Bob Gemmell: “Slowtown” Song Review

I remember the psychedelic days of my youth a little too well. But no song has ever taken me back to meet the person I was then.

“Slowtown” is a strange title for a song in which nothing stays still. Time accelerates, downtown turns around Bob Gemmell, and a passing bus seems to carry away the life he should be living.

The song first appeared on Rex Hotel, the debut album from Gemmell’s band, Big Medicine Head. Bob later returned to it, saying he wanted to hear what it might sound like if R.E.M. had recorded it. The reworked solo version was released on September 18, 2024. It runs 6:14 and revises parts of the lyric as well as the music. The most important change comes at the end.

The story began after a Big Medicine Head performance in San Luis Obispo, California, a place also known as “Slotown.” After the show, the band walked into a street celebration that had spread across the sidewalks, through the city square and even into the trees. Bob remembers the night as joyful and excessive, but the song it inspired took a much darker direction.

The opening verse places the narrator, Bob, in an unfamiliar room with a television he does not recognize. His sense of time has accelerated and he is beginning to doubt his own reality. Then he sees his life passing him on a bus.

That bus is one of the song’s strongest images. It has a route and a schedule. Bob has neither. Life continues moving while he struggles to understand where he is and how he arrived there.

Musically, “Slowtown” maintains a pulse of approximately 112 beats per minute, although the groove can feel closer to a slow half-time movement. The song is in G Mixolydian. F major supplies the characteristic flattened seventh, while D minor reinforces the modal colour. Tight drums and bass hold the foundation as grungy guitar fills out the harmony. Bob’s vocal remains clear above the arrangement, allowing the lyric to lead. The band stays controlled even as Bob’s perception becomes less reliable.

From there, the lyric moves into the streets. Bob encounters a riot, police and people being chased, then wanders into a parade that is not his. The drugs are already shaping his perception; the later reference to medicine only confirms it. The actual night, hallucination and Bob’s deeper fears become inseparable. When Montgomery Clift and Claude Monet appear together in an impossible contest inside a mobile home, the image is surreal, but the isolation beneath it is real.

The video keeps the presentation simple. It opens with Bob recalling the night while seated outside The Stockman Club with an orange sunburst Rickenbacker guitar. Once the song begins, it largely stays with him singing and playing on the sidewalk. The performance leaves the lyric to create the surrounding chaos.

The title becomes increasingly ironic. Slowtown is not slow. Time rushes ahead, the town turns around Bob and he cannot find secure footing within it. The drugs distort what he sees, but they do not invent the emotional truth. Life appears to be moving forward without him.

The final section moves beyond one night in California. Music no longer reaches Bob, faith offers no practical help and every conversation feels like another conflict. An earlier version of the song left the younger Bob there, alone in Slowtown. The rewritten ending does something different: “I’ll be around. Meet me down in Slowtown.”

Years later, Bob returns. I do not hear this as merely revisiting an old piece of music. An old song preserves something of the person who wrote it, and “Slowtown” has held that younger Bob inside the night ever since. By reopening and rewriting the song, present-day Bob goes back to him.

He cannot stop the calendar pages, catch the bus or change what happened. He can change one thing: whether the younger man must remain there alone. To me, the new final words are older Bob’s promise to his earlier self.

Bob is still here, living his life, but he is also back in Slowtown with the person he once was. That is what the new version makes possible.

Catch ya down in Slowtown, Bob.

Listen:

• Slowtown (Taylor Version): https://dirtpreachers.com/track/3962007/slowtown-taylor-version

Connect with Bob Gemmell:

• Official website: https://bobgemmell.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bob.cougar.gemmellcamp
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robert_gemmell/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8hiaTR6LMcaTYo9fpURNzQ
• Bandcamp: https://bobgemmell.bandcamp.com