Best Album You've Never Heard
According to me
I’ve worked with people in the past that are very talented when it comes to writing music reviews. They use words I’ve never heard and crack me up with their wit.
Unfortunately, I’m not very good at that. But I truly want to share my love of this album with people because it’s been close to my heart for almost thirty years. Bear with me as I try to explain.
To be honest, I was not familiar with The Call when I snagged this promotional CD from the radio station in 1994. The Call were an 80s rock band from California that gained brief notoriety on the Modern and Mainstream Rock Charts in 1989 with the song “Let The Day Begin.” The song only reached #51 on the Mainstream Chart, though, and the band essentially broke up in 1991.1
But to this 23-year old disc jockey The Call’s lead singer Michael Been was just some guy who had released a CD with some cool cover art. Honestly, this is a prime example of a visual driving a selection. Would I have purchased this CD based on the cover art? No, but what it did do is drive curiosity. The cover art made me want to know what it sounded like.
I vaguely remember the first time I played the opening track, “Us.” I was living in a studio apartment in downtown Sioux City, Iowa.
A screaming guitar lick followed by a tribal drum beat. And then there was this haunting voice:
I don't care for cruel confrontations
I don't care for cool conversations
I don't care much for a life of crime
I don't care much for violent times
But I care about love
And I care about truth
And I care about trust
And I care about you
And I care about us
Of course, I had never heard Michael Been’s voice before. It caught me off guard. But it all fit together very well on that first song and it made me curious about the rest of the album.2
I don’t recall how much more of the album I listened to that night. It might’ve been the entire thing or it might’ve been a skip through several songs just to get a feel. But what I do know is I liked what I hear enough to take the CD with me on a solo drive to Denver more than a year later.
I was heading out to visit Jay for the very first time since graduating from college. It was an exciting event for me because I had never taken a road trip like this alone. It was roughly a 9 hour drive and I was going to do it through the middle of the night and arrive at his house in the wee-hours of the morning.3
I drove from Sioux City to Omaha, on to Lincoln, and then just kept going endlessly west on I-80. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill had just been released. I remember listening to “You Oughta Know” on the radio during the drive and thinking to myself “She seems really angry and that actually makes for a cool song, and kinda creepy.”
That ‘creepy’ theme continued when, in the middle of the night somewhere west of North Platte, Nebraska, I popped the Michael Been CD into the stereo.4
I fell in love with On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakthrough that night. While I listened and drove through the darkness, I became caught in a hypnotic trance of Been’s ghostly vocals. I felt like he was speaking directly to me with his lyrics.
I had a wide range of emotions flowing through me at that time in my life. The trip was symbolic in a lot of ways. My first marriage was slowly unraveling its way to an end5 and my career in radio was in doubt as I struggled to decide if I wanted to move on from the industry, get a job in a different city, or stay in Sioux City where things would remain relatively easy.
To this day I still think of that drive when I hear these songs - I can feel the drive.
Example - the groaning guitar intro to “Luminous” leading to more eerie utterances from Been’s voice:
Time changes place
Time changes side
Lying in wait
Waiting to strike
I love you still
I always will
Here in the dark
Everything’s clear
Doesn’t seem right
For me to be here
If you listen to this song, you’ll understand.
That’s the thing about this album - it’s not an easy one to listen to these days. You won’t find it on any true music streaming platform.6 But thankfully you can hear it on YouTube thanks to the channel Strip Cycle Christian Music. For the record, I wouldn’t call this record “Christian Music,” but I can completely see the relation and I’m glad they’ve found it worthy of the upload. Otherwise I would’ve had to do it.
When I got rid of my CDs a few years ago I kept a stark few. Thankfully, On The Verge was one of them because I was already aware of how rare it had become.
Then there’s the song “Worried,” holy cow:
If you ever worried about me, darling
Better worry about me now
And if you ever cared anything about me
Better care about me now
I’m on a one-way dive into the bottom of the world
And it looks like I may not pull out
So if you ever worried about me
Better worry about me, better worry about me now
I’ve attempted to perform “Luminous” and “Worried” on my own and I’ve decided that it’s impossible to do it justice. The recordings by Been are just that good.
The one song I still do mess around with playing is “To Feel This Way.” I think it’s because the lyrics are still fairly powerful even through my “iffy” voice.
My favorite verse is the last one which, admittedly, has a somewhat spiritual relevance to it:
A million eyes were watching
From the world above my head
And I swear they saw right through me
The life that I had led
The stranger enters quietly
He braves the heat and cold
Through a deep dark haunted passageway
That leads into the soul
Let no one be mistaken
Death makes memories of us all
It’s the purpose that confounds me
I should never have allowed myself to feel this way
If you play/listen to the above video you’ll notice the track is nearly 12 minutes long. That’s because there are 2 versions of the song at the end of the CD.7
I’ll never forget my surprise during that long, drive into the darkness toward Colorado when the second version of “To Feel This Way” began, startling me with a thumping bass guitar. Without a doubt the second version (that begins at 5:54) is my favorite.
The rumor on Wikipedia is that Michael Been recorded another album of solo material that remains unreleased to this day. (Boo Hiss)
Been also portrayed the apostle John in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ.8
His son, Robert Levon Been, is the frontman for the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.9 Michael was heavily involved with them, touring as their sound engineer until his sudden death in 2010 from a heart attack while on the road in Hasselt, Belgium. Michael Been was 60.
For the longest time I had no idea what Michael Been looked like. There were no pictures inside the CD jacket and no Internet to do a Google search yet. The first time I remembering seeing his face was in the early 2000s on a VH-1 TV show about the 80s where they showed a quick blurb of him as “Michael Been of The Call.”
That’s what he looks like?
It momentarily caught me off guard. I had always assumed he was an eccentric dude with greasy hair, earrings - maybe some tattoos.
By this time the Internet was becoming a thing and I did a quick search and confirmed that yes, Michael Been did indeed look like my former McDonald’s manager and the first drummer I ever played with back in 1987 at the age of 16.
He was very unassuming. Which made me love him even more because - well - look at me.
Of course, what matters is the music, the songwriting, the lyrics, the voice. I will leave you with this rare live version of Michael Been performing “To Feel This Way” in 1997 with his reunited band, The Call.
When someone mentions an album that “changed their life,” On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakthrough is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.
I would argue that “Let The Day Begin” is more popular now than it was in ‘89. The Call’s cult following has continued to grow over the years, not just with listeners but with other artists as well. Simple Minds covered the song several years ago.
This time period was also the tail end of the grunge era. Kurt Cobain died just a week before this album was released. The album is in no way grungy, but the guitar work feels like an overlap with the time period and the voice, a distant cousin.
I have no idea why I did it this way. My guess is I did it to avoid taking a day off from work for the drive.
Back then it might’ve been a cassette copy I had made. I don’t recall having a CD player in my car until a few years later. But if I took the time to make a copy for the road trip, that tells you I already had good vibes about the album.
It would be permanently over less than 2 months after this trip. I was married the first time at the age of 23 years, 3 months. It was a product of major insecurity on my end, easily the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. The relationship was never good to begin with.
I have no idea why this is the case, except that whoever owns the rights believes it’s more profitable to not stream it. You can probably overpay for it on Amazon if you want or, it looks like Discogs might have it for a reasonable price.
“To Feel This Way” had appeared in a 1992 film titled Light Sleeper. I was not familiar with the song or movie that the time. You can hear this original version on YouTube if you search for it. So technically there are 3 versions of this song.
As I dig deeper I have discovered that the reason Christian Music embraces Michael Been is because he was apparently a devote and open Christian. In my humble opinion, appearing in the controversial Last Temptation Of Christ should have complicated his Christian image. But hey, whatever.
It was a complete coincidence that I became a fan of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club without knowing the relation to Michael Been. I still like them a lot.