Tuesday March 22, 2022 “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand” Primitive Radio Gods
As we continue 'telephone week' today we will explore phone booths, remember them....?
This song was written and first recorded in 1991 by Chris O'Connor who with his band the I-Rails had spent the back half of the '80s playing gigs around Santa Monica, California, releasing four independent albums along the way. When they broke up in 1991, O'Connor used his friend's garage studio to record the Rocket album, which cost about $1,000 to make and was filled with songs dealing with his disaffection. Predictably, he got no takers and the album sat on the shelf.
O’Connor would leave the music business and take a job as an air traffic controller until 1994 when his album Rocket somehow found its way to and A&R executive at a Columbia Records division and he loved the song. It would be released and go on to become a number one song on the Modern Rock charts and the video would be an MtV favorite.
Today’s song would be the Primitive Radio Gods only hit perhaps because their follow-up single was titled “Motherf$cker” and also that the PRG band was a rhythm and blues band that would surprise, confuse and disappoint their audiences when they played live.
“Standing Outside a Broken Phonebooth with Money in My Hand” is not contained in the lyrics and O’Connor says it was taken from a Bruce Cockburn song of essentially the same name and the hook samples the line, "I've been downhearted baby, ever since the day we met" from a live performance of B.B. King song "How Blue Can You Get?," which can be heard on his 1971 album Live in Cook County Jail.
Stay safe and well…and this is perhaps the longest song title of the nearly 600 songs included so far on Songs of the Day and don’t worry about the ‘explicit lyrics, pretty sure it refers to their follow-up single “Motherf$cker”.