prank phone calls

Also Penk phoning up a guy regarding an advert selling something. This chap says he'll sell for £180. Penk exclaims: "But I got the last one for a couple of quid at the local DIY store!"
Man feels confused and says: "£180's not a lot to pay for a moped..."
Penk says this: "A moped??? I thought it said ' Mop 'ed for sale' ! I'm looking for a new 'ead for me mop!"

Also Chris Morris released a flexidisc with a prank call on it via Select magazine - that was great, though I can't remember much about it now. I do remember him pretending to be Bono and the callee - Piers Morgan, then editor or something of The Mirror, if I remember correctly - being completely taken in.

The best however is the first "Longmont Potion Castle". Dude from Denver applies extremely stoned surrealism to completely fuck with his victims. "I've got some coaxial flutter on my perpendicular cross-talk..."

There's also "Stev" from Seattle, and "Mark Knofler" from Texas somewhere.

I think Vinyl Communications in San Diego carries most of these..

From http://www. missioncreep.com/mw/tubebar/recording.html:

I tracked the lineage of my copy, which I received from a friend in Colorado a couple years ago. He got it from a friend in San Francisco, who got it from a friend in Los Angeles, who got it from Brooklyn native Ashley Warren. Warren, who works for Caroline Records, received a copy from an employee at CBGB’s named Curtis Gates in early ‘88.

Gates got his copy from a country and western guitar player, who got his copy from his brother, who at the time was working at the Bottom Line, a club in New York, who got his copy from a guitar player named Jimmy Vivino. (Vivino is one of the Max Weinberg Seven on the Conan O'Brien show. He is also the brother of Floyd Vivino, who created another stellar icon of New Jersey pop culture, The Uncle Floyd Show.)

In the finest Tube Bar tradition, Warren played this pedal-to-the- metal insult-fest for friends and distributed duplicates. One band recording for Caroline at the time was Unrest from Washington, DC. Unrest is fronted by Mark Robinson, who also owns a small record label called Teen Beat. Within a few months of receiving the tape from Warren, Robinson made The Tube Bar recording commercially available on Teen Beat, first as a cassette, then as a LP, and then as a CD. He has since sold several thousand copies.

Although he doesn’t have the copyright to The Tube Bar, Robinson has no legal problems selling it commercially, nor does he have to pay royalties. Since Red is dead and the original creators of the tape hadn't surfaced by the early '90s, Robinson is free to do what he pleases with the recording. For all intents and purposes, The Tube Bar recording is in the public domain. Therefore, anyone could start a record label, print copies of The Tube Bar, and sell them. Another small label has done just that, releasing the recording under the name “The Red Tapes” on a 7-inch record, a recording that Robinson oddly refers to as a “bootleg.”

My favorite is probably Great Phone Calls as well... a release so amazing I've owned it on LP/CS/CD (lotsa bonus material on each of the original issues).

Worth mentioning is Shut Up Little Man by Raymond and Peter at The Pepto Bismo Palace. More of an audio documentary than prank calling but every bit as enjoyable.

See more here: gygax.pitas.com

these are all hella lol, dl the free ones fo sho

http://www.matadorrecords.com/earles_and_jensen/

i like fonejacker loads and i don't care if that's considered totally lame or not.

TUBE BAR .

Easy.

Phil Degrave

The best however is the first "Longmont Potion Castle". Dude from Denver applies extremely stoned surrealism to completely fuck with his victims. "I've got some coaxial flutter on my perpendicular cross-talk..."

-- Brian MacDonald, Wednesday, October 10, 2001 8:00 PM (6 years ago)

Longmont Potion Castle is thee best. Dirk Funk!

-- fritz, Wednesday, October 10, 2001 8:00 PM (6 years ago)

^^^^^^^^^^

These older kids used to hang around outside the local Spar, so me and my mate (we were about 12, I think) rang the phone-box by their little spot and told them in our best deep voices that they were on the radio and could win money by answering three questions. They got pissed off with us when we told them it was a joke and we ended up just shouting insults down the phone at each other for about ten minutes.

Good times.

The Melba series is great. Especially "Melba Comes Alive!". Jokers from Texas crank call religious talk radio stations, infomercial info centers, etc. The most oft used character is the 95 year old Melba Jackson, who's a God-fearing elderly woman...

i used to have an mp3 from one of the melba cds and always wanted to hear more but was never able to track them down

Sandy Chapin is hilarious in an unpleasant, Rupert Pupkin kind of way, exploiting the codes of courtesy in the vast US service industry. I wish the mayhem was directed at CEOs and the like. But I laugh anyway, for better or worse. My favorite is "The Burning Storks" undoubtedly because it's the nicest.

Derek Erdman has a few good short ones on his site ("Titles from the Future" is particularly relevant to ILM - he calls Dusty Groove in Chicago and asks for titles that are going to come out in 2012 as well as records that have never been made). He's the man behind the Kathy McGinty soundboard calls.

The soundboard calls on ebaumsworld (and elsewhere) are genius. "Ms Cleo Prank 1" is the masterpiece there.

There are also some good phone pranks on youtube too.

Longmont Potion Castle wins sooo hard. I recently bought the latest one, then lent it out before I got to listen to it much; lendee lost it the same night.

There was an old song by Sleep Chamber entitled "Freak Accident" that appeared on a 1984 comp of bands entitled "The Oblique Collection". It features a man talking to what I assume is an elderly man he has called at random. The man says he is drunk and got in a car accident and "hit some kids". The older man keeps asking him where he is, but he says he's so drunk he doesn't know. The younger man keeps saying "Is my wife there? Let me talk to my wife." Meanwhile in the background is electronics that make the whole thing sound really scary.

I don't know what happened to me, but I used to love these and now I usually feel bad for the person on the other end. Not with Tube Bar though, those still rule.

Wait, you feel bad for the LPC victim that says "YOU WANNA DANCE? LEEEEET'S DAAAAAAANCE!"

LPC outs the most douchery of the douchebags in greater Denver. LPC is a fucking public service!

Granted, I do feel sorry for Mr. Undubockey, of "Mr. Undubockey And Associates May I Help You?" fame.

Yo, you got Cookie Puss' numbah?

Cooky O'Puss, Cookie Chick,
Anybody, man, I need to speak to them . . . .

Fuchs got a hold of a recording, an answering machine hoax perpetrated by someone pretending to be Robert Christgau, calling up TMBG and warning them to give up or he would stop them, and then seeing as the final image Christgau’s own Escher-design-style reclining felines . “Hey, those are my cats!’ Christgau shouted, seated behind us, raising the presentation to an even deeper level of weirdness.

From KEXP blog talking about Jesse Fuchs presentation at the EMP Pop conference this year

re: Earles & Jensen - the Go-gurt one gets me every time.

I'm joining your band

The best however is the first "Longmont Potion Castle". Dude from Denver applies extremely stoned surrealism to completely fuck with his victims. "I've got some coaxial flutter on my perpendicular cross-talk..."

-- Brian MacDonald, Wednesday, October 10, 2001 8:00 PM (6 years ago)

Longmont Potion Castle is thee best. Dirk Funk!

-- fritz, Wednesday, October 10, 2001 8:00 PM (6 years ago)

^^^^^^^^^^

― am0n, Sunday, April 13, 2008 6:11 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Some good clips here on the AV Club "Vitamin Guy" is a stone cold classic.

the real leroy murcer is john bean:

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Leroy-Mercer-John-Bean/dp/B000056IIG

the original, the best

from knoxville

still wanna hear those melba cds. didn't anyone else buy from vinyl communications in the 90s lol. ysi??

The Melba/Brother Jihad series can easily be boiled down to a single best-of, tbh. If you had to choose one, Melba Comes Alive! is the best.. and also has the best album cover, which you can guess from the title.

Moreover, comparing Melba/Brother Jihad to the others mentioned (LPC, Hamburger, Stev/Seattle Pranker, Earles and Jensen, Tube Bar, The Screamer), the Melba folks, while funny, target religious talk radio, which is a hard-to-miss bullseye, so it doesn't blow me away as much (anymore).

There's also Savage Vigilance For A Rug Free America that does the same, and has great moments too. I think there was only one, though.

ctrl + f "mark knopfler" - not found?

Also had to rep for Kathy McGinty, probably my favorite alongside LPC. Understandably, Kathy McG could only exist for one CD release, but o wotta CD. (Deluxe version, too)

not familiar with that one

Oh it's...it's something. My review of same.

Savage Vigilance predated the Melba releases and IIRC directly inspired a number of specific jokes and references in the latter series so it's worth hunting down -- just dug it out of the collection the other day to rip it so I should actually relisten to it as well.

haha, it turns out the M/-\d d34dly issue is a bootleg. The duo from Chicago behind Kathy didn't sue the L.A. guy (probably *coughdddddd000000|\|b0000000001133zcough*) but mentioned they hacked their system to autocall him and bring down his line functionally as vindication. The O.G. Kathy re-issued the CD with a few bonus tracks but more importantly with proper liner notes and a picture of the duo behind Kathy.

Ned, your review was perfect though, as your ambiguous use of gender fits the reality moreso than you might have thought!

Yeah, the guys behind it e-mailed me to explain about the bootlegging and I tried to get it corrected on there -- can't remember why that fell through.

:-/

that is some bad acting

I usually like all the Evil David Letterman calls.

http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/20140130prank-call-ends-in-water-damage-at-comfort-inn-abrk.html

ha didnt realize this is on ilm

fuck prank calls. debated whether to post anything in case the perpetrator is an ilxor, but i got an extremely personalized and mean one tonight and it ruined my night.

just want to say that if you think prank phone calls are a good idea, you suck.

most people are just trying to do their best. they don't need this.