Michael Been, lead singer for Santa Cruz band, 'The Call,' dead at age 60

He played John the Baptist in a Martin Scorsese film. He once beat John Belushi in a comedy competition. He counted as friends Bono and Peter Gabriel. Al Gore borrowed one of his songs as the theme for his 2000 presidential campaign.

But before all that, Michael Been began his eccentric and brilliant career as a musician in Santa Cruz, arriving in the mid '70s and maintaining a residence here for nearly 20 years.

Been died Thursday at the age of 60 at a music festival in Belgium where he was working as a sound engineer for the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which includes his son Robert Levon Been.

He was best known as the lead singer for the 1980s rock band The Call, which during a period in the Reagan era was poised to break into post-punk rock 'n' roll stardom. But despite a high-profile endorsement from Gabriel and a couple of minor radio hits including "The Walls Came Down" and "Let the Day Begin,"

The Call never achieved the arena-rock status that many predicted of them.

"Michael was a very cosmic cat," said longtime friend and bandmate Dale Ockerman. "He was a poet and a philosopher. But he also had a brutal honesty about him. He was not a go-with-the-program, American-Dream kind of guy." Been's formative years as a musician took place in Santa Cruz from the mid-1970s until the moment when The Call was famously tabbed by Gabriel as "the future of American music."

Been grew up in Oklahoma in the 1960s. In a
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1994 interview, Been told me that he felt uncomfortable there. "In their eyes, I was extreme. I was listening to my rock 'n' roll records, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and they just couldn't figure me out. This was a place where people still looked at Elvis as some Satanic force of music. It was the Bible belt, and let me tell you, I felt extremely alone at that point."

As a young man, Been moved out to Los Angeles with fellow Tulsa musician Scott Musick. The two soon drifted up to Santa Cruz where they met former Moby Grape guitarist Jerry Miller and sax player Cornelius Bumpus. They formed a band called The Original Haze, with Been on bass/vocals and Musick on drums.

When Been and Musick broke apart to do their own thing, they enlisted keyboardist Ockerman in the clumsily titled band The Michael Been Band Is Airtight, which soon became simply Airtight.

Ockerman, who later joined the Doobie Brothers and now plays with the White Album Ensemble, said that he joined the group when Been approached him at the Crow's Nest shortly after Been's guitar player left the band.

"He just walked up to me and said, 'Hey, I know you. Want to sit in with us?'" Ockerman said that Airtight was pursuing a sound similar to The Band, the classic Canadian group that served as Bob Dylan's backing band (The Band's Garth Hudson even played with Airtight for a while). But as the 1970s turned into the '80s, Been became re-energized by the post-punk new music of the time, a period that produced the Police, Talking Heads and U2, among others.

It was then that Ockerman, not happy with Been's new influences, left the band. Been, with Musick, guitarist Tom Ferrier and keyboardist Jim Goodwin re-emerged soon thereafter as The Call.

"We all liked the old rock 'n' roll," said Ferrier who still makes his home in Santa Cruz. "We'd sit around all night and play Stones songs. But whatever he heard in that new music of the time, it really super-inspired him and he really hit his stride as a songwriter." What followed was a dizzying ride to the almost-top.

"One day, Peter Gabriel called us up," remembered Ferrier, "and said, 'You're the coolest band I've ever heard. Why don't you come out on the road and open for me for the next six months?'" The band had a bona fide MTV hit with the single "The Walls Came Down," which fit the anthemic vibe of the era. The band was touring at a constant pace throughout the decade, eight to nine months out of the year. And it broke through the one-hit-wonder barrier by a series of albums throughout the '80s consistently praised by critics.

But The Call never reached the level that was expected from fans such as Gabriel, Bono of U2 and Jim Kerr of Simple Minds.

Been and his bandmates made a couple of bad decisions -- they decided to turn down an invitation to perform in the cult-hit film "The Lost Boys" filmed in Santa Cruz. And they were burned by record-company decisions, as well.

"We were both the luckiest and the unluckiest band in the world," said Ferrier in reference to the band's 1989 hit "Let the Day Begin," which a decade later would be used as the unofficial theme of the Al Gore for President campaign. Upon its release on the MCA label, the song quickly rose to the top of the AOR (album-oriented rock) charts. "That record was just flying out of stores," said Ferrier, "and finally, we felt were really lifting off."

But MCA under-ordered the album and the unthinkable happened: "The stores went dry. Two weeks with no records in stores, and then, just like that, it was over." The band had a great ride, said Ferrier, but no one made much money, and the rock star life devastated the band's family relationships.

Throughout it all, Been played the role of the messianic front man, bringing a sense of purpose and charisma to his stage performances, and putting increasing demands on his bandmates and himself.

"He was a big, giant personality," said Ferrier. "He had a vision that we all bought into, and that's really how the best bands work. He was the most complete player and musician that I've ever been around, and to be in a band with somebody like that, it raised my game."

"I always loved him," said Ockerman. "We were not meant to be partners. But we were meant to be friends."

In an 1994 interview Been reflected on his near-miss career: "I don't have any regrets that it didn't happen. In fact, it's the worst thing that could happen in many ways. I know people who are in that kind of situation and believe me, they spend most of their time talking with lawyers and accountants and guarding their money."
Michael been
BORN: March 17, 1950
DIED: Aug. 19, 2010
HOME: Los Angeles
OCCUPATION: Musician, actor, songwriter, lead singer of The Call
SURVIVORS: Son Robert Levon Been, and a sister, Linda Southwell
SERVICES: Sept. 3 in Los Angeles, venue to be determined. For details, go to www.the-call-band.com

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Scissor Sisters In Concert

Formed in 2001, Scissor Sisters may well be the last band standing from the New York electroclash scene that blew up in 2004. That year, the group's B-side "Comfortably Numb," a cover of the Pink Floyd track, become a worldwide hit and pushed vocalists Jake Shears and Ana Matronic, multi-instrumentalist Baby Daddy and guitarist Del Marquis to the top of pop's A-list. U2's Bono even called Scissor Sisters "the best pop group in the world at the moment."

Today at noon ET, Scissor Sisters will bring a stadium-sized sound to the relatively tiny World Cafe Live stage in Philadelphia — and you can listen to the whole show live as it happens. You can bet the band will perform songs from its new record, Night Work, which has already sold a million copies in the U.K. alone.

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Arcade Fire take The Suburbs to The Daily Show

America's funniest fake news programme is filmed in an unassuming building in the middle of the unremittingly bleak stretch of run-down brownstones and warehouses just west of Midtown Manhattan known as Hell's Kitchen. Once you've obtained backstage clearance, however (with a wristband printed with the words "I am not a threat to The Daily Show"), the place opens up like a Tardis to reveal a rabbit's warren of hallways that appear to meander for miles. There are dogs everywhere: lounging in empty offices, hanging out by the water cooler, possibly running the control room. Open offices reveal huddled writers, TVs all tuned to different channels, and bespectacled comic John Hodgman straightening his tie. Near the Green Room, meanwhile, members of Arcade Fire are spilling out into the hallway like a small, restless army.

Win Butler, the band's unfeasibly tall singer, lyricist and all-around linchpin, looms in the doorway, dressed like a Dust Bowl-era farmer in head-to-toe-denim, while his petite multi-instrumentalist wife and fellow founding member Régine Chassagne flits back and forth in a fizzy bright-blue minidress loudly bemoaning an oncoming cold. Flame-haired guitar- and double bass-player Richard Reed Parry is debating whether or not it would be rude to throw away the unpalatable-looking cherry-flavoured vodka they've found in their Daily Show With Jon Stewart goody bags, while Win's younger brother Will (the band's rabble-rousing keyboard player), tries on various pairs of Ray-Bans with violinists Marika Shaw and Sarah Neufeld. Floppy-haired bassist Tim Kingsbury and drummer Jeremy Gara are sitting on a well-worn couch, debating the relative merits of 80s sitcoms ("Am I really the only one who watched Mr Belvedere?" asks Gara forlornly). There's as much French being spoken as English, and occasionally someone bursts into song. When Stewart stops by for a quick glad-hand, they clamour around him like happy, curious puppies. "How many of you are there?" Stewart asks in mock astonishment. "We only got you two sandwiches!"

The Montreal-based band have had more than a few milestones to toast lately: following a triumphant two-night stand at New York's 19,500-capacity Madison Square Garden arena (the second date of which was filmed by Terry Gilliam – one of Butler's "greatest heroes" and the singer's first choice to do the honours – for a live webcast), their third album The Suburbs entered America's tough-to-crack-if-you're-not-Taylor-Swift Billboard 100 album chart at No 1, knocking Eminem off top spot. And now they're here, preparing to join the ranks of only a handful of musicians ever invited to play The Daily Show, which happens to be one of Butler's favourite shows (Coldplay and the White Stripes have also previously made the grade).

'It doesn't feel like we've changed to meet the world. It feels like the world has just made a little space for us'

That all of this is happening to an eclectic, hurdy gurdy-toting band on a small independent label, who record in their own studio (a decommissioned church), and who have relied on little more than the unstoppable momentum of their barnstorming live performances to generate a reverently fervent following, has escaped few critics' notice. In America, the enormity of Arcade Fire's success is being greeted as some kind of major-label-threatening game changer.

When Butler and Chassagne sneak away from the pre-taping chaos to The Daily Show's conference room (which, for the record, has pictures of dogs pinned to the walls, and buckets – actual buckets! – of Doritos filed away under the bookshelves), Chassagne sits quietly while her husband attempts to come to grips with the band's wild ride.

"We're doing great," he says, nodding vigorously, "but I felt like we were doing great when we got our first gig, or when Merge said they were going to put out our first record. What's happening now doesn't feel unrelated to what we've always been doing, because we're the same band we've always been. I mean, it's wonderful but it doesn't feel like we've changed to meet the world; it feels like the world has just made a little space for us for a minute." For his part, Butler's never been one of those indie purists who believes that big-time success comes hand in hand with a fundamental loss of integrity, anyway. "When I was growing up in the suburbs, I was able to hear and be moved by bands like REM and U2 and Radiohead, which wouldn't have happened unless they had a certain level of distribution," he says. "I mean, I got The Bends because the video was on MTV, not because I was some cool person who knew about something. So I don't take it lightly that we have the opportunity to actually reach people."

'In terms of what you can talk about in songs, nobody's talked about anything yet. Lyrically, there's an infinite amount of space to go'

As it happens, Butler's formative years – spent, mostly, in the numbingly bland outskirts of Houston, Texas – are exactly what the band's new album is all about. The songs revolve around notions of age and change, and the way that the "wasted years" of aimless adolescence can actually prove to be more pure and true than anything else we'll ever experience. Arcade Fire albums are always thematically cohesive – their 2004 debut Funeral was about death and community, while 2007's Neon Bible tackled bigger questions of spirituality, war, and organised religion – but on The Suburbs, the sense of time and place is even more deeply embedded. The songs loop back on themselves lyrically, mirroring the self-contained environment of the 'burbs themselves. There's a lot of sitting in cars, gazing at stars, waiting for life to begin.

The idea for the album came to Butler in 2009, when he received a letter from an old friend he had grown up with in Texas. "He had sent a picture of himself with his daughter on his shoulders at a mall near where my brother and I grew up," he says, "and it was a combination of seeing him as he is now and remembering the past that set me off thinking about feelings and images that could be starting places for songs."

It turned out to be fertile ground. "The original version of the song The Suburbs had so many lyrics that it went on for, like, 14 minutes," Butler laughs. "It was like [mimics a dry heave] bleuuurgh! People get really depressed about the idea that there's nothing new under the sun, but I think in terms of what you can talk about in songs, nobody's talked about anything yet. Lyrically, there's an infinite amount of space to go. And finding these new things to explore from different angles is really what keeps me excited."

Because Arcade Fire are a band known for asking Big Questions, it's tempting to parse their lyrics for deeper meaning, although according to Butler, critics' interpretations often fall far from the mark. When asked whether or not new tune Rococo, for example, is indeed the "anti-hipster anthem" it's been hailed as, Butler laughs so hard his head falls to the table. "There is so little about hipsters that interests me," he says. "I'm definitely not going to, like, write an opera about them." What he was trying to get at, he says, was something else. "I was thinking about how rococo was a baroque style of architecture that got taken to such an extreme it became disgustingly, overly ornate, and how now there's this glut of information everywhere … It's the idea that just because there's a medium for something, people will fill it up with crap."

'We spent a lot of energy trying to make the electronic stuff follow the band rather than having the band follow it … things have to be able to speed up and slow down and sound human'

Sonically, The Suburbs makes some interesting departures from the lushly orchestrated chamber rock that Arcade Fire have become known for. There are still rousing, muscular-but-tender-hearted Springsteen-indebted tracks (the unerringly excellent Modern Man and City With No Children), but this time the band didn't shy away from experimenting with electronica. Sprawl II (sung by Régine) pulses and sparkles like Giorgio Moroder disco, and Empty Room glides along on a sequenced New Order-esque beat. "I always wanted to be able to use synth stuff," Butler says. "Like the Beatles heard Elvis when they were kids, I heard New Order and Depeche Mode; those were the sounds that sounded foreign and exciting to me. But we spent a lot of energy trying to make the electronic stuff follow the band rather than having the band follow it. There's a kinetic energy to what we do, so things really have to be able to speed up and slow down and sound human; it was hard to use those types of sounds while keeping everything loose and organic."

Ultimately, Arcade Fire's gravitational pull comes most strongly from their collective, rambunctious energy – they've been known to play in the streets outside their own shows and incite crowd singalongs with megaphones – and Butler knowingly fans that spark. Just before the band step out into The Daily Show studio to rip through a feverish Ready To Start and Month Of May, he calls everyone over for a group hug. They stand there in the half-light for a few seconds, piled together in a tangle of intertwined arms, swaying; all for one and one for all.

After Stewart introduces them – making much of Butler's six-foot-five stature – he rushes off the stage, proclaiming, "They're the nicest people in the world!" And then the host stands there – watching them on the monitor, just as they will appear to millions of viewers at home – and bobs his head.

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Does Linkin Park's 'The Catalyst' Rank Among Their Best Videos?

At 12:01 a.m. on Thursday (August 26), Linkin Park premiered their brand-new video for "The Catalyst," the first single off their upcoming A Thousand Suns album. It's a dark, moody, abstract affair, full of swirling smoke, charred earth and rising tides, and, judging from the comments we got on MTVNews.com, Linkin Park fans totally love it. So that got us thinking: Is it good enough to rank among their all-time best videos?

Even though "The Catalyst" is barely 13 hours old at this point, it's clear the clip takes the band to places they've never gone before. But the short answer is ... no, not just yet. Sure, the video would probably land in the LP top 10, but we're talking about the best of the best here. So while it's undoubtedly good, it's not quite good enough to crack the band's top five. But give it some time. We're sure its impact will be measured in weeks and months, not hours. That's how Linkin Park videos tend to go. At least, judging by the ones we've selected as their five best:

#5: "Somewhere I Belong"

The greatest Linkin Park videos also tend to be the biggest, and while "Somewhere I Belong" is definitely massive — the burning bed, the creeping, long-legged mammoths, the mech-like archway the band performs beneath — it's the minimal touches that make it one of their all-time best. Joseph Hahn deftly uses macro focus to take us deep inside Chester Bennington's subconscious, and from there, he fills the void with items taken from his bedroom: the Dalí-esque painting on the wall, the Gundam figures on the dresser, etc. The end result is a stirring, powerful piece — one that matches the punch of the song — proof that sometimes the smallest things also pack the biggest wallop.

#4: "Faint"

Sort of a left-field choice (it's by no means one of their best-known clips), "Faint" is little more than a live clip ... and while Linkin Park have made more than their fair share of those, none can match the live-wire energy and emotional outpouring on display here. In a genius move, director Mark Romanek puts his cameras behind the band, which not only gives the viewer a new perspective on LP's stage show, but somehow makes the explosion of angst and aggression all the more palpable. The closest thing we can find to capturing the band's thunderous live performances.

#3: "Crawling"

A video that tackles heady themes (abuse, suicide, judgment and despair, to name just a few), "Crawling" goes deep — into the mind, behind the mirror, into a rapidly crumbling world — and somehow manages to come out the other side. It never feels heavy-handed, rather, the Brothers Strause were smart enough to harness the cathartic power of the song's chorus, and set the main character's road to redemption against it. Powerful stuff, with a happy ending.

#2: "Breaking the Habit"

Animated by the legendary Kazuto Nakazawa, "Breaking the Habit" is based around a simple story: the suicide of an unknown man in some foreboding future city. But as things progress, the story becomes increasingly complex ... a ghost haunts the skyscrapers, a girl slowly bleeds, a man struggles with his demons. And at clip's end, we learn that it was Bennington who leapt to his death. All the while, you're marveling at the unraveling narrative — and the dazzling animation too. Dramatic, doomy, filled with dread: It's the kind of thing that most bands only aspire to make. Linkin Park pull it off with style to spare.

#1: "What I've Done"

The biggest, baddest and best Linkin Park video of all time, "What I've Done" is full of wide-screen visuals (the band performs in a barren desert, surrounded by walls of speakers and lighting rigs, mountains peaking on the horizon), but it's hardly a summer blockbuster. Rather, Hahn was smart — or brave — enough to inject a message here: the destructive power of man versus the unyielding beauty of nature, and where it all will undoubtedly end (hint: we lose).

It also marks Linkin Park's first time wading into political waters, as Hahn filled the video with images of the collapsing Twin Towers, a Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and oil-soaked wildlife. A shot of a starved African man is intercut with an engorged American eating a cheeseburger. An atomic bomb is detonated, followed by time-lapse footage of blades of grass peaking through the soil. "We are living in the end times," the band seems to be saying. "Repent while you still can." Not exactly the most uplifting of messages, but certainly the most vital.

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