Call of the West

Call of the West is a 1982 album by American New Wave band Wall of Voodoo. "Mexican Radio" was released as a single (as well as a video that received moderate airplay on MTV), and is the group's most well-known song.

Call of the West is a concept album exploring the trials and tribulations of life of the common man in the southwestern United States, particularly in the desert towns east of Los Angeles which stretch along the interstate highways into Nevada and Arizona. Most of the songs are downbeat mood pieces expounding upon the dashed hopes, withered aspirations, economic disenfranchisement and existential malaise afflicting many of those who come to the southwest in search of wealth, fame and self-actualization.

The bleak, haunting atmosphere of the album evokes the romantic western frontier myth transfigured by the urban fatalism of L.A. crime fiction and Hollywood film noir. In many songs, the themes of misguided ambition and bitter disillusionment set against the sunbaked frenzy and desolation of southern California owe a great deal to the grimly satirical grotesquerie of Nathanael West. This darker thematic outlook makes the songs on Call of the West something of a departure from the compositions on Wall of Voodoo's debut album, Dark Continent, as well as their earlier eponymously titled EP, which were mostly inspired by L.A. pulp novelists like Jim Thompson.

"Tomorrow"

The opening track, "Tomorrow", is a fast-paced number propelled by a jagged keyboard motif and scratchy, atonal guitar. The song is about the demoralizing effects of procrastination, with the singer telling of the mounting anxiety he experiences when he thinks about all of his unfulfilled plans which keep piling up around him: "Life is moving faster/I can feel it every day...."

An early live version from 1979 appears on The Index Masters.

"Lost Weekend"

The next track, "Lost Weekend", takes its title from the 1945 Billy Wilder movie of the same name. However, this is not a song about an alcoholic on a bender; rather, it is a desperate tale of an impoverished, and rather unsophisticated, suburban couple chasing one get-rich-quick scheme after another in a vicious circle of false hope and futility. The story is told in the third person with quoted he-said/she-said dialogue in the manner of Raymond Carver against a slow, percolating electronic beat overlaid with languorous, breeze-like synth washes. The sardonic, matter-of-fact lyrics and the sparse yet nuanced musical accompaniment create a vivid portrait of a couple driving down a barren desert highway with the wind in their hair after an unprofitable weekend of playing the casinos in Vegas:

"'And I know, if we'd had just one more chance', he said.../'I know, we'd finally hit the big one at last', she said.../'Instead of another lost weekend.../Lost weekend.../Another lost weekend....'"

"Factory"

The third track, "Factory", features a musical arrangement that is as frantic and cluttered and claustrophobic as "Lost Weekend" is slow and sparse and desolate. The melody is comprised of decidedly "unmusical" atonal electronic sounds gradually building in intensity with each successive verse (a prime example of the band's famous use of "horror movie music" atmospherics — i.e., a spooky "wall of voodoo"). The electronics are complemented by a twangy descending guitar line and a recurring choppy, distorted, atonal guitar motif. There is also a repetitive metallic clanging noise for a percussion motif in addition to the plaintive wailing of a harmonica buried in the back of the sound mix. The total effect evokes the busy atmosphere of a factory plant where one is constantly surrounded by clanging and droning of heavy machinery all day long.

Vocalist Stan Ridgway again delivers the lyrics in a dry, sardonic, matter-of-fact style, however, this time the story is told in the immediate first-person voice. Ridgway assumes the persona of a blue-collar working stiff who has labored on a factory assembly line for most of his life and sees nothing different in his future:

"Well, I've brought the same piece of chicken in a bag/To work every day for the last twenty years or so..../Come around every Friday, well, I get a paycheck/Take the same road home that I come to work on/Heck! — it's a living."

Set against the discordant, repetitive music, the lyrics seems to take on a kind of disorienting stream-of-consciousness quality as the factory worker — who is as trapped and inarticulate as the suffering, alienated supplicants to Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts — relates the mundane details of his life in digressive, elliptical fits and starts. He even babbles about an accident on the job which resulted in part of his thumb being sliced off by a slipped bandsaw.

Ridgway talk-sings in a flat, uninflected monotone voice, evincing the factory worker's apparent lack of personality and inability to express himself properly. His pervading sense of his own dissatisfaction and malaise is indicated in an oblique and indirect way, when the man describes his leisure experience as being no different from that of his work. It seems that the simple, banal inactivity of sitting at home and falling asleep is his only real escape from the endless, repetitive drudgery of his life:

"And I've got another factory back home/I've got a barbecue, pink Mustang, fenders chrome/And at nine o'clock I sit there in my chair/And I don't know why I lose my hair/And then I go to.../And then I go to.../And then I go to sleep...."

"Look at Their Way" and "Hands of Love"

The last two tracks on the first half of the album are largely inscrutable exercises in minor-key melodic atonality and lyrical opacity.

The lyrics for "Look at Their Way" juxtapose a description of people who are "giving me looks" with a similar description of a swarm of insects, crawling across the floor and across a calendar on the wall. A few strange happenings are also casually described, such as "a mother makes love to her only son", along with a chorus of insects rubbing their long legs together to "play a sad melody, the only one they know". With the dramatic crunching sounds heard at the end, it is suggested that the insects (and perhaps the people too?) are eventually stepped on. The lines "Look at their way/On the floor today" could be interpreted as a reference to the insects or to people dancing.

"Hands of Love" offers a similarly elliptical and impressionistic string of apparently unrelated familiar-yet-strange images and ominously repeated lines like "I taste the water and the water tastes hot" and "Whistle down...whistle down the road" — none of which surrenders itself to any ready interpretation.

"Mexican Radio"

"Mexican Radio" is the album's centerpiece and (as it later turned out) its flagship hit single.

The track opens with a burst of swirling electronic noise, identical to the kind heard on earlier songs like "Back in Flesh" and "Me and My Dad" from Dark Continent. Musically, the song is characterized by Marc Moreland's atmospheric, twangy Ennio Morricone-inspired "spaghetti western" guitar lines all throughout, as well as a parodic ranchera theme played on a melodica and harmonica after each chorus and before the next verse. Like most of the other songs on the album, "Mexican Radio" is built around an insistent 4/4 drum-machine beat supplied by Joe Nanini along with percussion embellishments involving pots and pans and an occasional cowbell rattler. However, all of this stops silent in favor of a simple pounding tom-tom drum in a 2/4 time signature during the catchy, dramatic chorus.

The song is also notable for its memorably witty lyrics like "I wish I was in Tijuana/eating barbequed iguana". As with "Lost Weekend" and "Factory", the song demonstrates Richard Mazda's sophisticated technical production through its clever use of theatrical effects, such as Stan Ridgway's voice suddenly heard as if transmitted through a radio receiver on lines like "I'm on a wavelength far from home" as well as some humorous Spanish-language radio blather heard in the back of the sound mix.

The lyrics are an homage to high-wattage unregulated AM border-blaster Mexican radio stations that were received practically worldwide, and which often found themselves in direct competition with the commericial radio market in the southwestern United States. A more detailed discussion of the song and its lyrics can be found here.

Track listing

All songs composed by Wall of Voodoo/lyrics by Stan Ridgway

"Tomorrow" – 3:03
"Lost Weekend" – 4:58
"Factory" – 5:33
"Look at Their Way" – 3:18
"Hands of Love" – 3:52
"Mexican Radio" – 4:09
"Spy World" – 2:41
"They Don't Want Me" – 4:31
"On Interstate 15" – 2:44 see Interstate 15
"Call of the West" – 5:59

Personnel

Stan Ridgway – lead vocals, harmonica, keyboards
Marc Moreland – 6- and 12-string guitars
Joe Nanini – drums, percussion, spoken voice
Charles T. Gray – synthesizer, bass, melodica, backing vocals
Richard Mazda – bass
Louis Rivera – percussion

Charts

Album

Year	Chart	Position
1983	Billboard Pop Albums	45

Singles

Year	Chart	Single	Position
1982	Billboard Mainstream Rock	"Mexican Radio"	41
1983	Billboard Pop Singles	"Mexican Radio"	58