Stu As Guest and Commercial Spoofs

Remaining Fluke Recordings

IT
Bill, Dean, Michael & Raymond
Located in Mar Vista 391-1111 & 397-2774
Started Around 1970
During the first few weeks of "IT", the phone number was 397-2774. That number was soon replaced by 391-1111. The phone line was located at Bill's parents' house.

The "IT" answering machine was their own design, using relays, open-reel endless tape loops, and some other hacked-together stuff. An AC-powered electromechanical call counter (which Dean still has) went CLICK-CLACK when the machine would take a call. In the wee hours of the morning, the call counter could wake the dead.

Back then, linerunners all lived in fear of the phone company. Putting your own answering machine on the phone line was illegal, unless you had a DAA provided by the phone company, which hardly anyone did. The "IT" guys eventually got in hot water with the phone company, and had to rent a DAA from General Telephone.

General Telephone sent out a phone man who had no clue of how to install a DAA. After giving up on installing the DAA, the phone man suggested that they just continue using the machine hooked directly to the line. The phone man told them that, as long as they paid for the DAA, there wouldn't be any trouble. He wasn't about to admit to his supervisor that he couldn't figure out how to install the DAA, so the secret was safe with him. The DAA just sat, gathering dust, and General Telephone never bothered them again.

The answering machine was housed in a wooden box, which they nicknamed "Pandora's Box", since opening it would often cause the circuitry to fail. There were lots of wires running every which way. A later design was built on a homemade printed circuit board. Tape, donuts and ferric chloride were the technology. They taped directly onto copper-clad board, and etched it in a Pyrex beaker while heating it over Bill's mom's stove. No matter how careful they were, ferric chloride stains ended up everywhere.

There was a soft drink back then called "Simba". The ads for it were just screaming to be made fun of. The ads featured a gruff-voiced announcer telling about how, when on an African safari,

"The African sun beats down on you.
The African thirst strikes!
You reach for -- Simba. SIMBA!!
IT GOES FOR THE THROAT!!".....

One of IT's most popular recordings was a tape called "Bimba", making fun of those ads.

Three It Recordings

More It Recordings

Laffline
Located in Northridge 993-1010
Started in 1973
"You've Reached That Far Out Feeling Of Friendly Phone Fun"
Laffline had good original content. A bit like Fluke and "Z".
I won an album from their answer live night in 1975. Their sponsor was "Moby Disc" in Van Nuys when it was on Victory near Van Nuys Blvd.

Recordings
from the phone

Stuff 'n' Mold	DJ School	Vegetable Matic
Speed Reading		Stupid Questions

Recordings from the Master Tapes

Reel #2a

Reel #2b

The Machine
Run By Tom, Steve & Tom
San Pedro 833-3339 (Back On Their Old Numbeer)
Mar Vista 822-2329
Orange County 714-833-3339
The Machine was started on September 12, 1968
The original members were Tom and Tom, then Steve. Very quickly then Robin, Holly, Lewis , Jerry, Paul, Mike, Mike (two of them). Still later add Carl and Jose.
The Machine was once disconnected for frying the step-by-step equipment it was on. Having peaked at more than 2,000 calls in one day on a single line in a residential connector group, you can imagine. A worried switch man said that, of eight local connectors serving the phone numbers which were then 213-833-33XX, one was almost always connected to The Machine. One was almost always broken because of the high volume. At least half of the rest were dialing in or listening to a busy signal.
Sometime after that, it re-emerged with a different number. 213-833-2405. For about one year, it operated with 5 lines in rotary. Later, when the 833 prefix was moved from step to ESS#5, The Machine moved back to 833-3339.
The Machine operated on a variety of other numbers, including 213-836-5556 (selected to be in the miss-dialing shadow for Zzzzzz), and 714-833-3339 and 213-822-2329 among them. All of these were considered satellite numbers to the "The Machine Telephone Entertainment Network". The term was mockingly pretentious.

The Machine runs on rare occasion right now. Need new gear, and have little time to set it up -- let alone make decisions as to what gear to get.

Most of its recordings are archived in storage. The cast and crew (first, second and third companies) have all scattered to different parts of the country and world. Many of the recordings are now very dated. There are some commercial products, for example, that are now more outlandish than some of our satires.

Comment: I use to call the number once in a while at 833-3339. Later came the number for Mar Vista 822-2329. That was local to me since I lived in Van Nuys at the time. My group of friends had the opportunity to run the Mar Vista area's Machine. Our project ended and we couldn't provide a new home for it.

Recording #1	Recording #2	Recording #3	Recording #4
Recording #5	Recording #6	Recording #7	Recording #8

Mainline
Located in North Hollywood 765-6000
Started in 1973
Stu gave me this number when he was running "The Shokus Hotline" when he had a "Request Night". It must have started in 1973. It ran for two years and revived in 1979 by Bryan W. Feedback for two more years. I wish I still had my copies of the Mainline.

Here is an exerpt from one of the guys that ran Mainline (6/2/2006):
That was run by a very close friend of mine, Mike Levey. In fact just last year I actually set the old Mainline equipment out in the trash after storing it for the past 25 + years. I may even have the original recordings some place. The old tapes from the mainline were on 4-track and were lost many years ago due to water damage.

The system used Altec line amplifiers to connect to the phone line, it was illegal back then to hook anything to the phone line so we were kind of skirting the law. A home made breadboard was used to sense ringing and connect the line to the amplifiers and turn on the tape. The tape machines were 4 track type made by Telex with foil sensors for EOT.

We only had 3 lines in rotary and they were always busy. Now and then we would put an old Code-a-phone answering machine on it and hear what people thought about it and where they were from. They were from all over the country, a lot of phone operators and telephone linemen would call to test their lines and listen to the latest jokes.

Mike, of infomercial fame, was one of the people that started the mainline and it is his wife at the time, Paula that you hear as the sexy bimbo in many of the recordings. It is a shame that your recordings are of such poor quality, all of the originals were done on 15 ips 2 track tapes in a real recording studio in Hollywood, and the quality was perfect.

The Mainline was actually built as a prototype to sell to places like MacDonald's and Jack in the Box. The plan was that we would place a machine at each of the stores and supply them with fresh material on a monthly basis with a short advertisement at the end for the company. It was getting a bit of interest but for some reason no one wanted to be the first one so we gave up on it and all went our separate ways. I had hosted it at my house for a year at 213-783-8738 (back when Encino was 213) for a year before I finally shut it down and stored it in the garage. By then the material was getting old and no one had the time to go play in the studio.

Mike who started it went on to infomercial fame with his show Amazing Discoveries and Ask Mike, and did very well for himself. Sadly he passed away from asbestos induced cancer. Not sure where that came from as he never worked with it as far as we know.

Recordings

LINK - Evan Doorbell Tapes Mainline 1974
- CLICK HERE

Marshall O'Dell
Run by Marshall O'Dell
Located in the San Fernando Valley
Started in the late 1970's

"R"
Run by Randy 454-1904
Located in Pacific Palisades 454-1904
Started in 1971
"You've Dialed 454-1904, The Home Of "R".
They had a write up in the Los Angeles Times and at one time had to shut down temporarily because of the phone calls overloading the central office. It came back on again but for a short while. Some of the material I had heard on available records. Two skits where from a stereo test record that Radio Shack sold from "Audio Fidelity Records". One was the "Elevator" and the other was "Russian Roulette".

Recording For 25 March 1974

Superfone
Run by Joe Klein, with partners, John LaSalle, & Dick Peabody
Located in Sherman Oaks 986-9800
Started in 1973

Formally known as John Shannon, producer and the primary voice of Zzzzzz, Superfone was started by Klein and his partners as an early attempt to monitize a world wide network, specifically the telephone network. The line was run out of Joe's apartment in Sherman Oaks. The plan was to create a series of comedy recordings and, later, audio cartoon serials for major fast food retailers. Mark Robbins of "Dial-A-Joke" fame designed and built the answering system and had also designed innovative circuitry allowing the callers to blow into a "Secret Whistle" obtained at the restaurant to access the program material. Although the whistle-access technology was never actually implemented, Superfone served as the pilot program to demonstrate the concept to the corporations and advertising agencies. It was also used as a research tool to gather call statistics (ie. calls received, busy signals, etc.) to supply to prospective advertisers. At first, random comedy skits in the genre of "Z" ran on the line. Later on, the first series, "The Adventures Of Napkin Man" was featured, followed by a "spinoff" series entitled "The Life Of Rodney."

The line was operated for less than a year and discontinued when the fast food chains that the promotion was created for decided that the technology involved would be too costly to implement on a national scale.

Klein's last foray into telephone entertainment was about ten years later when he started a promotional telephone recording line called the "Spotline." This was a line used to promote Klien's production company, L.A. Trax, Inc., which was the leading producer of commercials for major label record albums. The "Spotline" featured a new national radio spot from the company every week and operated for aproximately one year in the early 1980's.

In 2005 Klein started a new company, The Podcast Voice Guys, which specializes in producing voice overs and fully produced audio elements for major podcasts worldwide.

Recordings 1972 - 1974

Recording #1	Recording #2
University Medical Center	Contest Of The Century
Discount Appliance Company	Little Orphan Annie
Make Your Request	Season's Greetings
Secret Fruit Of The Month	Tapping The Line
Telephone Driving Instructor	The Mad Doctor
Tongue Twister Of The Week	Man On The Street

The Adventures Of Napkinman

The Life Of Rodney Series

Tummies
Located in Northridge 886-6437
Started Sometime in 1975 running until 1977
One of the first lines Nino was involved with.
The number spelled out "Tummies" 886-6437. After the line went down, I heard some of the recordings that where left on one of the comment lines. The recordings where very short starting with "You've Dialed Tummies". They must have been 10-seconds or less each.

Recordings That Played On Fluke 1975
From Master Tape

Recordings That Played On Fluke
From Master Tape

More, Thanks To Tom Santa Monica

And More, Thanks To Tom Santa Monica

The End, Thanks To Tom Santa Monica

 Uncle Bill 
Located in San Pedro 548-6000
Uncle Bill was born after "The Machine"went away. Two of the 3 main people that ran The Machine are friends of Uncle Bill. The actual answering machine that was first used for Uncle Bill was the old one Tom had built for"The Machine". It worked fine, just kept killing 8 track tape players. At its peek Uncle Bill received about 1200 calls a day. The master tapes still exist on reel-to-reel as well as copied onto cassette.

Here is one recording:
     

Vermont
Located in Culver City 837-6668
Maybe the oldest of all the joke lines.
Not very many recordings made. It was off the hook most of the time. They ran the same type of recordings as "Zzzzzz". Heard that they where neighbors with the people that ran "Zzzzzz", in the same apartment complex in Palms.

The Wrong Number
Run by Rich Hurley & Jim Parkyn
Voices: Rick Hurley, Jim Parkyn, David Wolf & Dean Mertz
Several Numbers in 714 & 213
Ran during late 70's.  The Wrong Number was started long before Zygot but well after "Z".
It sounded like a mixture of recordings that where a cross between Zygot and recordings from Zzzzzz. There where several numbers located around the 714 & 213 areacode.

There used to be an answering machine that was dubbed "The Ear". It was run by a group called SERTOMA,"Service To Mankind". It actually attempted to administer a hearing test over the phone lines!!! It appeared to meet the old PacBell rules about non-danger to phone lines by being battery powered (no AC power connections). There would be contests to see how many calls it would take to bring the Ear down. One day Rich, who had quite a nice home-built recording studio, taped the Ear and then re-dubbed it with sound effects, music, and comments. Jim said that we should have our own Ear, or "The Other Ear" and built a VERY crude answering machine using a cassette player.

The original Ear's number was 714-532-5252 so I obtained 714-535-5252 in an Anaheim step office. Rich modified his dubbed Ear tape to say something like

"If you were trying to reach SERTOMA, you've gotten

'THE WRONG NUMBER'

Hence, the name stuck and even 411 Operators knew to refer people to 535-5252!

One of the best PR occurrences was when either Jobs or Wozniak admitted on a TV talk show that he used to phone phreak and would call the Wrong Number.....

The machines went through a number of 'morphings but the final "Mass Production" version was as follows;

• AC powered 8-track drive with integral cooling fan for constant speed and longevity.
• Built-in EQ circuit to match the typical phone line audio response.
• A "power" amp audio driver and matching transformer to deliver the EQ's output.
• Line-reversal detect to reset upon early hang-ups rather than wait for the end of a selection.
• Two-tone cueing was used to make the pick-up and hang-up timing match the recorded materials timing.
• A little bit of logic and timing to make the pick-up occur after ring voltage had occurred. Less of a voltage hit on the audio output circuits.

8_Track_Tapes	Change_Shifts	Childrens Levity Fund
Scrooge	Wisdom

Master Tapes
Thanks to Rich Hurley & Jim Parkyn

Zygot
Run by Joe "Zygot"
with the help of many
Numbers in 714, 213, 415, 602 & 215
Started in 1978 and is still going today
It started in Orange County by "The Link's" Joe Zygot. Later spreading throuout Los Angeles. So many that there where three communities that where not local to one. Zygot had spread to Philadelphia, Phoenix, & the San Francisco area.

Check Out The Newsletters

Zzzzzz
Run by Bob Bilkiss
Located in Culver City 837-5566, 836-5556, 836-5566
It began in February 1970
Originally 837-5566 on a Step-By-Step exchange. When the call volume rose to about 800 calls a day the phone folks moved it to a crossbar line which could better handle large call volumes, and that is when the 836-5566 number came in.
"The Last Listing In The Los Angeles Telephone Directory"One of The Oldest Of The Phone Recording lines first running on a Code-A-Phone 700. It first started out at his parents house and then it moved into his apartment in a very large apartment complex in Palms. Started I guess on or just before 1968. One of the original "Z" 8-track machines is still sitting in a garage in a box collecting dust. All of the master tapes still exist. They are on tapes with final recordings and are mixed up with original takes. If there are any old-timers that remember a recording that went"This moment of softness, has been brought to you by Z. ZZ. ZZZ."outro, which had some "Music Box" type music behind it. Anyone know what that music was from?

Here's a clue--it was the intro music (which then continued in the background after the main melody of the piece started) arranged in a particular manner for a specific rendition of a very well known song. As such, it was not the*melody*line of the song itself. It can be heard Muzak music systems and such occasionally. It is a song the melody of which, and the words to which, most adults in the U.S. would know.

Recordings

Evan Doorbell Tapes
1971 - 1974 Part 1

Evan Doorbell Tapes
1971 - 1974 Part 2

Evan Doorbell Tapes
1974 - 1976

Recorded by The Machine

Recording #1

"Z" Playing "Dial-A-Joke" Recordings

RonaldGibson HOTMAIL.com

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