In a few minutes, I’ll be wishing I could post “Private Universe”.
Let me tell you a story about this song. My college friend Linda and I have shared this obsession with Neil Finn together for 20 years now. In September 1993, one of us heard on the radio that Crowded House was playing the WOMAD Festival in San Francisco. This was right before Together Alone was released, in October 1993.
Being in Seattle, we were simply going to drive down, as it’s about a 9 hour drive. We had no trouble getting tickets, so we loaded up my VW camper van and she spent the night at my house.
But I woke up the morning we were to leave, not feeling well at all — I really didn’t think I could sit or drive that long. Bless my then-husband’s heart, he proposed we fly down and get a hotel. That seemed pretty unlikely — find reasonably priced plane tickets and a decent hotel at the very last-minute?
Yet by some miracle, we managed to do that.
Flash forward about 24 hours to the next morning, and our plane is landing in Oakland. We have no idea when Crowded House is taking the stage, so we get to our hotel in downtown San Francisco via BART, and then grab a cab out to Golden Gate Park as quickly as possible.
By the time we get to the festival, it’s about 1 p.m. Somehow we get through the ticket line and onto the festival grounds (I just looked it up, there were 98,000 people there that day).
What happened after that still seems like a dream to me. It was a beautiful September day, just a couple of days before the Autumn Equinox. We are what seems like a mile from the stage, moving forward through this huge crowd — I remember feeling like I was adrift in the ocean.
That’s when we heard it. The opening notes of a song that seemed familiar, but that we’d never heard before. Somehow the tide of people gently propelled us almost to the very front of the stage as this music drifted out across the audience.
And then Neil Finn began to sing.
That was the first time I heard “Private Universe.”
I have watched the “Farewell to the World” live version several times, and I can imagine that the experience was much the same for the people on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. The melody is haunting. The song still sends shivers down my spine.
I’m not a religious person, but this was probably as close to a religious experience as I will ever have.
