It`s Friday night and you want to have a few brews, but you don`t feel like stepping out to the neighborhood bar on your own. Instead, you pick up the phone and call Fred, but Fred doesn`t answer. A woman does.
”I`m sorry for this inconvenience, ladies and gentlemen,” she says,
”but at this time I`m afraid I`ll have to ask you to leave the bus.”
Whhhaaattt???? Who is this? What`s going on at Fred`s? Oh, it`s a tape.
”Please be sure and take all your belongings with you and I promise that arrangements will be made for your continued journey as quickly as possible.” Uh huh. Now you have it. That`s Sondra Locke from the Clint Eastwood film
”The Gauntlet.” Quiet now, the tape`s still going.
Background music begins to swell, the kind you hear in old adventure films when the heroine`s about to be thrown off the cliff. As it climaxes, a man`s voice yells, ”The box! The box!” and Bette Davis, in a bored, high-class tone says, ”Let`s hope this next one will be someone we can have a rapport with.” The doorbell rings. ”Ah, here he is now.”
That`s your clue to leave the message, but you don`t. You decide to call Jim instead; maybe he`ll have a drink. So you dial his number, but instead of Jim`s voice you hear Peter Falk growling, ”How do you do? I`m Detective Columbo. Now don`t get excited, you do have the right number. This is strictly a routine investigation. So leave a message when you hear the tone, and Irv Kupcinet will get right back to you, after I book him. After all, he is entitled to a phone call.”
With a sigh, you put down the receiver. Answering machines, they`re all over the place. As you later find out, these tapes were made locally by two men to supplement their incomes. Mario Massi, a musician, did the first, and Frank Pisano, a comic, did the second.
They and others around the country are cashing in on what is becoming a lucrative sideline–the creation of answering machine messages. In Chicago the number of hip messages has grown to such an extent and are so popular that disc jockey Jonathon Brandmeier of WLUP (FM 97.9) occasionally devotes a portion of his show to calling phone machines suggested by listeners. ”For some reason,” he says, ”it seems that `85 was the year everyone decided to get an answering machine.” Hence Brandmeier`s ”Answering Machine Olympics,” a contest in which tapes are rated on a scale of one to 10.
STAR-STRUCK
Being a citizen of the world, you knew that Sondra Locke and Bette Davis really weren`t at Fred`s, nor was Peter Falk hanging out at Jim`s. Knowing this puts you in a different category from the old lady in California who called Trans Pacific Services in North Hollywood and got a message from a Jimmy Stewart sound-alike and talked into the answering machine for 20 minutes trying to get Stewart to talk some more.
Linda Smith, who with her husband owns Trans Pacific Services, asked a friend to make them a tape in Stewart`s voice to keep people from hanging up on their machine. The ploy worked. People began calling the Smiths with assignments after hours just to listen to the voices. Not only that, Smith says, but ”it helped our business so tremendously that I said to my husband, `I bet we could sell these messages.` Thus Celebrity Voices, Smith`s successful business sideline, got started in 1981. By 1983 the company had grossed approximately $200,000 in sales worldwide.
The company`s name spread to the extent that Smith once received a call from a telephone operator in Mexico, who began making strange noises. ”I asked him, `What are you doing?` He said, ”I`m applying for a job with Celebrity Voices.` ”
TAPE TREND-SETTER
According to Smith, Celebrity Voices` success has spawned a host of imitators. Someone who had the idea before Smith, though, is Lloyd Burkley, who owns Phonies, a company in Cherry Hill, N.J., with tapes by Rich Little and Julie Dees. Another celebrity getting in on the act is Don Pardo of
”Saturday Night Live” and ”Jeopardy” fame. Pardo does voices for Pard`n Me Productions, a firm run by Rick and Joanne Kelman in Palisades Park, N.J.
Burkley`s company produces only generic tapes, which means that the message does not include the buyer`s name. Kelman, Smith, Pisani and Massi, however, produce custom and personalized tapes.
Personalized tapes are one-of-a-kind, whereas the customized variety are those in which the buyer`s name is inserted into a ready-made script. Massi, Kelman and Smith encourage their clients to come up with their own messages. Massi says: ”A customer will tell me he`s got a wild idea. Could I have him on the Starship Enterprise and could he be Mr. Spock or could he be Scotty, and we just start kidding around.”
Kelman says that one out of every three or four of Pard`n Me Productions` customers writes his own tape. ”We don`t supply a script,” Kelman says.
”What we do is play sample messages for people on the phone and that gives them ideas and then we either design a message for them or together with the customer we come up with a message to suit their needs.”
Smith`s Celebrity Voices makes personalized messages for $49.95 each or $250 for six but has stopped making customized tapes, which were relatively inexpensive ($29.95 for one, $150 for a six-pack). ”The prices of actors and studios went up so high that I was no longer able to offer them,” she says. Smith`s business over the holidays was so strong that she is not taking orders for personalized messages for several months, until she is able to fill back orders.
NOT JUST A FAD
The tape makers claim they are filling a definite need. Smith says she is helping to solve the problem of hang-ups. Kelman says, ”It`s a legitimate service we offer for people who don`t feel comfortable with the way they sound on their answering machine, or for people with a small business who want a professional announcement, or for people who get a lot of people hanging up.” It is not, he says, ”a fad or a status thing.”
Chicago photographer Paul Natkin, however, who has a tape made by Art Fleming and Don Pardo, says that a good tape is a status symbol in Chicago`s music community, a ”sign of how cool you are.”
Prices of tapes vary widely and comparisons seem a bit of a muddle. All of the personalized messages Pardo records for Kelman go for $49.95, but Kelman also produces tapes with celebrity imitations done by Boston radio personality Billy West that cost $29.95. Now Kelman is thinking of producing generic tapes to compete with Phonies` clever pieces, which sell in chain stores at $10 for a pack of six. Ten of Pisani`s generics, which are every bit as good as Little`s, sell for $10. One of his customized tapes goes for $25.
But of all the recent entries into the field, perhaps the most imaginative and least expensive are those by Mario Massi, a Chicago musician who brings his studio expertise to the job. Surprisingly, his personalized tapes cost only $20 each. With his background in multiple track recording, Massi mixes a potpourri of sound effects and voice-overs. A few of his tapes, for example, have Klingons attacking the Starship Enterprise while a frantic crew tries to cope.
”This all just came about,” Massi says, ”as a lucrative little sideline because I played in a local band around town for 10 years, so naturally I`m trying to sell myself as an artist/songwriter. And that`s where the studio came about. As for the phone tapes, I did one for myself, and my friends just couldn`t get enough of them.”
As is the case with his competitors, Massi uses a wide variety of voices, mostly of famous people. ”The most popular voice lately,” he says, ”seems to be Darth Vader. I do that by doing some special effects and balancing and digital delay. That seems to be going over real well.”
”I did a real good one when I eight-tracked applause off an album and just kept continually looping so it sounded like you`re in a big concert environment and then with some long-delay echo I said, `Hello, ladies and gentlemen, genetlemen, gentlemen, I`d like to introduce to you, to you, to you, Mr. Bill, Bill, Bill Horn. He can`t be here right now, but leave your name and number and he`ll get right back to you.` The crowd went wild and then you got the beep.”
What you do when you get a beep depends in part, of course, on who you are and what the message says. If you`re Ken Nordine, the creator of Word Jazz, you`re bound to have an extremely strange tape–one that, to say the least, bothers a few people.
One tape started with synthesized bleeps against a steady beat (which continued throughout the tape) and Nordine`s deep but quiet voice said,
”You`ve found us.” (”Where am I?” a shrill, weak voice piped up.) ”You have reached the center” (”Of what?”) ”Of the universe.” (”Ooooohhhh.”) ”Yeah, the center of the center.” (”I want to talk to Ken.”) ”It`s where Mr. Beep and the beep people” (”No, no.”) ”work.” (”Ken. I want to talk to Ken.”) ”Just about now it will be your chorus.” (”Mine?”) ”It will be at the beep.”
Well, Nordine says, that tape became ”a catalyst for a fantasy” and he had to get rid of it because too many people were calling just to hear the tape. Sure, it was flattering, but he was getting ”all sorts of strange calls.” Some people, in fact, started swearing into the machine. ”It became something that was an attractive nuisance.”
If you want a tape, nuisance or not, the following names and numbers will be of use: Mario Massi (289-1103); Frank Pisani (676-9594 for orders or 679-8866 and 676-9443 for samples); Celebrity Voices (818-700-1713 or 818-341-4322); Pard`n Me Productions (201-641-9312); and Phonies
(609-424-6787). —
