Louis "Red" Deutsch
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Louis "Red" Deutsch (1895-1985) was a heavyweight boxer and later the owner of the "Tube Bar", a tavern in Jersey City, New Jersey that he started in 1933 after the repeal of Prohibition. The bar, named for its proximity to a subway station, became a popular watering hole, especially with Deutsch's fellow boxers. Heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano was known to drink there, and a photo of him and Deutsch at the bar is widely circulated among Deutsch's fans. Deutsch was drafted during World War I; he served two years and eight months in the service but was never sent overseas (probably because he was deaf in one ear). He became local color around New Jersey for his unorthodox methods of running his bar: there were no barstools, women were forbidden to enter, and anyone caught not drinking was subject to be beaten by Red and ejected by force. Red, at 6'2" and over 200 lbs., was still an imposing physical presence even in his 80s and was famous for his unusual voice, described by one person as a deep, guttural bark. He was also known for his charitable giving. Newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote about Red in a 1974 column, adding to Red’s already legendary status.
[edit] The phone calls
Deutsch is still known today for his profanity-filled tirades in response to a series of prank calls placed in the mid-1970s to his bar. The recordings of these calls were widely circulated in the 1980s and 1990s. The character of barkeeper Moe Szyslak on television's The Simpsons is said to be based on Deutsch.
The pranksters behind the phone calls, Jim Davidson and John Elmo, refer to themselves as "The Bum Bar Bastards". Although they initially said that they had picked the Tube Bar at random out of a phone book, they later admitted that they had passed by the bar several times while still in high school, and had proffered a long standing fascination with Red ever since they saw him beat a loitering drunk and literally hurl him through the front door of the bar by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt.
Some of the early phone calls involved getting Deutsch to unwittingly call out a name that was actually an embarrassing pun such as "Phil Lacio (fellatio)", "Pepé Roni (pepperoni)", or "Mike Hunt" (my cunt). Initially, Deutsch would gullibly fall for the gags, but after Deutsch began catching on to his tormentors he would invariably launch into a cursing tirade. The Bastards would also sometimes immediately insult Deutsch to further infuriate him. The Bastards later escalated their assault on Deutsch, repeatedly challenging him to a fistfight but never showing, and at one point calling him at home and telling him that the bar had caught fire.
Despite Deutsch's claim that he knew the identities of his tormentors, he would never learn their names. After several months of telephoning Deutsch, the pair moved on to other targets. Deutsch sold the bar in 1980, and retired to Pompano Beach, Florida, where he would die three years later at the age of 93. Unbeknownst to Elmo and Davidson, the tapes they had made of their calls to Deutsch were beginning to circulate among their friends, and their friends' friends, becoming an underground sensation.
Deutsch and his sensational prank calls are also credited with inspiring an entire generation of prank callers including The Jerky Boys and The Happy Telephone.
[edit] The "Red" Tapes
By the 1980s, the equipment managers of several Major League Baseball teams had shared copies of the tapes, which had become known unofficially as the Red Tapes or Tube Bar Tapes. The tapes popularity spread throughout the league, branching out to other professional sports leagues, and then to sports reporters and into the media. By 1981, one of the Bastards' gags ("Mike Hunt") was incorporated into the movie Porky's. Animator Matt Groening had obtained a copy and incorporated the phone hijinks into a running gag on The Simpsons. Several New York City alternative rock record labels released various edits of the tapes on vinyl, before the Bum Bar Bastards came forward in the 1990s to copyright the tapes. The Bastards later released their own "official" version on CD which is now available on iTunes.
