Get Down
I think I recorded this circa 2001? 02? 03? I can’t remember, nor can I remember the guys who recorded it very well or how I came to go there and record but it was kind of trippy … oh wait! I remember two of their names - one was Paul and the other Peter. I kid you not!
Anyway, they were out in Ferntree Gully*, which is way out near where I live now in the Dandenongs*, and like I said I have zero recollection of how I came to use their services. I was expecting an actual studio but it was just a hippy-muso house in the ‘burbs, with all these dudes like from Credence Clearwater Revival or something. Anyway they were very nice and had a computer and we just laid down three or four tracks in their kitchen and I paid them like 100 bucks or something and that was that.
Then just the other day I saw one of them working in a bottle shop in Northcote* - I am pretty sure his name was Peter but anyway … he’s a big, tall, gentle, handsome dude with a beard.
The song itself I wrote in that mad year that was 1998 and now that I think about it, it’s a classic example of affirmations at work.
The key line that I love in it is “I don’t wanna be here forever, getting bored in this perfect weather…” which is about being underwhelmed in Adelaide post-Reckoning.
Well wouldn’t you know it, days after writing that my long-suffering ex-girlfriend finally broke it up with me for a better man than I, and my boss Samara at my on-again-off-again job at the Crown and Anchor Hotel finally gave me the final flick when I kept wearing sandals to work (I was going through a hippy phase).
Another interesting thing (for me at least) is my observation about a spider that was hanging around our lounge room at the time (normal stuff in Australia, and we are talking a big, hairy dude too!). Of course, he was just doing nothing much, as Hunstmen spiders do, and I admired him for this.
This was around the time I was first reading about meditation and Eastern Philosophies like Zen and the like, so I guess this was reflection of that.
Anyhoo, it’s a cool song, one of my current lady’s favourites (maybe ‘cos it isn’t about her?). I tried to re-learn it the other day but it’ll take a bit of working out again, all those chords!
*Districts of Melbourne, Australia.
Get Down
By Seamus
Say goodbye to your Mama,
Say goodbye to your Papa, Baby,
Say goodbye to your friends.
Say goodbye to your sister,
Say goodbye to the preacher,
See him praying over you at the end.
I don’t wanna be here forever,
Getting bored in this perfect weather,
We could turn it around.
We could turn it around.
I don’t wanna go backwards, baby,
When the whole point is forwards. Maybe,
We could go out and get down.
We should go out and get down.
Look at Sammy the spider,
Up there on the wall.
Just sitting up there on the wall,
The sanest one of us all.
The most sensible one of us all…
