Spencer Potter is ready to say goodbye to (201) 867-5309. Credit Rob Bennett for The New York Times


We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming about thieves on Wall Street, bad weather and that football game to bring you this important announcement about Spencer Potter’s decision to sell his telephone number on eBay, the song that inspired him and the half-life of pop culture fame.

The phone number is (201) 867-5309. The song is “867-5309/Jenny.” The half-life business you have to figure out on your own.




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And so it continues. Maybe it’s those Cingular commercials, but the song came out when Ronald Reagan was president. You would think the jokes would get old.


It’s been fun. Over the years, Mr. Potter, now 28 and living in Westchester County, and his roommate have posted their own dumb messages on the voice mail, like the guy with the number in Redmond, Wash., whose answering machine has a bunch of guys singing the song and the message: “If you guys are calling and want to leave a message like this, trust us, we’ve heard it before.”

But the number got too many joke calls to be good for the business, so he kept it sort of like a pet, the ringer usually off, and now he figures he’s had enough.

Hence the ad on eBay — “Selling my D.J. company with the most famous phone number in HISTORY ... 867-5309,” which he bills as “one of the last remaining 867-5309 numbers in service.”

An earlier attempt by another user to sell an 867-5309 number on eBay was halted by a telephone company, but since he’s selling his business, A Blast Entertainment, which consists of the name and the phone number, Mr. Potter figures he’ll be all right. The 201 number can be transferred anywhere in the United States.

In the inscrutable way things either get traction or do not in the vast cultural maw, it’s just one more moment in 867-5309 lore. It’s not as important as the “867-5309/Jenny” Awareness Center, posted by a guy who, whoops, bought the domain for 876-5309 instead. It’s not as alarming as the guy in 2004 who called 867-5309 in every possible area code in North America, reaching about two dozen voice mailboxes. It’s not as baffling as the plumbers (in the song, “Jenny” was written on a bathroom wall) who fought each other in court over the rights to use the song.

Mr. Potter hopes to make enough to spend two months backpacking in Europe. Whatever happens, it beats investing in the stock market.

And Mr. Call? Now 60, he’s a musician and aspiring author in Nashville, interested in Buddhism, world peace, Noam Chomsky and Carl Jung. His books, all unpublished, include a rock memoir, “For a Good Time Call: 867-5309 — I Wrote It, You’re Stuck With It!” and a historical novel set in the 23rd century B.C. featuring an Odysseus/Forrest Gump character wandering around the ancient world.

Mr. Call mostly writes and performs for presentations put on by the health care entrepreneur Quint Studer. He said that for years, he kind of disowned the song (“I’ve spent a lifetime making meaningful music, and what stands out is a girl’s name and number on a bathroom wall”) but has since made his peace with it:

“People love that song. You can play it 900 times in bars, and people don’t get tired of it. I figure if there are 300 million people in the country, 200 million know that song.”

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