Beep.
“Jeff, Scott Watson calling. It’s 12:11 on Friday evening. You better give me a call tonight. I’m [mad] about the noise going on downstairs. I’ve called the police already . . . You and I better have a face-to-face in the next 12 hours or I’m going to call the police every time that band plays down there. You call me fast. Bye.”
Beep.
So begins “Basement Show,” the fifth track on Citizen King’s Warner Brothers debut, “Mobile Estates.” The authentic message, which sums up a bizarre hurdle the band faced while making the album, comes courtesy of the hottest new recording tool in rock.
The answering machine has become a staple in recent recordings by such acts as Dr. Dre, the Beastie Boys, Limp Bizkit, Filter, Everlast, Ben Folds Five, Luscious Jackson, Local H and Citizen King.
Whether it’s a family member rambling or an irate enemy dishing out threats, the fuzzy, book-ended-by-beeps messages are the trendy new way for bands to serve up a slice of their personal lives to fans.
“It’s like one of those little Hallmark cards that you don’t really have to buy, you just step on,” says Matt Sims, frontman for the rap-rock group Citizen King, who had a 1999 hit in “Better Days (And The Bottom Drops Out).”
At Citizen King’s rehearsal space in downtown Milwaukee, a neighbor the band labeled The Bearded Monster, began complaining of extreme noise violations.
“This dude started out by giving our manager phone calls, `Turn it down, turn it down,'” Sims explains. “We tried to explain that we were making a record. . . . He’d show up downstairs . . . , this is a 45-year-old dude, yelling, `Turn your music down!'”
The band decided not to answer the door in hopes that the man would simply give up. It was when The Bearded Monster tried phoning the guys that they made a crucial creative decision.
“We were like, `OK, we’re going to tape him,'” Sims says. “And he just spilled his guts out on the answering machine. It was the funniest thing I had ever heard, and it was perfect to put on the album because it was something we had to go through to make it.”
The experimental guitar band Magwai was hoping to capture the same sort of “summary of the times” token when they recorded their manager for the song “Tracy,” on their “Young Team” album.
“As the song didn’t really have any structure to speak of, we needed something to finish it off and this seemed the best way,” lead guitarist Stuart Braithwaite says.
The band was struggling with the album and rumors of a break-up were floating. So, to mock the situation, the band staged a furious phone call to their manager.
“It was real for him; he believed it to be true,” Braithwaite says. “We were just winding him up, although he had to take it seriously due to the tension that actually did exist within the band at that time.”
On Local H’s 1998 celebrated concept album, “Pack Up the Cats,” frontman Scott Lucas used a montage of real messages taken from his and former band mate Joe Daniels’ machines to serve as a transition between songs, which chronicle the tales of a confused suburban boy who packs up and moves to a big city.
The messages “basically come at a point on the record where the main character has just moved and is starting to make a lot of friends,” Lucas explains. “His social calendar is a bit more filled and his life gets more jumbled. The messages are supposed to illustrate that.”
The initial response to the “Pack Up the Cats” segment was so positive, Local H decided to release a rare CD of each of the entire messages used, “so everyone could hear what our friends were calling about.”
One rocker who relied on an answering machine to compose his entire record is former Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, who recently released his solo debut under the name Methods of Mayhem. Lee was serving a prison term when he began writing the record. Worried about his cellmates or guards taking the material, Lee used his phone time to call his own machine and record lyrics and melodies.
“It was the only way to record at all hours of the night and not rely on people to be home to record it for me,” Lee says.
He contemplated using some actual messages on his album, but “Limp Bizkit and many others beat me to it,” Lee says. “And now it’s been done to death.”
Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, who appears on the Methods of Mayhem album, mixed two messages into his band’s hit album, “Significant Other.” The first is a real message from Mathematic of Wu-Tang Clan, while the second is from Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland.
The latter captures the unusual personality of the usually masked guitar man, as he rants, “I’m gonna kick your . . . (insert obscenities here).”
“It was a message he left me some day when I was down,” Durst says. “He cheered me up. Me happy now. The subject matter is entirely fiction.”
Of the current cluster of bands who have used answering machine messages, Filter is considered pioneers of the technique. An apparently intoxicated man slurs several profanities into the phone as the introduction to “Spent,” from the band’s 1995 debut, “Short Bus.”
On the supporting tour for the album, Filter used the same beep and message to signal the start of the tune. Filter later revisited the recording method on “(Can’t You) Trip Like I Do,” a collaboration with The Crystal Method, sampling female vocals from an answering machine message throughout the track. “I want you to trip like I do,” the voice whispers in the song’s most intimate moment.
Since then, DJ Mix Master Mike has showed off the “tweak scratch” over an answering machine on the Beasties Boys’ “Hello Nasty,” while rapper Sen Dog left some words of encouragement on Everlast’s “Whitey Ford Sings the Blues.”
Piano man Ben Fold’s father has rambled about John Glenn and body mass on “Your Most Valuable Possession” (from “The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner”) and Blondie’s Debbie Harry has offered her singing services on “Fantastic Fabulous” (from “Electric Honey”).
By law, the voice behind the message must sign a clearance form before the band can use it. Citizen King, who now brings tape recorders everywhere it goes, solved the situation by paying their bitter neighbor a small fee.
