"Downtown"

'Heartattack & Vine', 1980

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Will I see you tonight…on a…

No, wait. That’s next week. Today, the similarly-but-shorter-titled “Downtown.” No “Train.”

“Downtown” deserves more than to be a forgotten stepchild of a totally unrelated but much more popular song with a similar name. It’s a great song! It epitomizes what I love about Heartattack and Vine, which feels like the real transitional period from his early jazzbo-Beatnik sound to the weirdo psychotic-blues sound he was soon to adopt. Like several other songs on the album, “Downtown” has tinges of both.

The opening verse, for instance, could have come out straight outta “Singapore”:

Red Pants and the Sugarman in the Temple Street gloom
Drinkin' Chivas Regal in a four dollar room
Just another dead soldier in a powder blue night
Sugarman says baby, everything's alright

It amused me researching to find a karaoke version of this on YouTube. Do you think anyone’s actually tried this? Boy would I love to hear how that went.

He’s only performed it live once, in Detroit in 1982, on a tour ostensibly promoting the One from the Heart soundtrack where he—whoops—didn’t perform many songs off the soundtrack. That version replaces the prominent organ part with saxophone (or maybe clarinet, the audio quality is less than ideal). He should have given it more outings. The extended coda at the end is great too.