"Down Down Down"

'Swordfishtrombones', 1983

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Here’s how Tom describes the origins of “Down Down Down.” I expect almost every word of this is a lie.

I was stranded in Arizona on Route 66. It was freezing cold, and I slept in this ditch. Pulled all these leaves over on top of me and dug a hole and shoved my feet in this hole. It was about 20 below, no cars going by. Everything was closed. 

When I woke up in the morning, there was a Pentecostal church right across the road. I walked over there with leaves in my hair and sand on the side of my face. This woman named Mrs. Anderson came. It was New Years Eve. She said, "We're having services here, and you’re welcome to join us." So I sat in the back pew in this tiny little church. And this mutant rock and roll band got up and started playing these old hymns in such a broken sorta way. They were preaching, and every time they said something about the devil or evil or going down the wrong path, she gestured in the back of the church to me. And everybody would turn around and look and shake their heads and then turn back to the preacher. It gave me a complex that I grew up with. 

Sunday evening, they have these religious programs where the preachers, they all look like bankers. They get on with these wire-rim glasses and these seven-hundred-dollar suits and they shake their finger at America. So this is kind of my own little opportunity at the lectern.

That story is maximally entertaining and minimally informative. Extremely engaging horseshit, to put a finer point on it. The one part that is instructive in understanding the song is the last bit, when he calls “Down Down Down” his version of a televangelist. That part is dead on.

The lyrics are a fire-and-brimstone parable of a boy sent to hell for sins including chewing tobacco, drinking bathtub gin, cheating, and lying. The words on paper don’t add up to all that much, really (half the lines are just “He went down down down”). The music is what really channels an unhinged televangelist. Tom channels a manic, insane preacher perfectly—he revisits this archetype on “Way Down in the Hole” among others—and the wild organ solo played by Eric Bikales in the middle fits the church vibe perfectly. 

That Tom story, by the way, comes from a promo vinyl/cassette that Island Records sent out to, I’m assuming, radio, distributors, press, places like that. He tells shaggy-dog stories like that for every single song. Maybe I’ll dive deeper into it for one of these. For now, here’s him talking about “Down Down Down”: