Continued from…

DUPED

Knoxville pianist Marcus Shirley put the tapes together a few years after John died.

"I never had any idea it was going to be such a big thing," Shirley says. "I just thought they were hilarious and made them for those of us who'd known him. I never thought people would make copies down to the 20th generation."

Shirley says the tapes got "out" through country players like Merle Haggard and Roy Clark, who heard them at Dollywood, where John's friend Burton Akers plays in a house band. The tapes were then circulated and multiplied without any effort on the part of John's family and friends. "This all happened in spite of itself," Shirley says.

That's because the tapes strike a primordial funny bone. John was a prism through which others were able to see the world in a new way.

"He could see the humor in things that would just pass ordinary people by," Shirley says. "When you were around him, situations took on a new look. He had charisma. A certain kind of energy I've never known in anybody else, and even though his condition was slowly killing him, he didn't complain about it, hardly at all, ever. I still miss John."

Woody Hutson was the recipient of John's last fast one–the old dead-skunk-in-the-basement gambit, perpetrated just days before John turned up dead himself.

"He wasn't feeling good, and he had to crawl under the house to get it in there. He puked a couple of times in the process. That's dedication," Hutson says.

But he's tired of people telling him they wish they'd known John.

"I guess I'm a little defensive about it. This guy was absolutely, totally bizarre. Nuts. Most people wouldn't tolerate it. These were experiences we shared at the time and maybe I'd feel differently about it if he weren't dead. But now, since the world didn't know him, I'd like to just keep those experiences to myself."

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

It was another year or so after Steed found out who John was before he realized just how popular the tapes had become.

"I was working at Raven (Records) and a truck driver came in from Atlanta and said 'Hey, I'm looking for the redneck tapes. I heard a guy at a 7-11 in Knoxville had all of them.' He'd gone to every 7-l1 in Knoxville until someone told him where I was," Steed says. "He heard about the tapes through truck drivers. Everybody sends people that want the tapes to me."

He figures he's the Johnny Appleseed of the John Bean tapes, since he's dubbed hundreds of copies over the years, even sampling a signature' "hunh" for the Smokin' Dave and Premo Dopes CD Huh? Shirley says he's glad Steed has spread the tapes, but he hopes there aren't too many imitators out there.

"There's a big difference between John and some average dummy trying to pull a prank–John did it with such finesse… The important thing with him is, he wasn't doing it just to cause trouble. It was a much greater scheme, an art form to him.

"No one could ever even begin to do what he did. Somebody thinking it would be fun to call people like that, they'd just be fooling themselves. It's already been done."

FINALLY, A RELEASE

Among those who eventually heard about John Bean and the redneck tapes were two Chattanooga filmmakers, Dave Lang and Bobby Stone, who run a company called Atomic Film and Audio. One day Stone played the tape at the office, and Lang was instantly hooked. They did a little research and started looking in the Knoxville area for names like Leroy Mercer.

"The only person we could come up with was Eddie's Auto Parts. We called Eddie, and he gave me the name Betty Bean," Lang says.

I got together with them the next time they were in Knoxville on business, and Lang pitched the idea of doing a documentary film. This was not the first such offer I'd heard, and I was wary. John's tapes had been poorly imitated and just flat ripped off so many times over the years (Roy D. Mercer, The Jerky Boys, etc.) that I was not enthusiastic, and I wondered why these guys were interested.

Here's how Lang explains it:

"There are so many people who feel so passionately about these tapes–I'll bet that a lot of them sit around and do what we did–'Let's see if we can't figure out who this guy is…'

"There are so many rumors… And being filmmakers, we just thought this would be such a great documentary, and the more we found out about John, the more strange roads were veering off the main story… What I had envisioned in my mind was that I was going to find somebody who was ill, locked up in a room, had very little life outside these conversations… To my amazement, this was not the case at all."

Lang and Stone worked on the documentary for more than a year, finding time when they could before they became overwhelmed by the scope of the story. Eventually, we decided that the logical order of the John Bean Project would be to back burner the film in favor of first producing a CD. We searched out the best copies we could find, and, courtesy of John's friend Woody Hutson, even came up with some heretofore uncirculated material–a tape called "I Hate Atlanta" that contains an impromptu song recorded in real time while John was driving around lost and not entirely sober in the Big Peach. They had the tapes re-recorded and cleaned up, edited out some (but not all) of the most objectionable parts, and turned graphic designer Jimmy Hammond loose on the cover and liner art.

John would have liked the result.

"What I really, really hope is that everybody will realize who the genius behind this was," Lang says. "That this Roy D. Mercer [the most successful of the imitations of John's tapes now in commercial distribution] is nothing but a second-rate hack. Sure, we know that John Bean did not invent the prank phone call–but Picasso wasn't the first one to lay paint on a canvas, either. They stole a name John created, and I just want everybody down the road to realize who was really behind all this…"

Related Website:

asswhupper.com: The official site of the John Bean CD. It doesn't get updated much, but it does tell you how to get your own copy.

Page 1, 2

Back to Everyday People