured myself out like an old bitter wine.” In “Expecting”, Been emotes his way through a different version of the “I Don’t Wanna” dilemma, in which he waits for his lover to finally come to him, and lets the music buoy him as he sings, “Words so often fail.”

Been’s voice is as deep as his lyrics, and almost every song on this album counterpoints this voice with Goodwin’s high synths, to great effect. The contrast gives The Call’s songs a wonderful tension, the feel of a soul straining at its bonds. The exception is the last song on the album: “Walk Walk.” Synths are nowhere to be heard, and the whole things has an entirely different feel from every other song on the album — a gentle rockabilly groove that struts through the song’s central image of walking and learning at the same time. Where so many of the songs on Into The Woods enact entrapment and helplessness, “Walk Walk” is hopeful and propulsive, pushing its narrator into the future. As satisfying as The Call’s anguish has been, the hope of this last track is a welcome harbinger of a path out of the woods, into the sunlight.

The stakes are high in Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The characters aren’t always literally fighting for their lives, but they are absolutely fighting to protect their vitality, their joy, their life-force, from a world constantly encroaching on them. The stakes aren’t life or death, but they are life versus death.

“Badlands” lays out the thesis. Its narrator faces danger on every side — he’s caught in a crossfire, with trouble in the heartland looming, while he gets his back burned working in the fields, feeling a head-on collision smashing in his guts, man. All these forces combined make up the metaphorical Badlands in which he lives, constantly trying to grind him into meaninglessness. But his response is defiant — he reaches for love, faith, and hope, moves from fears to dreams, and embraces the notion that “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

That’s the triumph of the life force, right there. Springsteen and his band imbue the sentiment with anthemic power — driving rock and a passionate vocal. “The Promised Land” extends “Badlands”‘s musical approach as well as its themes, with a narrator who is pretty much identical to the “Badlands” guy. He works all day, assailed by feelings of helplessness, pain, and despair. He sees himself facing down a tornado ready to blow away his dreams… except.

Except he keeps returning to his core, and it is a core of faith. Not religious faith (though some of it is cloaked in religious language), but the belief that things can get better. That the dreams that get blown away are in fact lies if they don’t have the faith to stand their ground. That those dreams and lies deserve to get blown away, because their falseness otherwise stands ready to break his heart. That despite the storm that threatens him, he can drive straight into it and survive, protected by his belief in a better life, and a better future — the promised land.

Every song on the album plays out some version of this battle — death vs. life, darkness vs. light. Sometimes it’s in a romantic context, as in the breathtaking “Candy’s Room”, where the darkness in her hall is the sadness in her face, but she finds hidden worlds alive inside when she’s with her boy. “Prove It All Night” is the companion to this song, in which the life force is decidedly erotic, and the narrator kisses his lover to seal their fates, taking them into the world where they can live… and die.

Sometimes the darkness gets the upper hand, as in “Something In the Night”, where the characters lose everything they love, and end up “running burned and blind.” Or “Factory”, which puts death in the eyes of its workers, sending them home to pass their pain along to somebody else. That pairs directly with “Adam Raised A Cain”, in which “Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain”, and his son finds himself having to rebel or die.

I seem to be finding a lot of pairings on this album, so let me suggest one more: the bookends of “Badlands” and “Darkness On The Edge Of Town.” “Badlands” feels like the beginning of a life, with a narrator full of hope and fire, but “Darkness” feels like the end, its narrator looking back with regret at the wife, the money, and the life he lost. The darkness keeps rising up, that anti-life that may even be a little seductive, and like many of the characters on this album, he’s ready to “pay the cost” for being seduced by it.

The most interesting, though, of all these, is “Racing In The Street,” in which both the stakes and the narrator change partway through the song. We start out with lyrics that feel like they could have been plucked from a Beach Boys record, but sung slowly and gravely. Bruce here is engaging with a long rock and roll tradition of fast cars as symbols of freedom and joy, but undercutting it with the tone of the song, much like Tracy Chapman would ten years later. Then he makes the comparison explicit by quoting Martha And The Vandellas’ “Dancing In The Street” twice, but with a style that is diametrically opposed to Motown exuberance.

Once again, living and dying are on the line:

Some guys they just give up living
And start dying little by little piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
Then go racin’ in the street

The narrator finds his joy and vitality in these street races, his pride in shutting up and shutting down his competitors. He even finds love in these races, winning his girl after winning a race against her date. But then we learn something unexpected. She cries herself to sleep at night now. She worries about his safety. She stares off alone into the night, deeply unhappy and alone while he goes out racing.

And when he finally figures this out, the narrator leaves behind his world of “shut-down strangers and hot rod angels” to focus on what really matters in his life: love. He puts the power of his engine into the service of taking the two of them somewhere they can find redemption and a fresh start. For all the exultation of songs like “The Promised Land” and “Prove It All Night”, I would argue that the greatest triumph of life on the album happens at the end of “Racing In The Street.”

I’ve been focused on the songwriting of this album, because that’s what I connect to the most, but before I close, let me just add one more page to my already extensive Roy Bittan fan book. Sure, the entire band is wonderful, and Bruce’s vocals are great, sometimes bordering on scary great. But for me the piano feels like the emotional core so often. Can you imagine the beginning of “Prove It All Night” without Bittan? Or “Badlands”? Or “Something In The Night”? Or “Candy’s Room”? I sure can’t. Even songs that don’t feature the piano so prominently, like “The Promised Land”, benefit hugely from the beautiful underpinning that The Professor provides. Springsteen’s lyrics are the star of this album, but they wouldn’t shine anywhere near as brightly without the brilliant Roy Bittan.