Stream Jim Rockford’s Answering Machine Messages: All Six Seasons

The Rock­ford Files hit the air­waves in Sep­tem­ber 1974, and until the show end­ed in 1980, each episode began in the same way. Dur­ing the title sequence, you’d hear a phone ring, and then an answer­ing machine would start to play, “This is Jim Rock­ford. At the tone, leave your name and mes­sage. I’ll get back to you.” With each new episode, a caller would leave a dif­fer­ent mes­sage after the beep:

“It’s Nor­ma at the mar­ket. It bounced. You want me to tear it up, send it back, or put it with the oth­ers?”

“It’s Lau­rie at the trail­er park. A space opened up. Do you want me to save it or are the cops going to let you stay where you are?”

“It’s Audra. Remem­ber last sum­mer at Pat’s? I’ve got a twelve hour lay­over before I go to Chica­go. How about it?”

“This is the mes­sage phone com­pa­ny. I see you’re using our unit, now how about pay­ing for it?”

“I staked out that guy only it did­n’t work out like you said. Please call me. Room 234. Coun­ty Hos­pi­tal.”

“Hey Rock­ford, very fun­ny. I ain’t laugh­ing. You’re gonna get yours.”

The short mes­sages told you pret­ty much every­thing you need­ed to know about Jim Rock­ford. He’s a pri­vate detec­tive liv­ing pay­check to pay­check. He cuts cor­ners and bends rules when he needs to. He has friends among women, and ene­mies among men.  He’s a quin­tes­sen­tial pri­vate dick.

In total, 122 dif­fer­ent answer­ing machine mes­sages were left dur­ing the run of the series. (Appar­ent­ly, many fea­tured the voic­es of 1970s celebri­ties and pub­lic fig­ures.) You can play Sea­son 1 above, and the remain­ing sea­sons below.