Album of the Day — June 15
The Call — Modern Romans
The Call — Modern Romans
15.June.2020
The Call
Modern Romans
1983
In 1983, MTV may have had three dozen videos in rotation. As such, a little band from Santa Cruz, California — The Call:
Michael Been — vocals, guitar
Scott Musick — drums, vocals
Tom Ferrier — guitar, vocals
Jim Goodwin — bass, vocals
found themselves with a hit song.
It’s not that “The Walls Came Down” isn’t catchy or that it doesn’t have a decent hook — it’s just rather politically charged.
Somehow sandwiching it between “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper and “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie on MTV seemed anathema to its social message.
But those were different days.
More tolerant.
“The Walls Came Down” was the first single off the second album, Modern Romans, by the quartet. Produced by chief songwriter and lead singer Michael Been and the band, it’s overt political content was a deliberate statement about the climate at the time. Primarily, the Cold War and the two superpowers — the U.S & USSR — imperialism.
In an interview from 1987, Been said:
“There was a great deal happening politically — Grenada, Lebanon, or the U.S. government saying the Russians are evil and the Russian government probably saying the same about us.”
Modern Romans opens with “The Walls Came Down” and is an allegory of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. As both countries had spent the post-WWII building their respective “empires” The Call is singing about the past (the fall of the Roman Empire) to indicate what lay ahead.
It’s unclear whether Been is referring to the United States or the Soviet Union as the modern Romans, but in either case, the result is the same:
The Walls Came Down
Well they blew the horns
And the walls came down
They’d all been warned
And the walls came down
They stood there laughing
They’re not laughing anymore
The walls came down
I don’t think there are any Russians
And there ain’t no Yanks
Just corporate criminals
Playin’ with tanks
It’s those last lines — Just corporate criminals, playing with tanks — that still resonate today.
The only thing to have changed from 1983 is the year on the calendar.
“Turn a Blind Eye” is a searing indictment of the human ability to ignore injustices and human suffering alike.
Turn a Blind Eye
To the desperate young, turn a blind eye
To the old and lonely, turn a blind eye
To our inhumanity
To our death-dealing vanity
To the methods of persuasion, turn a blind eye
To the masters of evasion, turn
To the science of control, turn a blind eye
To a world in chains, turn
To the sellers of illusion, turn a blind eye
To masters of confusion, turn a blind eye
To a hollow culture
To the circling vulture
To lovers of power, turn a blind eye
To the resurrection
To a world in chains, turn
I don’t want to get involved
It’s not my problem
I’ll just ignore it
I don’t want to feel this
To the starving children, turn a blind eye
To your own redemption, turn
To the horror of extinction
To a world in chains, turn
This song is a harbinger of sorts. The following year, 1984, Midge Ure and Bob Geldof would write “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and start the public era of musicians attempting to not turn a blind eye and raise awareness on larger social issues.
Many of the songs on Modern Romans don’t have the typical verse-chorus-verse-bridge-verse rhythm to them that you may expect from a rock song. More often than not, Been’s lyrics have a unique poetic structure to them that work to their advantage.
Where a typical rock song may cause a visceral reaction, the songs on Modern Romans aim for the brain and the heart.
When the band has finished addressing the indifference of the world, they turn their attention to eviscerating the wealthy.
In 1983, the go-go ’80s were just getting underway … it would be the decade of Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and the rise of Donald Trump, three people who epitomize the “Greed is good” philosophy that the ’80s came to personify.
The bottom had yet to fall when Modern Romans was released but anyone with a 7th-grade knowledge of history knows what would come next… and it did, on October 19, 1987.
Been and The Call place colonialism and the wealthy in their crosshairs on the title track:
Modern Romans
Modern Romans, false gods
Colonial maneuvers, the writings on the wall
Maybe a solution working on a clue
Now we know for certain, now we know for sure
Modern Romans, lies on parade
Instruction to the masses, protect us they say
Looking for answers, working it through
Now we know for certain, now we know for sure
Your judgment is demanding, you push beyond the need
World domination, runaway greed
Maybe, just maybe, maybe its true
Now we know for certain, now we know for sure
Tired of your judgments, your demands
Forgiveness is beyond you, you will never understand
You love the nightlife, stepping with the crowd
Do you know desperation, have you ever cried out loud
Total repetition
Total repetition
Total repetition
Reviews of Modern Romans at the time were mostly flat. But that didn’t stop the band from amassing a huge fan base among their contemporaries — Bono of U2, Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson of The Band (Hudson played with them on Modern Romans).
Peter Gabriel was such a fan that he referred to The Call as the “future of American music”.
There was a certain prescience to Been’s lyrics.
“The Walls Came Down” proved to be more than allegory or metaphor in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR broke apart … and with it the “walls” of communism.
The music of The Call continues to percolate and resonate. Their blue-collar anthem (and highest-charting hit) “Let the Day Begin” was Vice President Al Gore’s Presidential theme song in 2000. Also, because the lyrical structure of the song calls out many jobs that have been deemed “essential” during the current pandemic, the song has popped up in a recent insurance commercial.
During the 1980s there were, and still are, many who genuflect at the altar of Ronald Reagan and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s … Michael Been & The Call were not among them. Modern Romans is their proclamation to take notice that all was not as it seemed. Even in 1983, Been could see that things were headed in a different direction than what we were being told.
The Call’s Modern Romans was one of the first of the MTV generation to crack open the door to politically-charged rock albums. They didn’t mince words or hide behind metaphors. That said, they scored a hit with “The Walls Came Down” not because it was a “political” song but because it was a good song. And that’s kind of a rock and roll unicorn.
But perhaps more than anything else, the lyrics on Modern Romans are evidence that the more things change … the more they stay the same.