Long before the Jerky Boys or anyone else even thought of picking up the phone to do a serious prank call, John Davidson and Jim Elmo began making calls to a local New Jersey Bar called the "Tube Bar," named after the nearby Manhattan-Jersey subway. What came out of those sessions was an incredible collection of the taped telephone torment of bartender Louis "Red" Deutsch, an old man with a "red" hot temper.

John Elmo and Jim Davidson are known today as the Bum Bar Bastards. Their calls have inspired a generation of pranksters, with references to them popping up everywhere from the Howard Stern show to the Simpsons to, of course, the Internet.

The Bum Bar Bastards are famous for the calls to the Tube Bar, but they have at least five tapes worth of calls in the vaults, and are finally ready to release a new album after all these years. The new tapes include around twenty more minutes of calls to Red, along with hours of calls to anyone else whose buttons they could push.

I recently found out that John and Jim and I live only 150 miles apart here in Florida. I got to talk to them and had the oppourtunity of a lifetime to find out all the inside information about Red and the Tube Bar, and I was able to create the insert for their upcoming album "Tavern Tour", as well as their official web site.

I conducted an interview with them over the phone and had the opportunity to ask all the questions that the hordes of Tube Bar fans of the world have always wanted to know about the background behind Red and the Bum Bar Bastards.

Prantagonize: How did you find Red?

"I literally said, 'We'll call one more.'"

Jim: We were making some calls one day and we were calling again and again, but we don't just get winners all the time. So I literally said "We'll call one more, right?" So I called up and I got him, you know, his voice? He said, "Hello!" I think I said "Joe Dildo... Is Joe Dildo there?" Anyway (laughs) I said okay, hung up, said whatever I said. I said "You gotta hear this fuckin' guy's voice," to John. So he called him back, and he starts laughing his ass off. John had a Marshall amp, and we started running it through the Marshall amp. We kept calling him back and this guy was falling for stupid stuff. Stand Dup, Sid Down, Sal Lami, Bill Loni, all this stuff. After about nine or ten he'd catch on. We'd stop and do it again. He'd be like "Ahh, ahh!" He was so busy in there, I guess he didn't put it together.

Prantagonize: Did the torture that he went through with you guys endure for a couple of years?

"I think it added years to his life, actually."

Jim: I think it added years to his life, actually. I think his family should pay us for keeping him around so long.

Prantagonize: How many years did you guys prank him?

Jim: We only did Tube Bar for about a year and a half. Freddy we did for like five, maybe six years, maybe more.

Prantagonize: Is Freddy the longest you've done?

Jim: Six or seven years..., yeah.

Prantagonize: What about Tom and Judy?

Jim: Tom used to hang up a lot. We'd piss him off so much, that's why he's so loud. He was about a year and a half too, around the same time as the Tube Bar.

Prantagonize: Do you know if he's dead?

Jim: Nah.

Prantagonize: What about Judy?

Jim: Yeah, Judy died last year.

Prantagonize: She owned a tavern?

"They got so mad that they took the phone out from behind the bar and put in on the wall."

Jim: She was a bartender in this place down in Hoboken called the Gull House. She answered the phone behind the bar - the new album has some calls to the Gull House by the way - they got so mad that they took the phone out from behind the bar and put in on the wall. So I went down there and got the number off the wall and started calling them, then they really got pissed. Judy was the bartender there - you actually wouldn't expect her mouth to be like that, but she had a mouth like a sailor, it was funny.

Prantagonize: You guys made this calls in your twenties?

Jim: Early twenties.

Prantagonize: How many tapes worth of calls do you have?

Jim: Five or six hours worth of calls, mostly old. Most of them pre-date the Tube Bar actually.

Prantagonize: Why are you calling your new album "Tavern Tour?"

Jim: The name "Tavern Tour" was just a natural because we literally called taven after tavern, hence "Tavern Tour."

Prantagonize: I know Red will be on there, but what other people are featured?

Jim: The other charecters will be Freddy, who got pissed off at us at first, but as time went on he would say things to try and get us to come down to his place in Hoboken. He was mobbed up, and would have slit our throats, or so the people that knew him told us. And Frank Kennedy from a place called the Stagg Bar. He's a real early call from the late sixties, early seventies. He's got a real distinctive voice, like Red... one of my favorites. Judy, who you met on the Tube Bar album. Lieutenant Sweeten, a cop from Hoboken who has some interesting dialogue, Benny Bendover, who we taped getting laid, Froggy, who is both me and John in a disguised voice, and Freddy's rendition of the mother voice. That's about it. If this album goes well there will be a bunch more. We hope to have it out by the end of July or early August.

Prantagonize: How did the Red calls get out? Did you pass them around to friends?

Jim: We didn't pass 'em to nobody, near as we can figure. We let a lot of people listen to 'em and somebody got that XXX bootleg thing. That tape sounds like the tape we used to use, like one single type of tape. Its funny because that was a red tape too, like red in color.

Prantagonize: So you called it the red tapes?

Jim: No, we put that together after we called Red. We used to tape off that kind of tape, but luckily we put them on master copies and John kept them. He just put them in a safe and for years we didn't even play them. All of a sudden we see them on MTV - "Look! Tube Bar..." We're the innovators of the prank call and we don't know anything about it. All these people are doing it - The Simpsons are doing it, this guy's doing it, that guy's doing it. The thing's showing up on all these albums, people are giving us credit, we don't even know them. We found it all over. I know Rush had it on, every clubhouse in major league baseball plays it, all these sports people play it. Sports fans come out and talk about it.

Prantagonize: So what is the material that did get out?

Jim: The stuff on the old album is just bad-sounding calls. That was the tape that we used to transfer the tapes on. Some fuckin' body got it. I don't know how it got out, I wanna figure how it got out - but its same stuff we got, that we cleaned up in the studio. Its clean now - the ones from the album are all scratchy.

Prantagonize: I've been looking for that like crazy.

Jim: Supposedly we stopped the guy from putting it out, but I don't think so cause I saw it on the Internet somewhere. Like the first time we got on a couple months ago. We just started with a computer, figured what the fuck, we'll try it on the computer. And I see all these places - I see my name more on the computer than anywhere. I'm like "What is this?"

Prantagonize: How did you guys find the Tube Bar? Have you always known about it?

"Cops would come in, he'd kick the cop's ass too."

Jim: Oh yeah, when I was in high school I used to walk past the Tube Bar everyday. I'd cut through there to get to school so I didn't have to take a bus. It was in this real skeevy-looking alley with all these characters in it. I used to go in there to get beer before we were 21 - In Jersey, you had to be 21. And he used to serve anybody... No one would bother him. Cops would come in, he'd kick the cop's ass too.

Prantagonize: Yeah, I read the article about how a cop came in and they got in a big fight.

Jim: See what I mean? They just let him take care of it. The guy was 85 years old doing this.

Prantagonize: I remember some of calls, like "Stu Pitt" where Red would say "What are you trying to make a jerk outta me?"

Jim: Yeah, that was John. The thing with Red was, he could pick up laughs. We would call him left and right, but if you giggled he'd get pissed off. He somehow picked that up. Like when John laughed on "Stu Pitt" or that time I said "Stand D. Pain." He said "Stanley Steamer" and it messed me up. I tried not to laugh, but he said "What? Whaddya trying to kid me now? Whaddya kidding me around ya motherfucker?" and he really caught on. I was like, "No!!" (laughs).

Prantagonize: What else do you have on tape?

Jim: Not so much Tube Bar - we only have like 20-25 minutes left of that. We got these other guys that we call. We started in about '68 or '69 when we were real young. We just did it, you know, not necessarily to a bar or anything. You gotta picture where we come from doing this.

Prantagonize: Have you ever met Red?

Jim: Oh yeah, we went down there.

Prantagonize: Did he know who you guys were?

Jim: No no no, cause he would have fuckin' killed us. I'll tell you a story about that, cause we found all this stuff out about Red after we called him. This is really how it happened: Usually we were fucked up calling people, then we heard him with that "Hello!". The first call I think I asked for "Ben Dover." That's the one where I was laughing. So we hooked it up to the Marshall amp we had. John couldn't keep a straight face.

Prantagonize: How did you record it?

Jim: We used alligator clips on Red - We had a jack right in the phone - like a guitar jack. We started calling these places before there were cassettes. That's how long ago it was. Not the Tube Bar though, it was on cassette.

Prantagonize: You just saw Tube Bar and started calling them?

Jim: Tube Bar was in an alley up in Journal Square. Everybody knew about it. I would always pass it and it was always open, 24 hours a day. Go in there if you wanted to be killed, you know? But the thing is that you could get served in there. When we were real young and wanted beer we'd go in there.

Prantagonize: Red never let any women in there?

Jim: Nah, even when the laws said that you had to let women in bars, he still wouldn't let 'em in.

Prantagonize: Have you ever pranked his wife?

Jim: Yeah, unfortunately we lost most of them tapes too. The one of the album that you hear is "Will you get down here, the bar's on fire!" That's the last one on there.

Prantagonize: That was the one where you called her and she said he was down at the bar and you called him back when he got home?

Jim: I called the Tube Bar and a Spanish guy answered. So I copied his voice and called Red's house - we got his name out of the fuckin' phone book. We didn't even know all the shit we know now about him then, but we found him... At this point we had found out his last name was Deutsch. I called the Tube Bar up and they said, "He's not here, he's not working tonight." So I called Red's house and said "The bar's on fire! The bar's on fire!" He goes "The bar's on *smack*" cause he dropped the phone and was running all over the place. The phone hung up, so I called him right back. His wife goes "He's on his way down to the bar, the bar's on fire!" So then I call the bar and say "Hey, is Red there?" He hadn't gotten there yet so I just laughed and hung up. A little later I called his house again and he was already back home. I said "Hey, the bar's on fire! Will ya get down here? The bar's on fire!" He said "You motherfucker!" right in front of his wife. He never used the word fuck in front of her.

Prantagonize: Do you have this stuff on tape?

Jim: Nah, the one from the album the only one we got left. We taped over the other one with his wife. That's what I mean, we did so many of these fuckin' things. Once we called some cuckoo we knew. This nut, he literally just got out of a nuthouse. He didn't say anything, he was just talking about his fuckin shoe on the phone.

Prantagonize: The Tube Bar tape is on off the best albums ever made. You guys deserve a movie, a better one than some groups made.

Jim: If we had known this was gonna happen we would have recorded it better. That movie was supposed to happen, but you know how it goes...

Extra Info: Clips from the new album, "Tavern Tour" The Art of Prank Calls' Virtual Red Lars' Tube Bar page Crankings' Tube Bar chat interview