Album:… Tick… Tick…Tick
Year: 2006
. . .
The final album in what Steve Wynn called his “Desert Trilogy” once again featured the Miracle 3, this time actually pared down to the threesome of drummer Linda Pitmon, bassist Bob DeCastro and guitarist Jason Victor, and while I didn’t like it quite as much, it still had “No Tomorrow,” one of the weirder songs in Wynn’s solo canon.
And while I say “weird,” I don’t mean that it embraced exotic rhythms or instrumentation or lyrics or anything like that. I mean “No Tomorrow” is weird in that it is basically two totally completely different songs patched together under one title. And given how I started consuming music in the mid-2000s — basically, everything new would go into my shuffled “Current” playlist so I could discover songs out of context of their siblings — I’m guessing it took me a bit of time to figure that out.
In any event, “No Tomorrow” starts off with a corkscrewing Jason Victor guitar riff, followed by DeCastro’s swirling bassline and Pitmon’s stuttering drum part, creating a speedy psychedelic stew for Wynn to sing over.
She said, “When it all came tumbling down
I was frozen. I was ripped to the core
I thought about everything I had learned
And how I didn’t want to learn nothing anymore.”Ain’t that just like you?
Shining all the lights on yourself
Ain’t that just like you
Firing all your guns at once until you fade away
Whether or not the Steppenwolf reference is on purpose — of course it is! — one thing is for sure: there’s literally nothing about “no tomorrow” in the lyrics of the first part. What there is, however, is a long instrumental break. First Wynn takes a solo over Victor’s corkscrewing riff, but soon enough Victor joins in the fun, and they’re both shredding again, once again harkening back to the past of and predicting the future of the Dream Syndicate.
Eventually, of course, they come back to the song proper, both guitars now fully amped, as Wynn sings the final verse again, this time in his psychotic voice, which I’ll never not love.
“I can’t breathe but I can’t leave
I’m a slave to the grave that I dug for myself
I want to go where the lights aren’t shining on me
I’ll crawl in a hole and fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away”
As you might expect, Wynn gets crazier and crazier with each repetition of “fade away” as the guitars and drums storm and swirl all around him, and the song finally seems to end with some sustained guitar chords. But before you can say, “good job, jolly well done,” Pitmon hits her snare, and the second half of the song starts up, slower and more measured, but still noisy and intense.
Now you say the end is near
Well, I’ve been hearing that for years
The shaking followed by the tears
Anger and then shifting gears
At this point, Pitmon does some cool rat-a-tat-tat snare rolls, the guitars follow her and Wynn hits the chorus, with De Castro and maybe Victor adding some nice harmonies.
And if the world must end
There’s no need to pretend
I want to love you like there’s no tomorrow
After that, there’s yet another long guitar duel between Victor and Wynn, and then one final verse & chorus that closes the song with:
I wanna love you like there’s no
Love you like there’s no
Love you like there’s no
Tomorrow
Whew! That’s quite a ride, and why those two songs were mashed together into a single song, I’m not sure, but I can sure as hell report that it worked like gangbusters.
“No Tomorrow”
“No Tomorrow” Live in NYC, 2016
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