Whenever a phone number that appears in a song, movie or TV show, curiosity compels people to call it. For example, at one point in Michael Moore’s 1992 documentary “Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint,” he gives someone his phone number. The day after it was broadcast on PBS, he got 314 calls.
In movies, a phone number is said just once, but in popular music it’s usually a repeated part of the chorus, so it’s easier to remember. Sometimes the numbers are fictitious, like the Marvelettes’ “Beechwood 4-5789,” chosen only for its ascending number pattern (on rotary and touch-tone phones, the BE translates to 23). Of course people tried dialing it anyway.
In other cases it’s a working number. Glenn Miller, whose “Pennsylvania 6-500” might have been the first phone number title, quoted the actual number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Morris Day and the Time’s “777-9311” – Prince wrote it an played all the instruments – was the phone number of his guitar player in the Revolution, Dez Dickerson, who quickly changed it after the song appeared.
The champion among phone number songs has to be the lone hit by New Wave band Tommy Tutone, because 45 years after the release of “867-5309,” people are still getting calls asking for Jenny. It helped that the tune reached No. 4 on the Hot 100 and the video was in heavy rotation during the early days of MTV. Thereafter anybody who’s had the number, regardless of area code, has been inundated with prank calls. Most people had it changed, but businesses are so eager to get hold of such an easily remembered number that it’s been bought and sold.
Earlier this year somebody at the Cancer Support Community asked for it, and it’s now a cancer helpline. Call (272) 867-5309 and someone answers at Gilda’s Club, an organization named for Gilda Radner that provides free cancer support to patients and their families (the 272 area code is the phonepad equivalent of CSC). Tommy Tutone’s frontman, Tommy Heath, gave them his approval.
When the song came out Heath spun a yarn about a real girl the song was supposedly based on, and lead guitarist Jim Keller, who co-wrote the song, told a similar tale about a different girl. Co-writer Alex Call of the band Clover (Elvis Costello’s backing band on “My Aim Is True”), later revealed to Songfacts that those stories were the record company’s idea.
Despite all the mythology to the contrary, I actually just came up with the ‘Jenny,’ and the telephone number and the music and all that just sitting in my backyard. There was no Jenny. I don’t know where the number came from, I was just trying to write a 4-chord Rock song and it just kind of came out. … I had the guitar lick, I had the name and number, but I didn’t know what the song was about. [Keller] stopped by that afternoon and he said, ‘Al, it’s a girl’s number on a bathroom wall,’ and we had a good laugh. I said, “That’s exactly right, that’s exactly what it is.” … We wrote the verses in 15 or 20 minutes, they were just obvious.
A couple of years ago country singer Jenny Pruitt wrote an answer song.
