Singers Still Get Flak Today for ‘Tomorrow’

Johnette Napolitano and Andy Prieboy have toured together and recorded together, which is hardly surprising for two artistically compatible singers who came out of the same ‘80s Los Angeles alternative-rock scene.

Since last year, they also have been getting some of the same outraged mail.

The cause is “Tomorrow Wendy,” one of the most striking rock ballads of 1990. Prieboy wrote the song, which culminates in the scathing last testament of a suicide who curses life and bitterly mocks a God who presides impotently over its pain.

Prieboy, who first gained notice fronting the band Wall of Voodoo, called on his friend, Napolitano, to sing “Tomorrow Wendy” as a duet on his debut solo album, “ . . . Upon My Wicked Son.” The song struck Napolitano so deeply that she and her band, Concrete Blonde, subsequently did another version for their album, “Bloodletting.”

“I’ve gotten the weirdest mail about it,” said Napolitano, who is touring with Prieboy, including a show tonight at the Coach House in which they will perform separate acoustic sets as well as duets. (Wire Train guitarist Jeff Trott will back up both singers.)

“I’ve gotten a lot of letters from full-on Christians who want me to burn in hell,” Napolitano said. “I’ve gotten about 20 from people in the Midwest and the South who said they actually took the record back” after buying “Bloodletting” on the strength of “Joey,” the soulful romantic song that became a well-deserved hit and established Concrete Blonde as a mainstream pop contender. “They couldn’t understand how I could do something as nice as ‘Joey,’ and something as horrible as (‘Tomorrow Wendy’).”

Prieboy’s song probes the thoughts of a despairing character who is about to do herself in. In her final anguish, she scoffs at the proposition that humanity is redeemable or that God could have the power to redeem it.

I told the priest, Don’t plan on any second coming.

God got His ass kicked the first time He came down here slumming.

He had the (guts) to come, the gall to die and then forgive us.

No, I don’t wonder why, I ( just ) wonder what he thought that’d get us.

Hey, hey, goodby . . . . Tomorrow, Wendy is going to die. “To me it’s just asking,” Napolitano said. “It’s not saying, ‘God, you’re a bad person.’ It’s just wondering why” life has to turn out so badly.

While “Bloodletting” was an extremely dark album (all the more so with “Wendy” saved for the end), Napolitano said she doesn’t identify with the despair of the song’s central figure.

“I believe in God as a positive force of love and light. You have a choice. You can dwell on the dark stuff or the light stuff. Things come in cycles (of dark and light), but I do believe in a faith that everything will be OK. I absolutely do.”

In a separate interview, Prieboy, 32, said that “Tomorrow Wendy” should not be taken as a broadside against faith, but as a portrait of a character who has lost her faith as she contemplates ending a bitter life.

“We’ve gotten letters from religious people who are very disturbed by the song,” said Prieboy, whose deep, even, low-keyed conversational tone contrasts with Napolitano’s animated, freely opinionated style. “It’s not an anti-Christian song in the least. It’s just an accurate depiction of someone who’s dying without hope, without faith, without family and without friends.”

Prieboy said the song was inspired by a girl he had known while growing up in the steel-producing town of East Chicago, Ind., and by the general hopelessness that set in when the old economic guarantee of a secure factory job began to collapse for his own generation.

“The great industrial work force said, ‘We don’t need you anymore,’ ” Prieboy said. “Some of us lucked out” and found other ways to build a life. But the woman memorialized in his song turned to prostitution and contracted AIDS.

“Wendy was the type that just bided her time, took drugs, and took what was offered to her,” Prieboy said. Her suicide “was the one big (time) in her life when she took charge. Basically, (‘Tomorrow Wendy’) is a conversation she’s having with the mirror” as she decides to kill herself. “These are the feelings of rage that Wendy felt. Somebody’s got to sing (her) song, too--as I’ve expressed to people who’ve written angry letters about the song.”

In writing “Tomorrow Wendy,” Prieboy also drew on some crises of faith that he had seen in his own family. “I had two very religious grandfathers who died horribly from cancer, and I watched them go through a long period of rage and anger and atheism, railing at the God they’d worshiped all their life. Sooner or later, they accepted it. Wendy never accepted it.”

“Upon My Wicked Son,” Prieboy’s first solo album after Wall of Voodoo split, was an elaborately produced journey through a dark tunnel. “Nearer to Morning” appears to be about a sexual abduction; “That Was the Voice” recounts Prieboy’s own experience of being set upon by hatemongers armed with baseball bats.

“I had an argument with my girlfriend and went out to get a pack of cigarettes, and I was attacked by a couple of goons,” Prieboy said. “I got hurt bad enough, but I was able to get away. Adrenaline was a great painkiller.” The recorded voice of a Sieg Heil- ing Adolf Hitler drifts through the song, sometimes speeded up Chipmunks-style to ridicule hatred, but also menacing enough to underscore the ominous implications of hate crimes.

At the end of the album’s song-cycle, Prieboy lets a little light in, declaring, “the search for love goes on.”

“Instead of ending in the insane asylum, it ends with . . . not a ray of hope, but (a determination to) pick up the pieces and start again,” he said.

Prieboy has finished his second album, but he doesn’t know yet who will release it. “Upon My Wicked Son” and a subsequent mini-CD were released by the Orange County-based independent label Dr. Dream. Now, Prieboy said, some of the bigger labels are calling, “but I’m looking at major labels with a very skeptical eye.”

While Dr. Dream’s resources for promoting his album were limited, Prieboy said, “it was the best experience I ever had with a record label. They were guys who’d sit you down and say, ‘We want you to do what you want to do, and be who you are--don’t change a thing.’ ”

“He has the potential to be huge, I think,” said David Hayes, Dr. Dream’s president. “You have to let him get inside your head a bit. (‘Upon My Wicked Son’) was a little too alternative or quirky for the majors to deal with. I said, ‘Heck, we’ll do it.’ I told him the weirder he was, the better. That was the side of him I liked.”

Instead of putting together a band to play the elaborately produced “Upon My Wicked Son,” Prieboy toured as a solo act, accompanying himself on the piano.

“After being in Wall of Voodoo for five years and having the smoke machines and the lights, I wanted to pare things down to their simplest form and relearn the craft of performing,” Prieboy said. “It’s part of my schizophrenic personality that I would do a blatantly overproduced record, and then go on stage and play solo. I thought the average listener would be confused by the difference but that that confusion would be good for them.”

Prieboy said he will put a band together when he tours again after his next album is released. For now, he is still playing as a solo act on a brief tour that Napolitano instigated to quell the case of cabin fever she contracted while laboring on Concrete Blonde’s upcoming album, “Walking in London.”

Napolitano said she also needed to get out of Los Angeles. While it’s her hometown, she doesn’t hesitate to knock it. Before “Bloodletting,” in fact, Napolitano left Los Angeles and settled in London, where the album was recorded.

“There’s way too much record business here, and I can’t stand it,” she said. “It’s a city of leeches. I don’t mean the people on the bus, but the (music) business sometimes makes me ill. You turn into this object, to show off, and they’re living vicariously through you.”

Even so, Napolitano, 34, is a Los Angeles resident again, at least for the time being.

“I had been away, and I needed to be back here. I knew I wanted to be around my mom. That distance made a difference. Family life is something everybody needs to have. I don’t mean that in an American-flag-waving way, but in an Italian, Old-World way.”

Now Napolitano says she is grappling with whether it makes more sense to live a more sane life in Europe, or cope with the problems of a Los Angeles--and a United States--that she views warily.

“I don’t like where it’s going. I think it’s going to hell in a handcart,” she said. “But do you leave, or stay and try to be an example? The easy thing to do would be to split, and say, ‘I’m going to go to France and drink wine and marry a Frenchman.’ But that’s too easy. Kids need an example. I have young nieces. It’s very important for me to be around them.”

So, back in Los Angeles for the past few months, Napolitano has been trying to be an example. When a vacant lot near her Silver Lake house became a huddling ground for crack smokers, she said, she and her brother put a fence around it so the drug users wouldn’t be able to congregate there. She also spoke proudly of bringing her mother and 11-year-old brother to a demonstration in Hollywood against Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of a gay-rights bill.

“It sounds corny, but it was a very moving moment in my life. Everyone was lining the streets. It was like, ‘Yeah, this is our country, too.’ ”

Besides the family reunion, Napolitano’s return to Los Angeles also led to a reunion of the original Concrete Blonde lineup. Napolitano and guitarist Jim Mankey had fired drummer Harry Rushakoff while they were in London preparing to record “Bloodletting.”

“Harry was having some personal problems at the time that we simply didn’t have time to deal with,” Napolitano said. “He was going through a lot in his life, and he was very confused, and it was like, ‘Go home.’ ” British drummer Paul Thompson, formerly of Roxy Music, took his place for the album and subsequent tour.

Napolitano said that she and Mankey ran into Rushakoff in Los Angeles a few months ago (the drummer had subsequently joined a new band and moved to Nashville). “We had a beer, and it was obvious we belonged back together,” she said. “He had worked a lot of things out, and so had we.”

“Bloodletting” was a commercial breakthrough for Concrete Blonde, bringing the group its first gold album (more than 500,000 copies sold). One would suspect that the band is feeling pressure now to build on that success.

“Nope. Not at all,” said Napolitano, who takes the view that selling albums is her record company’s problem, not hers. “As long as I like my records, I’m fine.” In fact, she said, if back problems that hampered her during Concrete Blonde’s long 1990-91 tour recur (she attributes them to playing a bass that was too heavy for her), Napolitano said she will forgo touring.

“If I can’t, I can’t. I’m not going to risk my health at all. I was a mess last year.” (Napolitano said that playing guitar in the low-key solo tour she is doing now won’t strain her back the way playing bass did in Concrete Blonde’s full-scale rock shows).

After the bleak “Bloodletting,” a haunted album populated by vampires, wraiths, drunks and failed loves, Napolitano says that Concrete Blonde’s next album will have some lighter hues.

“I felt (‘Bloodletting’) was so open. There’s a fine line between (that) and being self-indulgent and whiny,” she said. The next album “is not happy, it’s just not as dismal. You can’t dwell in your miserable problems forever. Ultimately, there’s a broader scope.”

* Johnette Napolitano and Andy Prieboy play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $18.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.