Lifted from bluesky
just remembered when jerry garcia died, some djs at whpk made a bunch of flyers and posted them around chicago saying "if you miss jerry call this number and leave a message about what he meant to you" but put steve albini's phone number on it. one of the all time great pranks.
Further details
So I went to school at the University of Chicago, starting in 1990. At the time, Chicago had a pretty standard (but great) radio station, WHPK 88.5 fm Pride of the South Side 50 booming watts and I eventually got a show there. Albini was a legendary figure in Chicago, 1/
and somehow a previous station manager had written his phone number on a poster or something, and it quickly became a kind of samizadat, because you could prank call and absolutely 100% get a callback reaction from an incandescently angry Albini. Look, we were assholes. 2/
Eventually we sort of stopped, but one day, August 9th, 1995, as it happens, I got a call from a friend who said, and this is clear as day to me, "hey, I need Albini's number and I can't tell you why, yet". So I gave him the number and forgot about it, more or less. 3/
You may remember that date as the day that Jerry Garcia died. The Dead were going to be in Chicago shortly afterwards for a run of shows, and there were thousands of Deadheads milling aimlessly around Grant Park. Garcia's death hit them hard, 4/
and someone came up with an idea to set up a phone line for them to call and leave their condolences for Jerry's family, and favourite memories of him, and the Dead. They then printed up a bunch of fliers and went down to Grant Park and handed them out. 5/
I think you can put the pieces together, here.
Supposedly, Albini had to call the phone company to get his line diverted or something, because the volume of incoming calls immediately made his phone unusable. 6/
Albini telling his version, at 15:20 in the 1997 documentary Out of the Loop: He calls it "the best prank that I've ever encountered" and offers "hat's off" to the prankster.
https://youtu.be/l9CWxt_dxA4?feature=shared
