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Public Eye James
Hebert Attention, those of you have been mistakenly calling the offices of the San Diego-based company Digitaria: Elvis has left the building. And he took his phone number with him. More than a decade ago, renegade local rocker Mojo Nixon recorded a song whose title was a phone number. The song had to do with the whereabouts of Elvis Presley. The idea was that Elvis himself – or anyone who had spotted the allegedly deceased King of Rock ‘n’ Roll – could dial the title, which connected to an actual phone line run by Nixon. The song, released on Nixon’s 1989 album, “Root Hog or Die” got plenty of airplay at the time. But its real legacy seems to be this: Eleven years later, people are still calling the Elvis hotline. Problem is, the phone number now belongs to Digitaria, a 4-year-old company that develops Web sites. (Public Eye has refrained from reprinting the song’s name to spare poor Digitaria from further call volume.) Paras Shah, a marketing specialist for the company says the Elvis-related calls come in “all the time. Almost every day.” When he answers the phone with, “Digitaria, can I help you?,” Shah can tell right away if the call is Elvis-related: “The people on the line are usually silent. As soon as I hear that pause, I know. I say “Are you looking for Mojo Nixon, did you see the King?” When the caller finds out the truth, “they’re so disappointed,” he says. “You can just hear it in their voices.” Shah says Digitaria staffers used to keep an updated map of Elvis sightings based on the calls, but that has since been taken down. These days, the wildman Nixon works as a DJ in Ohio, when he’s not performing. Elvis, meanwhile, is presumable still out there somewhere. But we hear he only does e-mail now.
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