Closing Statement: “Tomorrow, Wendy” by Concrete Blonde
Twenty-five years and my life is still
Tryin’ to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination (4 Non Blondes, 1992)
That is the opening of “What’s Up?” the 1993 hit by San Francisco, CA’s 4 Non Blondes. It is a song that sounds like a hopeful anthem but reads like someone who is trying to crawl out of despair. The pre-chorus goes on to say,
And so I cry sometimes when I’m lying in bed
Just to get it all out, what’s in my head
And I, I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning and I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs
“What’s going on?” (4 Non Blondes, 1992)
The first time I heard “What’s Up?” on the radio, I thought “Oh cool, a new Concrete Blonde song.” I was introduced to Concrete Blonde a year or two before when a friend loaned me a copy of their album Bloodletting and through their cover of “Everybody Knows” from the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume.
I made the connection between the bands because 4 Non Blonde’s Linda Perry sounds a lot like Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. Listening to “What’s Up?” now I hear another connection, or more accurately, I am hearing the song in conversation with Concrete Blonde’s “Tomorrow, Wendy.”
Written by former Wall of Voodoo frontman Andy Prieboy, the song was recorded for and the first single from his 1990 debut solo album ...Upon My Wicked Son. Prieboy asked Napolitano to record the song with him as a duet.
She was so moved by the song that she asked if Concrete Blonde could record it as well.
“Tomorrow, Wendy” is a dark, angry, and desperate song. As Wikipedia put it, the song,
was inspired by the suicide of a woman who Prieboy had known from a young age when they were both growing up in East Chicago, Indiana. Wendy later turned to prostitution and drugs, and when she was diagnosed with HIV, she decided to die by suicide by taking a heroin overdose rather than go on to die of an AIDS-related disease.[1][2][3]
It is also the last song on Concrete Blonde’s 1990 album Bloodletting, a record that Napolitano admitted is quite dark,
It was pretty miserable. It’s not a happy little disc. We had a string of bad luck and [Bloodletting] was the tail end of it. A particularly bad relationship. It had never happened to me until I was 29 years old. I had a hard time getting over it. So, it’s not a happy record, but I could do two things: I could make a self-indulgent record, which is what this is, or I could lock up all these songs in a closet and do something that wasn’t sincere. This will never happen again, this record.[6]
Despite the fact that it is a cover, “Tomorrow, Wendy” is the perfect closer for Bloodletting. It is the exclamation point that dives the album home while pulling all of its threads together.
And “What Up?”, where does it come into all of this? Let’s take another look at that pre-chorus,
And so I wake in the morning and I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs
“What’s going on?” (4 Non Blondes, 1992)
That looks like a cry of desperation to me. Now let’s look at the most controversial part of “Tomorrow, Wendy,”
I told the priest
Don’t count on any second coming
God got his ass kicked
The first time he came down here slumming
He had the balls to come
The gall to die and then forgive us
No, I don’t wonder why
I wonder what he thought it would get us
Hey, hey, goodbye
Tomorrow, Wendy is going to dieHey, hey, good bye
Tomorrow, Wendy is going to die
Tomorrow, Wendy is going to dieOnly God says, “Jump”
So I set the time
Cause if he ever saw it
It was through these eyes of mine
And if he ever suffered
It was me who did his cryingHey, hey, goodbye
Tomorrow, Wendy is going to die (Concrete Blonde, 1990)
This is pure, unadulterated desperation. That kind that cries out, curses god, and begs to know why. And that is the connection. The difference is one sounds hopeful while the other sounds like a beautifully emotional wreck. I say beautifully because Napolitano’s performance is breathtaking.