Customer Reviews

Real Leroy Mercer: The Original Recordings of John

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In these days of shameless hype, staged "reality" shows and cultural devolution, it is good to remember that there once lived a man named John Bean. He had a telephone, a tape recorder, an assumed name and one of the most inventive, if vicious, imaginations ever bestowed by God upon man.

Forget Roy D. Mercer, the Jerky Boys, Telephone Terrorists and all those other contrived, phony pretenders to the throne. John Bean was a genius; according to friends and family, he regarded the prank call as not some sort of cheap thrill or stunt but rather an art form. It shows: His calls to a shoestore, to auto parts purveyors such as "Eddie's Auto" and other retailers are pure brilliance. His format was usually rather predictable -- cheated customer seeks refund or replacement or some kind of satisfaction. In "Plots," though, he sheds crocodile tears as he responds to a sales call from a seller of cemetery plots, and in "Pigs," he strings along the seller of some choice porcine specimens with ridiculous but heartfelt-sounding one-liners.

I've played this for people who don't even LIKE this kind of humor, and inevitably it reduces them to eruptions of laughter, choking and even tears. John Bean is dead now, but his art (and I mean that seriously) lives on.