Current Swell – TOUR PRANKS

This crazy story from the road was written by the indie rock band, Current Swell. You can check out the band’s story, after the break.

Digging a good prank story out of the history of Current Swell is really not that difficult. You could write a record on the topic, as long as it had a parental advisory sticker stamped on it.

And that was the problem. See the stories come easy, but trying to find one that didn’t involve indecent exposure and wouldn’t land us on a C.I.A. watch-list was actually kind of tough.

So I give you the following tale of practical jokes and pranks on a train that ran off the tracks.

See, a couple of years back our biggest fear on the road wasn’t being late for a gig or missing a flight…it was leaving our Facebook accounts logged in.

Some of you may immediately recognize the gag. You leave your account open and one of your “friends” jumps on and posts some jackass embarrassing status update.

For example: “Yo I just won 500 bucks on a scratch ticket, party at my place tonight!!”. And just like that the hapless bastard spends the rest of his night saying things like “Dude I don’t have any idea what ‘cravers’ are but there’s none at my house and don’t go there, I’m not even home!” or “No I don’t have the 40 bucks you lent me, my FaceBook got hijacked!”

But someone always takes the joke one step too far, don’t they?
I suppose it was a showcase run somewhere in Australia. Our good friend and manager Stephen was on tour shaking hands and working the angles or whatever the hell it is that managers do these days.

Stephen had just gotten burned pretty bad when Scotty hijacked his status and left some heinous post about explosive diarrhea, subjecting him to countless responses from concerned friends espousing the benefits of ginger-root suppositories.

So late one night after this sweet summertime gig, Stephen confided in me. Scotty had left his shiznit logged in and our manager was out for revenge.

Now I’d like to say I took the high road this night. That I was looking out for my homeboy and said “Stephen don’t do it, its too cruel” or some such do-gooder nonsense.

But the truth my friends, is that I laughed. I laughed and told him it would be the greatest hijack in Swell history.

So it was that Scotty’s relationship status was changed to “engaged” with some kind if announcement about how happy he was.

Hilarious, right?
Yeah well Scotty’s girlfriend didn’t exactly see the humour.

Scotty surfed the seas down under the next day, blissfully unaware that his girlfriend was getting bombarded with messages and phone calls from all of her friends and family congratulating her, and she had to let them all down and let them know the whole thing was a farce.

When Scotty returned from his day off he had to face the wrath of an extremely pissed off girlfriend and a weeks worth of props from those who still didn’t know it was a joke.

In the end our manager apologized and the status hijacking game pretty much ended
permanently after that. And if and when Scotty does get engaged we won’t find out online because he permanently deleted his Facebook account.

The moral of the story is: get off Facebook. It’s a goddamn CIA run data-mining privacy invading hoax that’s gotten way too big for its britches. And go see some live music. Did I mention we’re playing near you soon?

Keep up with Current Swell on Twitter and Facebook! The band is heading out on tour starting next week, check out the dates and get tickets here!

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