Primitive Radio Gods — "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand"
A hypnotic loop of B.B. King singing "I've been downhearted baby" over a slow beat, recorded on a 16-track in a friend's garage — with a title borrowed off a Bruce Cockburn record because Chris O'Connor couldn't think of a name. Labels passed. Then The Cable Guy happened.
Chris O'Connor, frontman of the American alternative rock group Primitive Radio Gods, recorded the song — like the rest of the band's debut album "Rocket" — on an Ampex 16-track machine in a friend's garage. Its spell is a sample: a loop of B.B. King's 1964 "How Blue Can You Get", the line "I've been downhearted baby / ever since the day we met" circling under O'Connor's murmured verses. Even the title was an act of desperation — struggling to name the track, O'Connor pulled Bruce Cockburn's 1978 album "Further Adventures Of" off the shelf and adapted the title of an unrelated Cockburn song on it.
At first, no label bit. Months later O'Connor sent his tapes around again and landed at Columbia — and the song went out on the soundtrack of the 1996 Jim Carrey black comedy The Cable Guy, with the album "Rocket" carrying it too. Released in the UK in March 1996 and serviced to US radio that June, it hit number one on Billboard's Modern Rock and Triple A charts, number two in Canada, and number ten on the Hot 100 Airplay chart, becoming one of the inescapable radio songs of that summer.
Primitive Radio Gods never had another chart hit. The song's success pushed "Rocket" past 500,000 copies, and the band's whole public existence remains this one long, strange, beautiful loop — a garage recording that wandered onto every alt-rock station in America and then quietly hung up.
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