Five Eight is a punk band from Athens, Georgia, that formed in the late '80s. The built a cult following in the area but never emerged from that scene the way other Athens bands like R.E.M. and The B-52s did. In 2024 they got to work on a new album and put out "Take Me To The Skate Park" as a single. Lead singer Mike Mantione told Songfacts the story behind it:
"So, sometime around 2017, 2018, maybe 2019. I think my son Dylan might have been 15 years old, 16. Anyway, about a mile and a half from our house was a place called Foundation.
Foundation was exactly that. It was an old foundation for a commercial building project that completely collapsed economically on Atlanta Highway in Athens, Georgia. All the local skaters from bands like Nuclear Tourism and other skater bands would go there and skate, and they built mini ramps, rails, half pipes, and they would do little construction projects, which Dylan would beg me to be part of.
He'd be like, 'Dad, come on, let's go, we're building this and that.'
And so I would go and sometimes I'd try to help with the construction, but mostly these kids wanted to do it themselves. And it was very cool.
Five Eight actually covered the
Nuclear Tourism song called 'I Wanna Skate,' which the song is fairly based on anyway.
Ultimately, me and Dylan built an entire half pipe inside our double garage at our house.
It was a half pipe that was just turned into a skater hangout for a little while.
While we were doing this crazy half pipe thing, he would always ask me, 'Hey, Dad, take me to the skate park,' which was like, What? I built you this whole f--king half pipe! But you know how it is when you're young and you can't wait to be on your own and all that... he was always asking me.
And so finally I was mocking him one day, I was like, 'Dad, take me to the skate park.' And as I said it I suddenly started singing it, and it turned into the song. The song basically wrote itself in four seconds.
And then I started talking about the song to both bands, Five Eight and the Bad Ends, and anybody that would listen, because I knew the song wouldn't come out of my head at all. But I didn't really have great lyrics for it because it had to be sung fast and crazy. So to write the lyrics was going to be hard.
I'm not usually a punk rock singer, I'm usually more melodic. I had an understanding of what the lyrics would be. I had the chorus down, 'Dad take me to the skate park,' and I had the 1-2-3-4, and I had the first lines of the fast punk break, 'One day soon I'm gonna have a car, and then I'll drive myself to the park.'
I rewrote the lyrics so many times, and then when we got into the studio to record, I still didn't have them nailed down yet. We had played the song a few times, and I would just sing whatever I wanted to live, but unfortunately we never recorded a live version of the song even in practice which didn't bode well for me ever finishing the song.
When we went into the studio, we did a three-day live session where Five Eight played live with David Barbe at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens, Georgia, and we had worked with David Barbe on the Weirdo Project, and so he was really great at just capturing the band in its live intensity, and so that's what I wanted to do.
But in the live version of the song, I didn't really have lyrics to sing, so I was kind of just singing syllables except for the choruses, and so I didn't make up many great lyrics right on the spot, so I had to come back and re-sing the song, and it was one of the last songs I did because I kept putting off writing the lyrics for it, and finally, I don't know what happened, I wrote a set of lyrics, and I went in one night, because I'd like to go in after work and drink a s--t ton of coffee, and then go into the recording studio and then just go for it.
And so I had the lyric sheet up, and I just sang the first take. I sang right off the cuff, and I didn't really stick to the lyric sheet at all. I was just like all over the place, but I knew there was a couple of parts where I would say 'talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk,' which was a break, and so I knew that was coming up, and so I knew it was going to be something like, 'I don't have to listen to you, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk,' and if you listen to the lyrics, there's a lot of syllabic nonsense that approximates the lyrics that I wrote, but not exactly.
And so that's how the song is. It's sort of a free scat singing and combination effect. I sang it a bunch more times but we kept going back to that one first shot, and it was just so great. I just said, you know what, it's never getting any better than that, and Dave agreed with me and that was the version we used."
