Album: The Days of Wine and Roses
Year: 1982
Listen to Steve Wynn’s rhythm guitar. It’s the last thing you notice on this song. You’re listening to Karl Precoda’s endlessly corkscrewing lead, or you’re listening to Dennis Duck’s stop-time on the chorus, or you’re listening to Wynn coming on like the bastard son Uncle Lou had with Sister Ray.
But the key to “Tell Me When It’s Over” — the kick-off track to an album that I love beyond all measure — is one of the great rhythm guitar parts in history. With every scrape of his fingers against the strings, it’s like he’s peeling another layer from his very soul and holding it aloft for the world to see.
Of course, you’ve had to listen to “Tell Me When It’s Over” as many damn times as I have in the the past 30 some-odd years to even notice, because everything else about it is so ridiculously great.
Take Dennis Duck’s drum part. His snare — sounding like the first shot in the last war — is what kicks the song off, and his drums drive the chorus:
Bam bam bam bam … bam bam crash!
And I really don’t know
Bam bam bam bam … bam bam crash!
Cos I don’t wanna know
Or take Steve Wynn’s singing. He’s not so much doing Lou Reed as inhabiting Lou Reed, and his “yeahhhhhhhhs” and “aaaahhhhhhhhs” sound like he’s going out and re-gathering the bits of his soul his guitar has already peeled off, and when he croaks “Ahhhhhh, you gotta real imagination, mannnnnnn!” in the third verse, it’s like the world is coming to an end.
Luckily, if the world is coming to an end, it’s being rebooted by Karl Precoda’s riff. Over and over again, the world is destroyed and restarted and destroyed and restarted and destroyed and restarted out of time out of space until there is absolutely nothing but that guitar hook everywhere you go everywhere you look until you realize that the answer to the question posed by the title of this song is “never.”
It’s never over.
“Tell Me When It’s Over” performed live in Spain, 1984