THE CALL: This Headline Contains No Puns

THE CALL: This Headline Contains No Puns

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“We speak from such a limited, myopic generational context.” —Michael Been

by John Mendelssohn

Such is your affection for the one song of the Call’s that everyone’s heard—the one that struck you as a wondrous marriage of the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, and Larry (“Boney Maronie”) Williams— that you go to see them on a week night at a grotty little nightclub in a Northern California town so small that four of the City Council’s six members are barnyard animals.

There’s a pasture where the backstage area should be, so it takes you a while to find the group’s dressing room. It turns out to be as big as a walk-in closet. Diana Ross wouldn’t be able to fit all her socks in it, never mind all her shoes. And it’s as airless as it is cramped. So you understand lead singer Michael Been and drummer Scott Musick’s willingness to follow you out into the damp March night in search of a place where they’ll be audible over their opening act.

You trudge through the darkness to Bud’s Ice Cream. Michael Been is uncomfortable with the idea of taking advantage of the place’s quiet without ordering something. So you get him and drummer Scott Musick and yourself coffee. Been doesn’t drink his, but you’ll forget to ask him if he’s a health nut, just as you’ll neglect to accuse him of having played in H.P. Lovecraft, a minor group of rock’s silly Psychedelic Era. You’ll neglect as well to get more details of the 1970 Chicago high school comedy contest in which he placed first and John Belushi second. It’s futile to pretend that a long day of wage slavery hasn’t reduced you to a feeble imitation of your normal robust self.

Been’s small. And stocky. He’s closecropped and bearded, and not remotely apt to be mistaken for John Taylor or Billy Idol. He hasn’t the cheekbones for it. He lacks Iggy Pop’s lean muscularity. At 34, he is not one of rock’s principal dream boats.

Considering how powerfully he sings, you’re surprised that he speaks in a whine that tends toward twanginess, the apparent residue of a Dust Bowl childhood. But he has kind eyes and betrays no trace of self-importance.

You sip your coffee and imagine that it must be heart-breaking to be playing grotty little nightclubs in the middle of nowhere in 1986 after having been In Heavy Rotation on MTV and a staple on hipper radio stations through most of the first half of 1983. You ask them what happened. They blame Phonogram Records for everything.

Every time they’d turn around, they say, “there’d be different people in charge of deciding what to do with us, and months would go by when the people in charge didn’t know who we were. When they put out ‘The Walls Came Down’ single in January, ’83, they said that all the radio feedback was completely negative, so they gave us only $15,000 to do a video at a time when the minimum was like $35,000. By the time we finished it, the record was already dead as far as the record company was concerned. After MTV started playing it to death, though, people started calling the radio stations and got it started again. But the record company still wouldn’t do anything.

“They finally kicked in money for us to tour with Peter Gabriel, and after that went well, a lot of money for us to go to Europe with him. But then they didn’t release the record the whole time we were there, even though we got real good reviews in France and Germany, and the video was on some of their video shows.

“We’ll never know why they handled us like they did,” Michael Been sighs. “But I do know that it felt personal.”

Now they’ve got a new record company, one whose Call press kit gives the impression that Been is a lot more intent on venting his outrage at the sad state of current affairs than in churning out frivolous Top 40 hits. You admit, therefore, that you were flabbergasted to find the group’s latest album, Reconciled, being led off with the consummately innocuous “Everywhere I Go,” which strikes you as a deliberate attempt to tone down and get on the radio—if not as the first Wang Chung rip you’ve ever heard.

Little suspecting the disdain in which you hold it, Been tells you how the song came to be. “I can write very systematic pop songs,” he says, “but that isn’t really one of them. That was inspired by seeing Jesse Jackson on TV before the elections. He was saying, ‘Lord, when I go into the ghetto, I need you there,’ and, ‘Lord, when I go into the White House, I need you there,' and, ‘When I go to Cuba, Lord, I need you there,’ and this one little deacon in the row of deacons that sit behind him got all aroused and suddenly jumped up yelling, ‘Lord, I need you everywhere I go.’ Then I wrote that song in about 20 minutes.”

The interview’s going nowhere. You know it. Michael Been knows it. Scott Musick knows it. The gabby locals slurping ice cream at the next table probably know it. So you do what you know you must, and remove your gloves of kid. You note in a gently accusatory tone that Reconciled strikes you as pretty thin insofar as the sort of moral outrage you’d thought the Call’s stock in trade is concerned.

“I don’t think I’m as angry as I was,” Michael Been unashamedly concedes, not reaching for his coffee. “I just reached a point where I stopped thinking it was cool to be an angry or cynical person. I got real tired of looking at everything as dark and hopeless. You have to be able to say yes to this life the way it is.

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“We speak from such a limited, myopic generational context. If you look back through history, though, you see it’s always been this way. Life’s a much bigger picture than the political situation. You have to simultaneously work for change and find some degree of happiness and peace with the way things are. The thing to do is to ask yourself if you’re going to be a man and take the licks and still say yes to life, or are you going to be a wimp and just bitch and moan and complain?”

When you invite Been to disparage rock’s New Conservatives, imbeciles like Sammy (“I think Reagan is the coolest fucker we’ve had in office in a long time”) Hagar, he’s a lot gentler than you’d expect someone who insinuated (most aptly) that Ronald Reagan is a “corporate criminal playing with tanks” to be.

“Some great writer,” he chuckles, “said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, and that’s a fact.” He has a distinctly Will Rogersish way of saying that’s a fact. “There’s a lot of that jingoism going around. But I’m not in that place. I think America’s the best country in the world, but I also think it’s simultaneously the worst. Eastern Bloc countries don’t have the freedom we have, and that’s a fact. On the other hand, the reason that we have freedom and money and a high standard of living is that people in Guatemala are working for 10 cents an hour to finance our corporations.

“I’m not a Reagan supporter, but the bottom line of it to me is that he’s my kind. I’m not as big or obvious a perpetrator of crime as he might be, but at the same time, in the big picture, I’m only an inch away from him. I’m closer to Reagan than I am to any kind of holy perfection. To me, there’s still hope even for him.”

All this said, he takes care to point out that Reconciled isn’t entirely without its scathing moral indignation. “ ‘Blood Red (America),’ ” he notes, “was inspired by a speech Reagan gave to the Moral Majority where he said something like, ‘We Americans are the saviors of the world, and we will walk into Heaven proudly, with our heads raised high.’”

“Man, you must be jokin’,” the Call song replies. “Our hands are colored blood red.”

You tell Been that you’re hardly more appalled by the New Conservatives than by what you’ve wryly dubbed the New Inspirational—that wave of groups from the U.K. that deals not in mere songs, but in generic Anthems of Hope. You admit that you perceive Simple Minds as belonging to this nauseous corps. You hope that Been or Musick will mutter, “Yeah, they do suck,” and that you’ll be able to rush the quote into print in time for the concert tour the two groups will shortly undertake together, and that you’ll come home from work one day soon, switch on MTV, and hear Martha marveling, “Simple Minds have called off the rest of their North American tour after learning what their opening act said about them to John Mendelssohn.” You want to have that power again, as you did in the ’70s, when you made or destroyed careers with a few well-placed taps on the keys of your Olivetti.

But no such luck. “I could never write a song about the theology of glory,” Been admits, “but those guys are 26 years old, and they really are walking six inches off the ground. I don’t find that stuff offensive if I get the feeling of sincerity from it, and in their case, I know it’s sincere.

“I guess I wouldn’t be much of a critic,” he apologizes, staring melancholically into the desolation outside and allowing his coffee to grow ever colder. “I really don’t see the value of tearing things down.

“Of course, on the other hand I don’t mind telling you that I wouldn’t cross the street to see Bryan Adams. Or Corey Hart. Or Hall & Oates. Or a lot of other people I could mention. I just don’t think any of that stuff’s good enough to put on record. I get no sense of real commitment from it.

“At the same time, though, I realize that all those people have got something I don’t.”. E