Solo savior

Primitive Radio Gods are a single-deity band

by Jon Garelick

Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand" has been saturating the airwaves for weeks with its trippy grooves and B.B. King sample (probably the most airplay B.B.'s ever gotten), but it doesn't even begin to hint at the bizarre breadth of the album it comes from, Rocket (Columbia). Even with a huge "alternative" hit like "Phone Booth," Rocket is defiantly non-alternative. Sure, the opening track, "Women," has an Achtung Baby wallop in its deep, snare-drum bonk, corrosive guitar-chord washes, and crooning Bono-esque vocals. But the rest of the album revels in unfashionable guitar-solo heroics and power pop unmediated by '90s angst. Just check the good ol' unambiguous anti-establishment sentiments of "Motherfucker," "Where the Monkey Meets the Man," and the parody of rock-star lifestyles, "The Rise and Fall of OOO Mau," with its big Zep riff-rock fanfares and concluding lines: "Sales fall/Lose it all/The crowd moves on/You can't afford a limo/Pout and cry/Fake suicide/Then write a book/About a past addiction."

In fact, when you meet Primitive Radio Gods one-man-band Chris O'Connor, he has a lone-wolf air of determination about him and, apparently, not a lot of ambivalence. He also says "fuck" a lot. O'Connor, as all media junkies know by now, recorded Rocket for $1000, playing all the parts, using mostly drum samples except for here and there, and later adding a couple of "guest" guitar spots. It was recorded in frustration after his successful indie-pop trio the I-Rails, four albums into their career, went bust. The tape sat around for a few years before he started sending out CDs of it to various radio and A&R people. In the meantime, O'Connor was logging another first for an American rock dude: we can pretty safely say that he's the only artist charting on Billboard's 200 album chart who's worked a day job as an air-traffic controller.

When we met for lunch to chat before his current tour (which comes to the Paradise next Thursday), O'Connor, lean and blue-eyed, faced automobile traffic fearlessly, and not, it seems, because he's from California, where drivers get ticketed for running crosswalks. He's got a nose-forward gait, and when we arrived at the restaurant for lunch, he claimed to have no appetite before relenting with a Caesar salad, stabbing each chunk of romaine with his fork and cleaning his plate while he delivered pronouncements on the music industry and a gloss of his personal history -- which, it turned out, could also be the history of the last 10 years in rock.

"From the time I was 19 to 24 I was caught up in the whole alternative-rock mentality: if it was on a major label, or if it was retro, then it sucked and you didn't listen to it. With Rocket I was going back and listening to old stuff: Beatles, and especially Bowie. I would put Ziggy Stardust on and say, `Wow, this is the best record ever!' Rocket has a lot of retro influences."

"We [the I-Rails] played the whole game. It was really a bad time for -- I hate to use the word -- alternative. But at that time, '89-'90, fuckin' hair bands and glam were ruling MTV and all the rock signings. We were a three-piece, and I remember this one show, we had this A&R chick from Geffen come out to see us, and she said we needed to get a keyboard player. We went through the whole wringer; we had VPs from New York come out to see us. It was brutal, because we had so many A&R guys say, `Oh, you are the greatest, I'll [risk getting] fired if only I can sign you, blah, blah, blah.' After we went through that for a year and a half, it was like `Fuck this.' That's when [guitarist] Jeff [Sparks] quit and we basically broke up.

"That's one of the reasons Rocket sat around for so long. After we broke up I just didn't have the energy to get a band together and try to start that whole process all over again. I said, `I'm not going to play for those fuckin' monkeys anymore.'

"Until Beck came along, a major label wouldn't sign a white rock-and-roll solo guy playing legitimate art rock, for lack of a better word. I mean, there's people like Rick Springfield, or Madonna, or a dance diva, or a rap guy who can do it as one guy in a studio. But from a marketing standpoint, they didn't have any models for solo rock guys. In England, it's very acceptable for a guy, like The The or the Orb, to make records, and they don't worry about the live package. Knowing that I would have to put a band together to play for these people, I just said fuck it. I wasn't going to do it."

So what was the appeal of Columbia?

"That they wanted to put it out. That was very appealing. It was just shocking that I got a major-label deal not only without them seeing the band, but not even seeing me in person. They had no idea what I looked like. They just called up and said they wanted to put the record out."

And so, uh, what was it like being an air-traffic controller? "Understaffed, underpaid. The equipment is 40 years old, breaks down all the time. It's so old that they have to call guys off retirement to fix it, and they come in and can't fix it because the parts aren't made anymore."

O'Connor was too young to be involved in the famous Reagan-era strike and lockout. "I'm a pretty hardcore union guy, anyway. I wouldn't scab out on those guys. I wanted to strike for years when I was working. I think everybody should fucking walk out."

Primitive Radio Gods, with Chris O'Connor and former I-Rails Jeff Sparks and Tim Lauterio, plus guitarist Luke McAuliffe, play the Paradise next Thursday, August 22.