Songoftheday 6/14/20 - Jan lays down and wrestles in her sleep, moonlight spills on comic books and superstars in magazines...
from the albums Rocket and The Cable Guy (Original Soundtrack) (both 1996)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #10 (one week)
Weeks in the Hot 100 Airplay Top-40: 19
Today's song of the day comes from the alternative rock act Primitive Radio Gods, which was the brainchild of Californian musician Chris O'Connor. Along with childhood friend Jeff Sparks, he was in a band called the I-Rails in the late 1980s. After four albums that went unnoticed, the I-Rails split, with O'Connor taking songs he intended for a fifth effort and recording an album of material himself under the moniker Primitive Radio Gods which was a previous I-Rails album cut. After a label exec he had sent the demos too took a liking to one specific track, that person set up O'Connor with Columbia Records, who picked up the album to release with a little upgrading. The liked song in question also would be used in the Jim Carrey film The Cable Guy, and that success helped the long-titled track find its way to radio. "Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand" took its name from a song from Canadian rock artist Bruce Cockburn and added the "Standing", but it wasn't a cover of that at all. Rather, it was built on a sample of a record from the blues master B.B. King, "How Blue Can You Get", from back in 1964...
O'Connor took King's vocals from that single and created the hook for his record, and by the end of the song, takes on the words himself...
Since "Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth..." wasn't released as a proper physical single, it was unable to place on Billboard magazine's official pop Hot 100 chart. However, the song got so much mainstream radio love that it made it to the top ten on the Airplay component of the list in September of 1996. The song was a huge hit on rock radio, spending six weeks at #1 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, as well as crossing over to their Mainstream Rock format list at #32. It also got to #19 on the Adult Top-40 chart, and also topped the Triple-A (Adult Album Alternative) format chart. Internationally, the single went to #2 in Canada, hit the top-40 in Australia at #31, and was a minor hit in the UK at #74. Since the single only could be had on the Cable Guy soundtrack and the Primitive Radio Gods album Rocket, the latter was able to make the top-40 on the Billboard 200 sales chart at #36. The Cable Guy soundtrack also produced a rock radio hit with Alice In Chains member Jerry Cantrell going solo on "Leave Me Alone", which went to #14 at Mainstream Rock.
Now the thing is, there wasn't a plan to follow-up this unexpected success, and perhaps O'Connor himself wanted to sabotage that, with the next single from the critically-panned album being the totally radio-not-friendly "Motherfucker", which not one radio format touched. It sounded like something in the 1991 Jesus Jones-era music scene, and it effective killed any momentum. Columbia dropped the act (which by 1997 was a full-fledged band) like a hot potato, and when they were helped again (by that guy, Jonathan Daniel) to move to Sire, that label ended up putting them in limbo during their merger in 1999. O'Connor finally released the next PRG album, White Hot Peach, independently, but by then there wasn't a market. The band has released a few more albums since then, the most recent one readily available is Out Alive in 2010. In 2016, O'Connor put out Manmade Sun, available on his website. Earlier this year, the Gods toured with fellow 90s rockers Toad The Wet Sprocket.
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Here's O'Connor and the Primitive Radio Gods performing the hit live in concert in 2012...
Up tomorrow: Jersey jam-rockers are ambivalent.
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