Brad's Cactus Shack

This is a story about phone phreaking in the early 1970’s, and it’s taken from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. It tells the stories of a few phone phreaks of the era, including Joe Engressia (Joybubbles), Captain Crunch, Mark Bernay, and lots of other interesting weirdos. I broke up some of the chapters of this story with phone related music. Please let me know if those are too distracting or jarring and I will consider removing them. Also, if I made any mistakes, please point them out and maybe I’ll fix them while I still can.

00:00:00 Gotta Get to the Phone by Al Philipp and The Woo Team

00:00:22 A Quick Intro

00:01:47 The Story Begins

00:24:45 The song is Bell Odyssey by Rob T Firefly

00:38:20 The song is I Phreak Alone by Bonecage

00:52:25 MF Boogie 1 by Joe Engressia, performed via the telephone

01:02:09 Boxing by Redbox and the Chilipeppers

01:17:47 This pretend radio bit is by Joe Engressia from the end of his song MF Boogie 2

01:28:03 More Bell Odyssey by Rob T Firefly

01:29:55 Background music is Deeploop by MicroKORGI

01:38:38 The Phone Trips Song by Evan Doorbell

Below are some related links.

Here is the issue of Esquire from their official site, which wants you to register with them

Here is the issue of Esquire that I read from where you don’t have to register to read

Evan Doorbell’s Phone Trips site

Learn more about Joe Engressia on his wikipedia entry

Listen to Stories and Stuff by Joybubbles (Joe Engressia)

Call the PLA phone line and listen to Stories and Stuff via your phone at 206-424-8422

Learn about Captain Crunch (John Draper) on his website or on his wikipedia entry.

Live out your blue boxing fantasies by calling Project MF’s blue boxable telephone line at 630-485-2995

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On this week’s Brad’s Cactus Shack, we’re going to phone phreak like it’s 1995 so that we can illegally dial in to some sexy 1-900 numbers for actual real-life psychics and phone sex workers. Get ready to have your minds blown by the uncanny accuracy of psychics who use mind rays to lock in on your brain frequencies over the phone so that they can give you winning lotto numbers.

What this show is really about, though, is the two completely different methods we used to call into 1-900 numbers for free back in 2009, both which involved opening up phone boxes that us regular citizens aren’t supposed to be opening up. Special thanks to positiveandmultiple on Reddit, who first suggested that I talk about some old phreaking adventures on my show. Sorry it took me 3 years to get around to it, positiveandmultiple!

Big thanks to MC Lars for the opening song about me. MC Lars is a rapper, just like a lot of other people are, and he does live shows that you should go to and heckle him from the crowd, asking him to do the Brad Carter song. And another big thanks to Andy Anderson who recorded the sexy jobs commercial for me at the very end of the show. Andy Anderson is a professional DJ at prankcast.com, and a part-time retired sheriff for the city of Phoenix. Listen to his shows, but also say hi to him when you spot him in Phoenix hauling the bad guys away. Finally, thanks to Posy, who not only makes all of the background music you hear in this episode, but he also does the coolest YouTube videos about light and other technologies.

I tend to just assume that people know what I’m talking about when I do a show like this and I casually mention things like beige boxing as if that’s something everyone knows about in 2025. But they do not. “Beige boxing” is an old form of phreaking where you bring your own phone to a telephone box on the outside of a home or building, or one of those giant green boxes on the side of the road, and hook your phone to the wires inside so you can make free calls from phone lines that don’t belong to you. There, now you know and it will be less confusing to listen to this episode. As I was editing, I dropped in new bits of audio to clear up other things I didn’t explain well enough. Hopefully it helps.

I think when I talked about how call forwarding works with the 72# code, I was remembering how remote call forwarding used to work, where you would access the service remotely to forward your calls. By just dialing 72# from your home, you would hear the stuttering dial tone, then dial the number you wanted to forward, and then the dialed number would ring so you can let whoever it is know that you’ve just forwarded your calls to them. There was no confirmation message for that, so I apologize to Jennifer Martino who runs thisisarecording.com for yelling at you for not having those recordings. Jennifer is the girl you hear mid-show saying the funniest lines ever to a psychic as we constantly sabotage her psychic reading call. I miss you Jennifer, please come back and I’ll never pimp slap you again.

Here’s a link to my 2010 blog post about Kevin from 7-Eleven. I kept this post set to “private” for many years because I didn’t want Kevin stumbling across it and losing his mind when he confirmed that it was me. I wonder if that ever crossed his mind when his fax line failed so badly that he had to call the phone company and the cops to figure out what the problem was. And I wonder if when the home office tried to fax things to Kevin’s store, did they get charged for the calls to 1-900 psychics? Or did he completely forget about me like I did about him until I saw his full name on Jessica’s Facebook page.

I’m surprised the police in that town didn’t automatically suspect me of doing that. Back in 1996, that police department arrested me for making thousands of dollars in illegal phone calls that apparently was the weirdest thing they’d ever had to deal with. They actually thought I was tapping into the phone box of a local power company to make these free calls and staked out the telco box waiting for me to show up and plug my phone into it, but I was doing it all remotely from my house which I had to explain to them after they arrested me.

The video that I refer to use making of horrible things to do to 7-Eleven employees kept getting taken down from my YouTube accounts, so I finally gave up trying to keep it up anywhere. You can still watch it, though, by downloading the 2025 Phone Losers of America Media Pack, and then looking for the video file named Causing Problems at 7-eleven.mp4. I don’t blame people for reporting it, since one of the things we do on the video is take a box of condoms off a shelf, poke a hole through the entire box with a safety pin, and then put them back on the shelf. Hilarious, right? Don’t worry, after turning the camera off I crushed the box of condoms in my hand and tossed it into their trash can. So none of you can blame your unwanted 2000-era pregnancies on me.

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A long time ago I spent about a year harassing a radio DJ named MJ from the MJ Morning Show just to try and stir up drama on his show. I guess MJ still remembers this event too because he spent around 15 minutes talking about it on his show recently. In this episode of Brad’s Cactus Shack I will spaz out over every little thing MJ says about me in this completely slanderous video he posted.

• Thank you Gus Gallucci for posting the video on MJ on our Reddit
• Here’s the video that I’m playing
• Here’s PLA Radio episode 14 – Wacky Morning DJ
• Read the chapter of the Phone Losers of America book that made MJ so happy
• After you read the book for free, you’ll probably want to buy a physical copy of it
• Listen to the MJ Morning Show

After recording all of this, I told a friend about it and he watched the video. He’s the one who got most of the backstory back in my MJ harassing days. He said even before I asked, when he heard MJ talk about my “it’s coming to your door” threat, he didn’t think that was something I would say even back then.

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In yet another episode of Brad Plays With Old Crap, I decide to see what messages are on an old answering machine that Devon gave to me. This is guaranteed to be at least as interesting as when I played my Dad’s old echoplex tape. Not only will you hear old messages, but I manage to contact one of the message leavers from 1989.

I didn’t look too hard for the manual for this machine, so I’m not sure what year it was manufactured. I’d guess the mid-to-late 1980’s. You can attempt to hack into this machine remotely by calling 505-608-6123 or 845-470-0336 and picking answering machine #4 in the answering machine menu.

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After spending the past couple of months ripping old 1990’s underground indie punk rock prank call cassette tapes into the computer to add to the biggest archive on the internet and finally finishing with that project, I decided to rip some old cassette tapes I found in my parent’s attic last year to see exactly what’s on them. Between church sermons and band concerts, I found some old “comedy” skits I did, most likely in the very early 1980’s and that’s what you’re about to hear.

This 90 minute Kmart cassette tape is labeled “FIRST BAND CONCERT” in my grade school era handwriting so I was expecting to hear terrible band music by 5th grade me. And there’s a little of that. But it appears that I purposely recorded over the band music to make classic comedy bits, which seems obvious when I take a break for music and you hear a few seconds of the band music that I recorded over. This tape is presented pretty much exactly as I found it, though I did move the Chariots Of Fire song to the beginning for an opening song, and I chopped off most of the music from the second half of the tape.

In this Brad’s Cactus Shack you’re going to hear about the invention of television, the history of radios, the invention of the dollar bill, the history of computers and exactly how they work, commercials, announcements, skits, a celebrity, and more. Right after the “I Love You” song, I will have a co-host named John and occasionally his sister Renae. John will be playing the part of Nothing Momigan and Renae will be starring as Miss Piggy. Sorry, that’s not the real Miss Piggy. The Old Timey tape recorder bit is by John and then it’s back to me with the calculator advertisement. I think I heard a bit of our friend Eric in there too. At the time I thought Microwave Milkshakes were my own stupid invention, but years later they became a real, actual product. I thought of it first, though.

This is the only photo I can find of me and John, which I stole from Renae’s Facebook. Sorry, Renae.

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In the mid-to-late 1980’s I wrote a program for my TRS-80 Color Computer 2 that allowed me to easily talk to people on the phone using the computer’s speech cartridge. The program consisted of a screen full of commonly used phrases like “How Are You” and “I am doing okay” and “Malfunction, Need Input.” I used the computer to call pay phones and talk to strangers, and to order pizzas from Dominos. Episode 11 of Brad’s Cactus Shack went into more detail about this same thing, but in that episode I didn’t have any actual audio of me talking to people with the computer. In this episode I’ve found a couple of short audio files of me actually talking to people with my computer.

Enjoy this 30 minutes of terrible quality phone recordings where I talk to a girl from my school while she does her homework and I call kids who are hanging around the pay phones at Alton Square Mall. About 11 minutes in I couldn’t understand who she was asking if I knew. During my editing I heard the name clearly. She wanted to know if I knew Sammy Hagar from Van Halen. You probably already know this. I also play a few of my old answering machine messages from 1989 or 1990. The opening song is Welcome To My World by Nerf Herder. The background music is Danger Storm by Kevin MacLeod. The ending song is The Sun Shines Down On Me by Daniel Johnston.

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Here’s another episode where I activate old man story mode and tell you a thing or two about how the 1980’s were. Part One involves a machine called an Echoplex, which I used for all kinds of fun and shenanigans as a kid. The Echoplex segment isn’t quite as exciting as I’d hoped it would be, but it’s still fun to play around with an old machine and listen to the things it can do.

Above is the Echoplex hooked up to the Gibson amplifier, but not working because of a burnt out tube in the amp. Below is the setup I was using to record the Summer of ’85 portion.

Part Two is all about my neighbor Sara, who used to embark on all kinds of evil missions with me in the evenings. The missions included, but weren’t limited to, toilet papering trees, stealing porch light bulbs (or just loosening them to make them appear burnt out), peering in windows, setting things on fire, knocking and running, and avoiding police cars at all costs even if we hadn’t done anything wrong, which usually meant being chased by them because they thought we were up to no good. We’d rearrange people’s lawn furniture, we’d hang strings across the roads to confuse motorists, once on trash night we stole everybody’s trash and put it in one person’s back yard. In the trash area, not the yard. But it was about 5 blocks worth of trash in one single yard. I bet the trash men were a little confused about that one.

We started a club at some point, called the BASLC. The Brad and Sara Lab Club. Because my garage was the lab. We had monthly dues, but I don’t think we ever actually spent the money on anything. In fact, I never got my share of the money back after we went our separate ways. I was ripped off! We were hoping to save up for a set of intercoms to put in our rooms so we could talk to each other. Our windows faced each other, but were on different floors. So we had to contact each other by shining flashlights, throwing rocks, or doing half-rings on the telephone which annoyed our parents. I don’t think our “club” ever actually did anything besides collect dues and write songs.

She played guitar, and we recorded quite a few tapes of us singing and talking together. I think she ended up with most of those, because I only have one of them now. We wrote a few songs together, mostly weird parodies. I think I still have lyric sheets to them somewhere around here. I know we did a lot of hits of the time too, but the only one I can remember is Islands in the Stream. We were into the duets.

I spent weeks during the days drawing a colored, detailed, scale (more or less) map of our block to help us on our missions. This map was on a small piece of posterboard and included every rock, tree stump, garden, car, clothesline, etc. in everyone’s yard. I suppose the map didn’t really help, it was more just to make it all more fun for us. I even bought those pin flags, to mark important things on the maps.

My garage was command central, we carried walkie-talkies, we had code names, we had our own secret handwriting that we could read and write fluently. I still can, in fact. Anyway, we did these things for a couple of years. She finally grew up and became interested in a boyfriend so we stopped hanging out so much and I found new friends. We hung out a few times during jr. high and high school, but we’d outgrown our nightly missions by that point.

That’s a picture of us, in the attic, probably taken a year or two after 1985. Thanks, Mr. Biggs, for creating the guitar loop for me since I never got around to it. The ending song is The Moon Is High (And So Am I) by Roger Miller.

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These BCS episodes have reached the level of boring to where I’m going through PAPERWORK for 90 minutes. In this one I peruse the notes written about me by counselors in my drug abuse classes. Apparently I stare at the floor a lot.

For more information about my six month stint in the drug and alcohol classes, listen to episode 10B of Brad’s Cactus Shack, and watch episode 10 of the PLA Show.

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