![]() ![]() “We heard the tapes - just like everybody else - when we got a cassette from friends,” says Dave Lang of Atomic Films, a commercial and industrial DVD-length film producer based in Chattanooga, Tenn. “How is it that two redneck pranksters living over 900 miles apart could be so similar,” asked Coury Turczyn in her Knoxville Metro Pulse story on the subject in June 2008, “using the same words, the same gags, the same identities? Are they twin brothers, or could it be a remarkable case of divine comedic coincidence?”īean’s been dead 24 years, but clearly his legacy lives. In it, Bean, identifying himself as LeRoy Mercer, rings up a well-meaning manager at the Thom McCann shoe store in Knoxville (long since closed) seeking well-deserved restitution for a bum pair of boots he says “got a little bit damp and folded up, looks like a damn dog’s been eatin’ on ’em.” Through the course of the call - at the end of which “Mercer” and the manager, after a series of intentional miscommunications and hilarious misdirections on Bean’s part, realize that the caller probably bought his boots at a neighboring store - Bean delivered what is today the one of Lee Roy and Roy D.’s signature lines, modified for all manner of advertisements, among other uses: “It ain’t nothin’ for me to whoop a man’s ass.” ![]() It’s an alternate spelling of Bean’s most famous telephonic pseudonym.īean used that name on a call that is part of the first three on the CD, the classic trinity of “whupass calls,” as Betty tells it. Perhaps a more direct imitation came out of the Bristol, Tenn., area just north of the Beans’ Knoxville home base via a character you might recognize from his many - admittedly staged-sounding - prank calls to NASCAR drivers. ![]() Mercer, created by Brent Douglas and Phil Stone at KMOD in Tulsa, Okla., in the 1990s with several subsequent CD releases, though Douglas and Stone both claim no prior knowledge of the tapes. A veritable industry of imitators has arisen in subsequent years, including the calls of the character Roy D. Nor would that tape be the last installment of the craze Bean unwittingly created. That Oklahoma trucker wasn’t the last to stop in at Raven when it served as the hot spot for what would become an international underground phenomenon, Steed says. An inveterate prankster, as the tape and new CD make clear, when Bean passed away, Betty says, a friend was on the way to the hospital with a video camera, “and they were going to mess with the nurses.” That cancer was the outcome of over-radiation when Bean was treated a decade or more earlier for Hodgkin’s Disease, says his surviving sister Betty. 18, 1984, at age 33 went into respiratory failure as the result of resurgent cancer. Remastered versions of the calls on that tape, now out on CD from Nashville’s Dualtone Records as The Real LeRoy Mercer: The Original Recordings of John Bean, were the work of a man who, on Aug. The CD and digital downloads are available via Amazon and other retailers. ![]() I said, ‘What’s this guy want?'” The trucker came in, Steed says, blank tape in hand, and said, “You got the LeRoy Mercer tapes?” He was an Oklahoma native who’d heard about the tape third- or fourth-hand. I was working one day, and this giant semi pulled into our parking lot. Steed knew nothing about the origins of what he had, but the infectious nature of the comedy involved naturally led to him making copies of the tape for friends and customers at Raven Records to the point where, he says, “we were making hundreds of tapes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |