Winamp Wednesday: Ever Since the Day We Met
A perfect one-hit wonder and a wild belief about this world...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Primitive Radio Gods, “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand”
What’s the craziest thing you honestly and truly believe?
That’s a dangerous question to ask on the internet now, or really anywhere at all off of it. It’s not that we’re any more divided (but maybe we are) or people are any worse than they used to be (but maybe they are), but the rush to tell your friends and neighbors and any passing car on the road that you have a deep-seeded and totally bonkers belief system is now as American as apple pie and as worldly as a well-stamped passport. Conspiracy theories cease to be conspiracies when they have more videos behind them than the entire 20th-century history of public access, and fringe becomes the whole damn jacket when it’s this well funded. Even the seemingly-innocuous ones are scary as hell just below the surface. Scratch the Mandela Effect to find its bigoted origins, talk a little bit more about the Berenstain Bears to hear semitic conspiracy theories from the worst sort of people.
I’m trying to stay level-headed and evidence-based, to see the world as it is and with an eye towards understanding everyone. Nobody always succeeds, but turning a critical eye to the world is essential.
Which is why I need you to believe me that the last verse of Primitive Radio Gods’ “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” didn’t exist until years after it was recorded, and that every copy of it changed suddenly one day.
Typing that out makes it look even more bonkers than it probably is, but I labored under this belief for a while. I knew I knew this song extremely well; my sudden unfamiliarity of it didn’t come from only hearing a radio edit or video version for years and then stumbling upon the album cut. (We’ll talk about that with “Black Coffee in Bed” in a while.) Rocket was already in rotation, “Standing Outside…” a staple of my adolescent bullshittery. There had already been ample time to trace a flight path from Baltimore to New Orleans, to track down that original B.B. King sample that all our dads knew straight off, to wonder what Mother Theresa would look like as a mafia enforcer.
“Bathe yourself in zebra flesh” is an evocative image and out of step with most of the rest of the song. I would have noticed it as a tween who was quick to mock abrupt tonal shifts. Wouldn’t I have? If I was missing this verse when soaking in this perfect track then what else was I missing in my life?
I was quick to invent a fantastical and elaborate reason why there had been this change. Maybe when we die we go back to the beginning of our lives, ready to live it all over again with only slight differences. Our lives overlap, and maybe the changes that we make the next time around change things for everyone else. Nothing big—nobody can fight the way their lives go with forewarning, not really—but little changes: articles in the titles of old books, the way ridges on quarters feel, a new bit of a song you knew by heart. No alternate universes, no scary conspiracies, just people living on top of each other and pushing out new ripples under pressure. Things change but only because people change them.
It made as much sense to me at thirteen as “you just didn’t notice something”. Because what did that mean, of course we notice everything. This world is big and wild and wooly and we have to take it all in, that’s the whole reason we’re here. If I couldn’t remember all three verses of this song—and it did have three verses, right?—then there was no way I was even living. Everything was passing me by and how much of it was beautiful and how much of it was important and how much would I regret when I was older?
My brother read a lot, and that means that I read a lot as he left paperbacks in victorious piles after finishing them. Most of these tomes were way beyond where I was; no seventh-grade C-student was going to pick up The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and get anything from it. But for some reason I cottoned immediately to Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, which may have been my first Vonnegut in a fit of literary irony. The plot, in any kind of nutshell, concerns an event that propels every person on Earth back ten years from 2001 to 1991. Everyone is powerless to change anything, and they can only watch themselves make bad decisions and lose loved ones until they catch up with the day they all went back in time. It drives everyone to severe depression, and when they can act for themselves again they find themselves unable. The nominal protagonist, Vonnegut stand-in and constant presence Kilgore Trout, is the only one unaffected by this ennui. He wakes the world from its stupor with this mantra:
"You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do."
I can’t remember if my knot-twisting chronological reasoning came before my first blush with Timequake or not. What I do know is that my explanation is a fool’s hope. The god we’ve never seen (but never fails to side with me) would spin a version of the afterlife that allows for eternal life. We would get a chance to do it again and maybe do it right this time. It’s the fantasy concocted by someone experiencing heartbreak and disastrous loss for the first time. If only I do this one little thing different it will all be fine, so let me go back and try it again. You’ll know I’ve succeeded when the Primitive Radio Gods keep singing.
Vonnegut was right. The past is a horror show full of caged mistakes, and we didn’t notice enough or take action enough when we were running through it. For all our talk of saving the future and regretting the past we never talk about the present. When a song is slightly different we could rejoice in the changes. It’s my brother coming back from college with the longer version of “Semi-Charmed Life” that’s on that first Third Eye Blind album or the “Penny Lane” off of Anthology with the added coronet blast at the end. The world may not have changed but our perception of it has. That doesn’t change the past and the future is not here. So what do we have?
"You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do."
I still pause as that last verse spins up, and I think about the ways I was still a child and had to explain it away with fabulist tales rather than the fallibility of the human brain. Now I latch on to that lyric at the top: “a life is time, they teach you growing up.” This song has been in my life nearly thirty years and been a hundred different things to me since then. None of us are who we were when The I-Rails became Primitive Radio Gods and this became their first last and only radio hit. We can carry these totems of the past with us but we have to make sure we’re in the life that’s time. We have to be in the present. We have to be well. Because there’s work to do.
Next Time: Canadian TV, role models, the things we do for love, and a very blue rodeo.