Ticket 2 Ride

I never knew of this band, or maybe I heard the name or saw the CD. Their biggest success came in 1996 with an album called Rocket. One of their songs made it onto the soundtrack for Cable Guy. In those days, a soundtrack was an open door for a band from nowhere.

That was the last of the band, or the lone member at that point, until 200_. Originally, members of this band were in I-Rails. It broke up and Chris O’Connor continued on, when he released Rocket, which included the song, “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.” That the band’s high water mark.

Several months ago, I wrote a blog about 1990s indie rock bands. Primitive Radio Gods was a name I uncovered, but I drew a blank with their sound. There are a ton of copies of Rocket in every used record store or on eBay. I decided to dig around and learn more about this band.

The name, Primitive Radio Gods, was a song title from the I-Rails third album.

“I met Jeff (Sparks) in junior high, and he taught me open chords and bar chords and basic guitar theory,” said Chris O’Connor in an interview with Carl Wiser. “He could read music and was playing in the jazz band, and I had always been attracted to guitars, so I sort of latched on to the opportunity. We hung out for a while and wrote a few songs together, mostly comedy stuff – I remember laughing a lot. We did our own thing in high school and I lost interest in playing. Then (I think after we graduated) I went to see him at his house and he had gotten a cassette tape 4-track recorder.

“The I-Rails started as a 4-piece in the late ’80s and ended as a 3-piece in ’91. there were four records. when Jeff (Sparks) left the band, there were two songs that had already been recorded at Camp David (“Are You Happy?” and “Where The Monkey Meets The Man”) that were to be the start of the fifth record. That’s when I got the sampler and decided to do the rest by myself. In ’94 I printed 500 CDs of the finished album, Rocket, and mailed them out to college radio and independent publishers and labels. In ’96 it was released in England on Columbia Records.” – Interview by Carl Wiser, Songfacts.com

Personally, I like Rocket a lot. It has a garage rock feel, the songs are rough, but there are some smooth stretches of riffy, melodic rock. “Skin Turns Blue” is catchy. The phone booth song is clever with the sampling and self-production. “Where the Monkey Meets the Man” has a Black Crowes feel and “The Rise and Fall of Ooo Mau” rocks like Led Zeppelin. “Are You Happy” reminds me of the Smitherenes.

This album is the textbook example of “buying an entire shitty CD for one good song,” wrote one commenter on a blog site.

“I bought their album ‘Rocket’ based on the strength of that one song in 1996….There is a reason Primitive Radio Gods only have one single that charted anywhere across seven albums, they are complete and utter crap musicians,” said another commenter.

The band’s sophomore release, White Hot Peach, saw the light of day four years after it was originally scheduled for release. “Invisible Landscape was the first record we submitted to Sire,” O’Connor said. “None of the eighteen songs on the album worked for them. Then there was Melatron On, the album Sire eventually agreed upon.” After selling over 500,000 copies of their 1996 Columbia debut, Rocket, the Primitive Radio Gods soon found themselves without a label, as Columbia failed to hear a song capable of duplicating the success of their breakthrough hit “Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand”. Pity.

Other Primitive Radio Gods releases:

White Hot Peach (2000), Still Electric (2003), Sweet Venus (2006) and Out Alive (2010)

There are tons of these bands fall within the broad and flexible categories of post-punk / grunge / indie rock that sound like they belong in the garage with the doors shut. Loud, energetic and out-of-tune. Some of them are worth a listen, just keep your expectations in check.