Oh, I don't know, Bucky Beaver, is Mrs. Beaver there? Oh, is it? Mrs.
Cousin Beaver. Hello? What number were you calling? I was calling you his number.
No, you was. Yes, I was. H.Bucky Beaver. Or is you Mrs.
Beaver? Usus Mrs. Beaver? How are you?
Me? I was a Cousin Beaver. You don't think he's from here now, smart? I ain't?
Am I done? Yeah, you're going to be a little bit dumber too, and please get them. How is the police going to get me? Welcome to Rotten Pressions, number 41.
Lou makes an exciting discovery. But cassette tape insanity number one, sent to him by his friend Marc Harris in 1982. Can set letters, mix tapes? Mom, can I call Lou tonight?
No, that's my carry on. Is he going to? Yeah. Well, how come I can't call after he's finished?
I just have to. You, which is Bill? I do not want to. I do not want to be getting on this call.
Can he rarely have Mrs. Perry White? That's why I gave him a subscription to this. Well, Massachusetts isn't that far from here though, I mean.
That's why he doesn't call. Yeah, but my point is that it doesn't cost nearly as much as I did in Michigan. Cause probably half as much or something like that. One more than this is going that is not.
Can he ask first? Oh my gosh, well, I, so Merck must have had that on the kitchen table, like recording. Did his mom know this? No.
He also picks a fight with her in the same cassette. And afterwards, he says, I picked that fight just so he had something interesting to listen to. Oh my gosh. And it's wildly obnoxious.
Wow. Mark Harris was, was Lou's childhood best friend. Yeah, we met in fourth grade. In Michigan.
Jackson, Michigan. I can really hear his accent in there. And I can also hear adult Mark as a child in there. It's weird.
Yeah. It's like, oh, of course that's Mark. Of course I recognize Mark's voice. Yeah.
But he's young. How old is he there? Well, it would have been 1982. God.
It was just, I think. He was like 14, 15. I have to say, I feel like those are snippets of history that you are so lucky to have. Yeah.
I mean, that's incredible. I never thought about making tapes to send to friends or anything like that as a form of communication. I really find it endlessly fascinating that you and Mark did this. Your family did things like this.
Yeah, I hit set. Mark and I had moved to part in 1978. And I went to Massachusetts. He stayed in Michigan.
He ended up moving to Syracuse, New York. And it actually occurs during the course of this cassette. And I was like, I'm in Michigan. The next half is him in Syracuse.
But when I started to discover like punk rock, I would make mixtapes for him. And not by playing records or recording. I would actually just put the portable cassette recorder right in between the speakers and play. I was really excited by the dead Kennedys and the circle jerks and black flag by this hardcore punk rock that I was discovering.
So I would make these tapes for him and then be a DJ in between and also talk about my life. And then also like make, you know, sort of secret recordings of my family. Oh my gosh. Just yelling at each other.
My dad. And I just made these little in between these in between the groups of songs. I would come on and then that evolved into me making my own songs in between there to make to see what he thought of them. My own like kind of goofy obnoxious because we had a very, very funny obnoxious way of speaking.
Like he's, he was a performer. Like he loved to sing. He loved to enunciate everything really clearly. And this started when we were kids.
And I was fascinated by the way that he ate. You can even hear it on the cassette there. He's just shoveling. I loved the way he would just put a piece of silverware and bite down on it.
And he would hold it just like he was gripping a club. Yes. You still have a lot of that. Mm hmm.
I mean, he made, and my attempts to entertain him were became the beginning of me really writing my own songs and becoming an editor in portable tape recorder. So it really became, and a lot of those things later on became the early, were on the early sebodot records. I wonder whatever happened to the tapes you sent Mark. They must be long gone.
I don't know. I wonder. I mean, I know that he saved them for quite a while. I don't know.
His life was kind of chaotic towards the end. So I don't know if that stuff would have followed him or he went. Were you and Mark the same age? Yeah.
So what grade were you and when you met him? Fourth. Fourth grade in Michigan. Why was it fourth grade?
Was he new to the school or like how did that happen? I don't remember. I know that I was bouncing between schools all the time. Okay.
You know, sort of it was the early seventies. So it was kind of there was a lot of busing integration issues. So I was changing a lot. So I ended up at Griswald Elementary in Jackson and we met in fourth grade.
Okay. But he kind of quieted. He just stepped in and was like, you're my friend. He took me in.
He saw you and he was like, you're mine. Yeah. He did. I remember he took me out to eat.
He was like, you're going out to eat? When you heard fourth grade? Yeah. I was like his eight and I went with his mom and went to this really cool place in Jackson that had like one of these places where they had pop, trawls of popcorn and old movies playing in the background.
It was like, which I never really got to go to. Oh, wow. So he took me into this and I was just enveloped by him immediately. Like every his mannerisms, his, and he was bigger than me too.
So he actually provided a lot of really like crucial bodyguard action on the early seventies play, you know, black top playground. He was, and he called me Louie who kicks with the side of his foot because we played kickball all the time. I would kick with the side of my foot because I kind of learned in my last school, we played this kind of real rough like playground version of soccer. Uh huh.
It's gonna say it sounds like soccer. Yeah. So when I, when I, in the next school, they didn't play soccer and it was just black top. We just didn't, there was no grass that we played on.
There was actually a very small bit of grass. But anyway, that's for little kids. We all played on the black top and uh. Same in my elementary school.
Yeah. So, and Mark was a really good asset for me. He was a really good someone that could protect me because he was so, uh, he was just so outspoken. He was very gregarious.
Gregarious. Yeah. Yeah. Extremely, uh, outwardly confident.
Maybe, you know, right. Absolutely. Definitely outwardly confident and uh, social. He was very social.
Did he, did he have other friends or? It was kind of just he and I in the school. I, you know, I think that you and I have a similar thing. When we were young, we were both attracted to other people like strong personalities, not necessarily like always for our benefit sometimes, yes.
But like, just for whatever reason, we would almost try to like mesh into someone else's like habits or mannerisms or wave speaking or, you know, personality. I did the same thing. I was very attracted to people who maybe weren't even necessarily the most popular people in school. They were usually odd actually, but in kind of extreme and, and Mark was.
Yeah. Let me play a couple more of these. Yeah. Let's hear some more tapes.
Oh, yes. The very first thing you heard was a prank phone call that marked it. Hello, my friend. Did you know that a shit in time saves a hundred thousand?
Really? Yeah. Well, but this is like your friendly friend from out west. Well, what?
Yeah. I just told you. My friend, Lee. Really?
Yeah. What's your name? My name? Yeah.
The friendly friend from outer space. You're the fuck not, the Bells, your name gone over here buddy. Was it? It's a thing.
They what? Two days. Two days. Three days.
What the fuck in here is Mrs. Deaver there? It's gone. Where'd she go?
She go to collect Max? Did she? Well, where would she be back? Where'd she be back before the winner?
I don't know. Why not? Well, I was wondering what her to do. Oh.
Well, how'd you've been doing lately, Mr. Meaver? I'm pretty good. I've been collecting that for the winter lately.
Right, right. Yes. Well, fantastic. And how is Paul the little gators?
Paul, there's still people. No? Well, she is. Thank you very much for that, for your time.
Oh, you're welcome. Goodbye. Goodbye. I like that one because it resolves really nicely, which kind of a show is it marked it have, he had a side where he was just like straight up obnoxious, like, bam, just pushing those buttons until something broke, you know.
And then he had this other side where he seemed to really enjoy talking to people and enjoyed moments, you know, where he really enjoyed people's personalities. And it kind of comes out on this tape because there's a whole series of these calls. Is that Kenny in the background? His brother Kenny giggling in the background?
It's not Kenny. It's actually, I think, a neighbor of his. I can't remember his name. He sort of puts the neighbor up to a bunch of these phone calls too, most of which seem to involve making him call girls that he likes.
Oh. I want to play on the plane. Okay. The neighbor?
Yeah. Okay. Is the owner there? All right.
Tell her Bucky Beaver call. No. Oh my gosh. That's gonna be funny.
No. No. Crushes. Oh my gosh.
I have to have like the dad or something intercepting like, okay, son, we want to actually leave your real name. No. Oh my gosh. The innocence to that.
It's such a time capsule. It really captures somebody like Mark putting him up to that too because Mark was so, I mean, he was a potster. Oh my God. Oh my God.
Until the last time I hung out with him. All the way to the end. All the way to the end. This is true.
This is true. Oh my gosh. I mean, it's funny. There's nothing like this.
It doesn't even exist now. I mean, we had phones. They had to pick up. There were neighborhood phone books that were in every person's house.
You could just flip through it and look to see where someone lived. It was very unusual for someone to be unlisted. Yeah. Everybody was in the phone book.
He would use the numbers against the people too in the phone calls. I should play another one. This is pretty funny. What number was you calling?
7802090. What's that? This number is what we don't have. Anybody but the name of Jimmy.
But Jimmy gave me a summary of calls. Oh wait, just a minute. Hello. Jimmy there.
I think you got through on the other side. Wait. Jimmy gave me the summary of calls. Hello.
Is Jimmy there? No. Are you the one that called last night? I checked with Jimmy.
Earlier today he gave me the summary again. Honey, it isn't. His number, he's telling you wrong. You said 7802090.
There's nobody and never has been but the name of Jimmy. So he's fooling you. What Jimmy gave me was the right name of me. Well, he did because I was a dear.
I was a dear. I was a dear. I was a dear. I was a dear.
I was a dear. I was a dear a long time and no one but the name of Jimmy has ever been here. You showed Jimmy that that you just saw me. Well, he gave you the wrong number.
Bye. Oh my gosh. That conversation sounds practically ancient. Do you know what I mean?
What the heck who speaks like that? It's like listening to Little House and the Prairie. Like you fooling me. Jimmy never lived here.
There's a great caller, Mark's brother, who was also a genius and also a performer. They call someone and his brother pretends to be someone who gets known by a bee and does it affect this whole fake southern accent? Oh, it's really long. So I'm not gonna put it here, but I will put it on our sub stack.
That's a great idea. Yeah, you all can check it out. I'm gonna put all these up so people can check them out. I love family general sub-set.
Oh my gosh. The other thing that I loved about Mark or what attracted me was that I would go to his house after school. And he had like unlimited snacks. Unfucking limited.
The best of which were carnation breakfast bars, which tasted so good. And we would watch cartoons and he would memorize all the bugs, money, cartoons, and can launch into these very specific, really amazing imitations of them. And a lot of what we watched on TV, he would imitate it. And I make my commercial recreations.
It is directly from Mark. And thankfully he put one of his own on this tape. I'm gonna play it really quick. Down sport.
Oh, mother. Later. It's almost meal time. You wanna be soft.
You gotta be firm. It's a right time for sex. And I say, when? And then it's hostess.
Hostess is good and fresh. The kind of snacks that I want my family to eat. I'm a tough mother. And tough mothers have gotta do the right thing.
So from now on, you'd be a tough mother too. Be a real trooper and buy hostess snacking cakes. No, I had fallen. Mark and I weren't communicating towards the end.
He passed away, I think maybe a month or two ago. And the last conversation we had was very intense. I mean, we didn't fight or anything. It was during the pandemic.
He was stirring the pot. And I just couldn't match that energy. Because a lot of it was like you would attempt to match his energy. Which meant either just listening to him or becoming wrapped up in his dialogue.
Whatever he chose to spin about. He became very apocalyptic at the end. Not surprisingly. We all worked.
But that was one reason that I couldn't really call him. And also I never had to call Mark. He always called me. And I would wait for that call.
And then, you know, in the last ten years or so, those calls became so time consuming. That I couldn't really, it was... But when we started doing the podcast and I started doing the commercial recreations, I wanted to reach out. I wanted him to hear it.
Because almost it was like something that I wanted to gift him. Much like the tapes that we would make. He made me this one in Sanity One. And it was amazing that he responded and kind to me.
Because I put on his tapes, I did put Frank phone calls. And my own calls were much more innocuous. And that really is inventive. But I was active.
I made these crazy songs for him. And then he responded with this cassette. And which did capture him. But I wanted to, when I started to do the recreations.
Especially maybe alive, I was like, oh my God, I want him to hear this. So badly because he did such an amazing baby alive commercial. And I texted him. And I texted him, hey Mark, are you still alive?
And he didn't respond. Unsurprisingly, he wasn't really a texter. He was a talker. You couldn't really hold you down with text.
He had to be enveloped by it. Truly, truly a text was not enough for Mark. I'm sure you all heard the expression before Time Bandit. And Mark really was captain.
He was like, time bandit on the level of Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean. He was kind of a time man where you just, it wasn't necessarily a negative thing. And certainly not for me because he was such a part of my personality and my, but he had such a huge influence on me. But anyway, he didn't.
I felt like it got kind of difficult at the end there when he was on drugs. And his time banditness then took on a very dark. Oh, dark. It was very dark.
So dark. I mean, he introduced me to recreational drugs. In my late teens, actually when I was 19 or 20, he became involved, of course, much earlier in his teens. He had a very, his father was, I never got to meet his father.
But he, from what I understand, he was like this very large man who lived on almost like a compound in rural Missouri. And Mark would go there and his dad would feed him LSD and weed and alcohol. And Mark would come back just with his mind blown and also with this desire to share these things. So he came to my house after I graduated from high school.
And that's when my, that's when I, that's when I used, but I really, when I began drinking and smoking weed and trying hallucinogens, it sort of spread out into the early 80s from early 90s from there. Yeah, Mark, those, those experiments for him became his lifestyle. You know, and he could not run it. And, you know, and he had such a huge appetite.
This was another thing that I was so fascinated about him. He just inhaled the world. Right. And, and stories and experiences and drama and, you know, I mean, he would get caught up on things and my God, the way he would spin.
It was truly, it was an experience for sure. I mean, I only knew Mark, and in the years where he was really pretty deeply addicted to drugs. Yeah. You, you sussed it out immediately.
I think one thing I share with a lot of his friends was we are very, I would say malleable. And from early, when I met him, I believed everything he said. I had, I had our teacher, our fourth grade teacher, took me aside, or my, our fifth grade teacher. We managed to be in the same class in fifth grade, which was amazing.
It was one of the best, best years of my life. And she took me aside and said, you know, Louie, everything Mark says isn't true. Because he was telling me that he, he would vacation in Switzerland and sled down the Alps and that he was fand, that he had fantastic wealth in his family. And that he was like, had an IQ, an unbelievably high IQ.
And he was just, and I believed everything. Everything he said. And I would go to his house after school, like I said, and just go to John Snacks television. He had a CB radio.
He had a shortwave radio. He had Pong, you know, the electric video game before anyone else did. So it was just this, all I had to do was endure his abuse. But he would also quiz me on world capitals.
Like, so I knew every, every state capital, every world capital. Like we were just, so there was this side to it that was, and then, you know, when we would say over at each other's places on weekends, we would listen to American Top 40 from 40 to one. And just, just, we were obsessed with property. Gosh.
That's, so that's largely when I was making mixtapes for him. I was like, you've got to hear this. And I was finding, I was finding these really obscure records. I mean, no, in terms of pretty obscure records.
But he actually incorporated, this is a last bit for this episode. I want to play this little, these two little calls that he made that incorporate a song called Tumor Boy by a band called Mentally Ill, the Mentally Ill from Chicago. I have this, I have this seven inch. I was like, this is, it's the, it's such a crazy seven inch.
Such a, and I was like, Mark's gonna love this. And he, he did. Well, but friendliness is next to Godliness. I always say.
No, I don't care. Right, you a friendly friend? No, you're not. You're not, you're not, you're not.
Oh my. Well then, two, bye-bye. That's a dark mark. Thank you for listening to Ron Impression's number 41.
No. Between you and me, four track man, and Adele. Lou is not done talking about Mark yet. And there's still more to play from him.
In sanity number one. Should be cassette from his charismatic friend. Mark a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck a fuck he said before. See to the dick.
Whoa!