Call Me Up in Dreamland

I was pretty young and impressionable and an innocent rube the first time I encountered a tune that employed a telephone number in the lyric. It might even have seemed slightly quirky at the time, but the tune was definitely catchy, and when you are eight years old or so oddity is not exactly an unusual experience. The world of grownups can be a pretty strange and sometimes even inexplicable place. And the exceptional child who notices things like that - never mind vocalizing questions - often acquires an early not-necessarily-positive stigma.

That was more than a few years ago. That rare lyric occurrence definitely catches my attention now. It may be one of the more infrequent events in popular music, the use of a specific sequence of numbers, often as part of the rhyme scheme. It fascinates me to contemplate what the tunesmith could have been thinking in electing such an unusual tagging of the lyric. For example, my original encounter involved an alphabetical prefix followed by four digits. Do you suppose the composer even considered that it would not be long before it would take more than six digits to accommodate the appetite for phone lines? I still remember our number from that late-'50's period (maybe even more important to an adolescent than memorizing the year!): GLadstone 3231.

A fascinating bit of culture, in any case. I wonder if it is a case of "only in America"? Are phone numbers commonplace in pop lyrics in other countries?

How often do you suppose folks with one of the contemporary-style numbers get calls from music-lovers?

Here are some music-lyric phone numbers I have recorded, more or less in historical order as far as I can tell. If you have others I'd be delighted to hear of them via "comments" at bottom of post. Likewise, if you can identify sources of these besides the first (a gimmee, since I believe the number was used as tune title), please brag on yourself - I'd enjoy hearing about it.

BEechwood 4578
PLaza 04433
637-1188
924-8838