lifestone76
09-22-2007, 04:10 PM
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0b2_1190442020
Made in the mid ’70s, The Tube Bar is a bizarre and wonderfully chaotic recording of a series of prank phone calls made by a group of callers (who were unknown until recently) to the small Jersey City bar called the TubeBar.
Originally passed around as an in-joke by the bar's patrons, the tape became an underground favorite with everyone from the New York Mets to the staff at Caroline records, an alternative label. The appeal of the tape is both basic and bizarre: what starts out as a dumb but harmless game explodes into a violent, hateful, yet hysterically funny verbal jousting match.
What’s fascinating about The Tube Bar isn’t the phone prank but what happens when our merry prankster tangles with Red, owner of the Tube Bar. Red is a cantankerous, foul-mouthed, gravel-voiced old coot who doesn’t think much of phone pranks. He’s from a time gone by, when men settled their differences the honorable way--face to face with their fists.
Once Red catches onto the silly prank, the aging taproom owner uses each call as an opportunity to blast the prankster with every ounce of strength in his ravaged vocal chords, bandying about multisyllabic profanities like confetti.
The caller soon becomes more interested in Red’s feverishly obscene performance and drops all pretense of the prank.
Of course, the caller has no intention of meeting Red. His only intention is to bait Red into even more, crazed ranting, what the record sleeve refers to as “cranking.”
While not challenging each other’s courage, much of this friendly repartee involves graphic descriptions of sex acts supposedly performed by the other’s mother. Red is particularly adept on this subject, but the prankster gets in a brilliant zinger when he boasts of being intimate with Red’s mother’s corpse, which he claims to have dug up from the grave.
Of course, Red could hang up on his tormentors at any time, but he seems to feed off the calls, cherishing this outlet for his mighty ream of anger and frustration. Collaborators rather than adversaries, a weird symbiotic relationship develops. They seem to need each other.
Made in the mid ’70s, The Tube Bar is a bizarre and wonderfully chaotic recording of a series of prank phone calls made by a group of callers (who were unknown until recently) to the small Jersey City bar called the TubeBar.
Originally passed around as an in-joke by the bar's patrons, the tape became an underground favorite with everyone from the New York Mets to the staff at Caroline records, an alternative label. The appeal of the tape is both basic and bizarre: what starts out as a dumb but harmless game explodes into a violent, hateful, yet hysterically funny verbal jousting match.
What’s fascinating about The Tube Bar isn’t the phone prank but what happens when our merry prankster tangles with Red, owner of the Tube Bar. Red is a cantankerous, foul-mouthed, gravel-voiced old coot who doesn’t think much of phone pranks. He’s from a time gone by, when men settled their differences the honorable way--face to face with their fists.
Once Red catches onto the silly prank, the aging taproom owner uses each call as an opportunity to blast the prankster with every ounce of strength in his ravaged vocal chords, bandying about multisyllabic profanities like confetti.
The caller soon becomes more interested in Red’s feverishly obscene performance and drops all pretense of the prank.
Of course, the caller has no intention of meeting Red. His only intention is to bait Red into even more, crazed ranting, what the record sleeve refers to as “cranking.”
While not challenging each other’s courage, much of this friendly repartee involves graphic descriptions of sex acts supposedly performed by the other’s mother. Red is particularly adept on this subject, but the prankster gets in a brilliant zinger when he boasts of being intimate with Red’s mother’s corpse, which he claims to have dug up from the grave.
Of course, Red could hang up on his tormentors at any time, but he seems to feed off the calls, cherishing this outlet for his mighty ream of anger and frustration. Collaborators rather than adversaries, a weird symbiotic relationship develops. They seem to need each other.