The Walls at Least Moved a Little Farther Outward

Album: The Call, Modern Romans, 1983

Acquired: I probably bought this at the Navy Exchange at Little Creek, but I wouldn't swear to that. I do know that Modern Romans is one of the first cassettes I purchased in 1983.

Best Track: "Time of Your Life"

Lasting Memory: Much like I can't remember the details of purchasing this album, I can't point to a single indelible moment I associate with it. Modern Romans, for me, has just always sort of been there. Except when it wasn't.

[WARNING: The following paragraphs contain high levels of unverifiable pseudofacts and unpopular opinions. Proceed at your own risk.]

Back in 1983, rock radio was still essentially AOR -- album-oriented radio. Microformats and supertight playlists hadn't pablumized and pigeonholed popular music yet, and disk jockeys could play pretty much what they wanted. There were boundaries, of course. But those boundaries were pretty wide. Today's classic rock stations reflect this to some degree. For instance, what exactly do Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and Van Halen's "Panama" have in common besides both being big rock hits in the early 1980s that are still played on your very own hometown's station that never forgets.

That programmatic freedom kept the airwaves open to bands like The Call, which if it would be unfair to call them odd, it would certainly be correct to describe them as something completely different. The best I can do by way of describing The Call's sound in three words or less is "gothic country gospel." I had never heard anything like it when WNOR-FM99 started spinning The Call's "The Walls Came Down" during that summer between seventh and eighth grade. And the video playing on MTV, which like the radio of the time took a much more catholic approach to its playlist, was way cool like the first Apple computer ad. (This ain't the original.)

Modern Romans opened up whole new musical worlds for me. Still, as unique as The Call sounded to me then, and still sounds to me now, the album is as much a product of 1983 as George Brett's pine tar incident and Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech. Betrayed innocence and deep paranoia are given equal play on The Call's major-label debut, and those were just the right notes to hit at a time when we could all be scandalized by the amount of stick 'um a baseball player used even as we expected the missiles to launch in 15 minutes.

There is one bit of sanctuary to be found on Modern Romans, however. In the closing track, "All About You," Michael Been sings, in clenched-throat scream that might be the sound a man makes just before the guillotine blade hits, "I've never been to wild about politics/ But I'm wild about you" and "I've never been easy with strangers/ But I'm easy with you." Sometimes all a paranoiac needs is love.

Love isn't always the answer, though, as the person being upbraided in "Time of Your Life" finds out when he chose both hugs and drugs:

Saw a bad movie
It was the story of my life
Bad direction
Story of my life

Now I can't hide
I can't move
I can't deliver
What you gonna do

You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the attention
It was the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the applause

Waking in a closed room
Feelings that I can't show
Told myself I don't mind
She says she wants the door closed

I look her in the eye
Tell her what I'm thinking
It doesn't seem to matter
The ship is sinking

You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the attention
It was the time of your life
But now it's time to go home

I saw a bad movie
I think I had my soul touched
He told me that he might call
He told me that he might call

He said come back
Come back, come back home
Living by your own rules
Means living all alone

You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh how you loved the attention
You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the attention
It was the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the applause

So what you wanna hear?

It really is your call on what to listen to now because I can't find "Time of Your Life" as a download or a sample anywhere. That's a shame. Rewatch the video above.

Up Next: The Call, Reconciled, 1986 (Yep, it's another theme week-ish. Postings made be irregular over the next seven days.)

Word Count to Date: 20,080