Through tape edits, Clarke removed any sounds that weren’t part of the voice information, including any gasps and heaves between the lines, leaving him with a cachet of random noises. “I remember joining the fricatives and plosives all together and playing them back. It went skhlrrp-sklurp. I played those majestic horrible noises backwards through the vocoder, and I thought, ‘A clock!’ You should never turn your back on a good accident.”
The cleaning mice with vibrato mustaches were personal favorites of Bradbury’s. “I got to thinking about mice and how they occupy a house,” he says. “You don’t know that they’re there. I thought it would be wonderful if you had mice that ran around the house and cleaned it for you but you never saw them. They came from the warrens in the wall.” Inspired by an electric toothbrush, Clarke gave the mice a fussy pitch for the clean-up scene, when the family dog comes home covered in radiation sores. Overwhelmed by the smell of automated pancakes, the dog goes berserk, chasing his tail in circles until Clarke makes him “disappear up his own asshole.”
ANSWER ECHOES DYING
In May of 2003, I received a package from Malcolm Clarke of Everlasting Lane in Herts, England. Included was a CD of preliminary vocoder tests for the Bradbury play and a brief letter. Apparently, Clarke couldn’t find the recording of the original broadcast but here was “some vocoder stuff.” The letter parted with an Irish beer salute and a drawing of a chubby spider with nostrils, smiling. The CD began with sustained noise at various pitches, from snub-nosed power drills to proboscis whining, as if the Green Hornet had donned a mosquito mask. This was followed by a cringing version of a HAL standard, “Daisy Bell,” pitched into the nosebleeds.
Two months later, I called Clarke to thank him, only to sadly learn that he had died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four. I then returned to his test demo, focusing on the incontinent white noise. The signal appeared to be in pain, struggling to birth speech, but something was there—the voice of a day, repeating itself mindless. Clarke had explained this during our last phone conversation, playing a game with intelligibility and intelligence. “Some people hear [the voice] very early on in the transition from pure chaos and noise into perfect speech. I took the voice of the calendar (“Today is August the fourth 2026”) but I started with the raw ingredients, filtered white noise, which gradually begins to pulse and shape. The beginning is a barren landscape out of which emerges intelligence—the house. The discovery of intelligence.”
The process was reversed for the end of “August 4th,” when the house catches fire and dies. “In the beginning, the barometer has a very low voice,” said Clarke. “Towards the end, the quality of his voice catches fire. The barometer turns from flames into steam and evaporates.”
“They did a fine job when the house catches fire,” adds Bradbury. The mice—now promoted to fire brigade—whiz about spewing green water. The house is frantic, caught between survival and loops of habit, “making breakfast at a psychopathic rate,” mowing the lawn, slamming doors, chucking umbrellas out the door. Several vocoded voices scream all at once, pitching fits, a crying of lot 451, one singing “Daisy,” another reading a Tennyson poem in the burning den. “Blow bugle blow answer echoes dying, dying, dying …” Then smoke. Then silence.
One wall stands among the ruins and inside it, the last vocoder, the daily minder repeating the day after, “Today is August the Fifth,” the voice disintegrating into the white noise landscape, what Malcolm Clarke called “the demise of intelligence.” The Deformation Age. The repetition seems to be nagging, as if mocking an attempt to perpetuate ourselves, in the event—a flashing instant—that we forget.
Spectrum Spreading was a natural result of the Second World War battle for electronic supremacy, a war waged with jamming.
— Robert Price, A History of Spread Spectrum Communications
ON THE BEACH
Sky’s afummadiddled!
— Richard Matheson, “Tis the Season to Be Jelly”
We’re the wreckers of the Florida shore.
— Wrecker’s folk song, 1830
Fuck that shit, let’s go to Pac Jam.
— Poison Clan, “Shake What Ya Mama Gave Ya”
Today is August 25, 1983.
The barometer screams for intelligence. Miami Beach screams back with the wrong answer, and in neon. The wavelengths have changed. Spectrum communications is now spread across beach towels, its frequency bands blaring in stripes: sunburnt Swatches, ultraviolet bikinis, flip-flop drunks. A small plane drags an announcement across the sky: The Coca Cola Y100 Amazing Fun End of Summer Marathon of Music. At this altitude, the crowd noise is but a hum, sucked into the plane’s nose, the vortical shredder. Down below, in the shadow of a giant inflatable beer can, the vocoder is tended by a man dressed like an eighteenth-century French aristocrat. His name is Michael Jonzun, and his powdered wig is itchy.
Freestyle “Don’t Stop the Rock” (1985, Music Specialist). Produced by Pretty Tony Butler, “Don’t Stop the Rock” is the first vocoder song to use the word Freakathon. Pretty Tony wore a pilot’s hat like Rocky the Squirrel and created at least three incarnations of Freestyle, each masked by vocoder, and no less than five Debbie Debs. (illustration credit 5.1)
The throng glows. They came to hear Jonzun perform “Pack Jam,” an electro-funk 12 inch released on Tommy Boy Records, a song that wanted to exterminate all Pac-Man machines but couldn’t, and settled for transforming Jonzun’s voice into the spectral description of all hell else. Off to the side of the stage is Weird Al Yankovic, a frizzy accordion player in a cheerleading uniform and sweaty glasses. Next to Weird Al is a tiny R&B singer named Stacy Lattisaw and behind her is Sylvester Stallone’s brother Frank. Frank is juiced from performing “Far from Over,” a push-up jam that inspired John Travolta to tighten a piece of string around his head in Staying Alive. Weird Al is juiced because he’s Weird Al. The humidity has introduced his hair, a spoof of hair, to moisture retention—an asset for one in the business of being zany and imitating Michael Jackson. Lattisaw is juiced because she’s seventeen and just sang “Let Me Be Your Angel” on Miami Beach. Her earrings are bright and her collar could poke out the sun. Though attendant to their own planets, they can’t help but stare at Jonzun, who seems to be dressed for the headless side of the French Revolution, an unporous move in this climate. His band, the Jonzun Crew—Gordon Worthy, Steve Thorpe and Jonzun’s brother Soni—are three sparkly musketeers in fringes. It’s too hot for hair, much less a powdered wig. The only powder going around Miami in 1983 was the coke that paid for Italian sports cars in cash, embarrassed the Federal Reserve, and funded The Music Specialist, Miami’s first successful electro hip-hop label and home to vocoder producer Pretty Tony Butler, the first man in Dade County to have Space Invaders hooked up in the glove compartment of his Delta 88.
The Amazing End of Summer Jam took place on Miami Beach in 1983 and featured Jonzun Crew, Weird Al Yankovic, Frank Stallone, Stacy Lattisaw, and champagne. (illustration credit 5.2)
Michael Jonzun never touched the stuff. Born Johnson, he is the youngest of six Johnson brothers who as a band could mimic the Jacksons and the Brothers Johnson. Something of a literalist, Jonzun had to make a name for himself and consulted the phone book first, no Jonzuns there, and so changed his signature. “Jonzun” had a French zing, kind of. Officially, his hit song is “Pack Jam (Look Out for the OVC),” though nobody seemed to know what the OVC was, nor why they should be looking out for it. The first to bring “Pack Jam” down to Florida was Allen Johnston, a record hustler for Tommy Boy who’d been thawing out in Miami after spending the Vietnam War doing glacier search-and-rescue in Alaska. Allen first tested “Pack Jam” on his kids (they freaked) and then pushed the song on the radio, clubs and record stores. You could soon hear “Pack Jam” in Woolworth’s, piped in over the impulse-buy Venus flytraps. Over at Superstar Rollerteque, North Miami’s first all-black rink, kids took off their skates in the middle of the floor and danced to “Pack Jam.” At a synagogue dow
n in Coral Gables, kids did jumping jacks to “Pack Jam.”
The Jonzuns’ Prophet-5 synthesizer played a frowning metal sky. The song’s only words, “Pack Jam look out,” were a warning, maybe a threat. Maybe prepare for lunch. The vocoder’s throat seemed to be dislodging something, namely darkness, less night than deep space. And it actually cackled, like it was onto something, maybe your sandwich, a greedy fly rubbing its hands together.
Whatever “Pack Jam look out” meant, at least Miami could say they had been warned and that they had been warned by the only black guy in a Bastille wig to use a vocoder to control a crowd in South Florida—not exactly the most evolved slab of real estate in the gun handle. Last out of the water, one of the last to desegregate. The fact that Jonzun was causing such a racket must have been unsettling to some of Miami’s older, leatherier resident tourists, sitting inside mumbling into their air conditioners. That is if they could even hear it, old folks being old folks, searching the radio for something quiet. (Pack Jam! Heavy rotation!) And if they could, they wouldn’t believe it, staring through tight-lipped windows.
COZELL MCQUEEN
After North Carolina State upset Houston in the 1983 NCAA basketball championship, fans and students burned couches to “Pack Jam.” (The man behind “Pack Jam,” Michael Jonzun, is pictured above.) According to Wolfpack guard Derek Wittenberg, “Pack Jam” was the soundtrack to their impossible tournament run, a 35-foot air-ball rescued from prayer and dunked when the buzzer screamed red—an entire season, compressed into a final second. That spring, Jonzun Crew and New Edition played at Reynolds Coliseum on NCSU’s campus in Raleigh. (illustration credit 5.3)
Historically, Miami itself was very familiar with pack jam, an exchange of fat suitcases in the restless heat, where the ground itself never settled. In the Eighties, Miami enjoyed a growth boom unheard, paying for its new skyline through the nose, oblivious to the decade’s violent birth, back when five white Dade County police officers were acquitted after fatally beating a black insurance agent for flipping off a squad car at a stoplight. The ensuing riots in Liberty City on May 17, 1980, left eighteen dead and $80 million in damages. That day, Bell Telephone operator James McCauley returned from his lunch break to a panicked switchboard, thinking it might be the usual wiretap paranoia (a common occurrence in Miami). Instead, it was the tremulous elderly, reporting the end of civilization. “Back then, 9-1-1 was in its infancy,” says McCauley, who went on to become the most vocodered voice in Miami, recording under aliases like Maggotron and DXJ. “People think the operator knows everything, especially the older generation. They figure the operator knows who you are. They’d call up, ‘Operator, I need to tell you! They’re breaking into the Winn Dixie!’ And hang up.”
The following October, when the Mariel Boatlift brought 125,000 Cuban refugees to town, McCauley’s switchboard lit up with more hysterics, this time in Spanish. Named after its port of flight, the Mariel Boatlift began with a siege at Cuba’s Peruvian embassy and ended with Fidel Castro cleverly exporting his dissident problem to South Florida, essentially calling the White House bluff of providing amnesty from communist dictators. In a matter of weeks, the city’s population increased by an Orange Bowl and a half. Miami had, in its many selves, become pack jam.
The Jonzun Crew, “Pak Man (Look Out for the OVC)” (Boston International Records) (illustration credit 5.4)
Willie Perez, now regarded as the best poplocker in Miami, was an eight-year-old Marielito when his parents fled Cuba in 1980. He remembers it as a “long-ass boat ride.” Three years later, Perez saw a blind DJ named Mickey C playing “Pack Jam” and danced like an escapist with syrup for bones, less an elusion and more a way of getting into something, playing the Martian card, something from a place where kids didn’t make fun of his English and his light skin, calling him “white boy.” For Willie Perez, “Pack Jam” wasn’t a capacity for understanding. It was a matter of space. So he started calling himself “Chillski” and danced at a teeny hip-hop club called Pac Jam, located in Liberty City in North Miami. Perez said he’d go there, look good and get the hell out.
Pac Jam was all things Miami: a party, a place, a pirate radio station, a handy buzzword for overstating the room, another dimension in itself. But for Willie Perez, “get in where you fit in” was a shrinking elastic contradiction in the club, in a world crammed into a city, where spread spectrum was in itself compression. At Pac Jam, the bass was as purple as a heart attack. Cuban was white, white was lines and black was Dominican, Haitian, Jamaican, Creole, Georgian. Whatever fit the Dade County police’s idea of spectral description.
A former telephone operator in Miami, James “Maggotron” McCauley’s electro-bass music drew inspiration from nematodes, boating instructional records, his garden, Nikita Khrushchev, skating backwards to “Rock Lobster,” bacon, Nazi propaganda, plastic furniture covers, and a Funkadelic song called “March to the Witch’s Castle.” (illustration credit 5.5)
Pac Jam Teen Disco had dropped its “k” in deference to Pac-Man, a dot-gobbling arcade game that Michael Jonzun avoided because it made him dizzy. So he recorded “Pack Jam” with the intent of obliterating the most popular kid-fattening time-rot since TV. “We took a man and turned him into jam,” Michael Jonzun would tell me, seriously, just trying to avoid getting litigated by Pac-Man’s manufacturer Namco. For appearances’ sake, the vocoder obliged, being somewhat unclear on these matters to begin with.
The vocoder would flourish in Miami, where it was a good idea to pick up a few spare identities and a speech scrambler, where everyone’s a character, whether you’re a Cuban double agent working for the CIA shadowed by the FBI, or say, Amos Larkin, a guy recording under at least ten different aliases with the Bee Gees’ unused vocoder in a motel studio run by Krishnas in West Palm, surrounded by outlaws with recording contracts shadier than swampy real estate deals. (The Bee Gees covered the Beatles’ “Mean Mister Mustard” through the vocoder in the Robert Stigwood film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.) In Miami, one could make a career out of being somebodies—Larkin said he had to keep changing names so radio wouldn’t get sick of him, inventing a son and a grandson (Larkin II and III) and making a song called “FRESH BEATS WITHOUT RAP BASS YOUR CAR STREETS AND PARTY.” Amos decided to do electro records after smoking away an afternoon at the South Dade 8 watching Tron. (“They just went up in that damn computer, didn’t they? I never saw any shit like that!”) Tron, with its Gentlemen’s Club fluorescence and minitruck blues and pinks, had enough neon to shame Miami Beach.
In 1982, Larkin recorded “E.T. Boogie” and “I Like It (Corn Flakes),” perhaps the only vocoder song to say, “Raisin Bran makes you feel like a man.” That year, as Miami police sparked another riot by fatally shooting an African American teenager in a video arcade, a man in a bug suit recorded a vocoder song entitled “Electronic Pussy Sucker.” Calling himself Blowfly, he had a hyperbolic middle finger and claimed to give better head than Pac-Man.
Michael Jonzun, creator of “Pack Jam (Look Out for the OVC),” released on Tommy Boy Records in 1983. “People gotta like what’s going on even if they have no idea what’s going on,” said Jonzun, who also released the electro 12 inch “Unclear Holocaust” while recording as The Future. (illustration credit 5.6)
As things stood, jumping up and down, Miami Beach is quite fond of Pac-Man. The crowd at the Amazing End of Summer Jam screams bloody quarter with Michael Jonzun’s wig on it. So Jonzun asks, “Are you ready for the Pack Jam?” smiling behind the hope that the sand hasn’t gritted his machine. A wink of granule is deafening when cracked between teeth. The salted air may be unkind to the vocoder, which is just happy not to be in a Russian prison.
Then things get blurry for Jonzun, on stage, sweating musket balls. Did he just hear the vocoder say, “Black man, look out”? He tells Miami to look out for the OVC instead. Crowd: Whatever you say, man.
Weird Al: That is that thing in “P.Y.T.” that goes “P.Y.T.” after Michael Jackson says, “I’ve
got to love you!”
Giant Inflatable Beer Can: I seem to be losing air.
Lattisaw: I am doing the Snake, having a ball.
Stallone: I am no longer here and nobody cares.
GO WITH THE SPACEMAN
I am Chroma the Great, conductor of color, maestro of pigment and director of the entire spectrum.
— The Phantom Tollbooth
OVC! Yeah, I remember the OVC. I never thought the OVC was real.
— Jordan Knight, New Kids On the Block
Sun Ra sits in darkness, starving for photons and wishing for ice cream. He withholds carbon dioxide while intubated by a machine designed to remap the chromatic spectrum. This silver hexagonal screen is the Outer Visual Communicator, the ideal companion for a man believed to be at once from Alabama and Saturn. For the moment, Sun Ra is stuck in 1985, sharing a studio with New Kids On the Block.
The OVC’s inventor (named Bill Sebastian) stands behind him, twirling his beard into little red balls. Beyond their whisper, Mission Control Studios is empty. NKOTB have the day off. Normally, they’d be there rehearsing, transforming themselves into your little sister’s everwaking tear-streaked wall-plastered moment. But none of the New Kids are old enough to drive. Their producer, Maurice Starr, hasn’t given them a car to illegally tool around in. Not yet. Donnie Wahlberg is elsewhere in Boston, smoothing his rattail and playing video games, trying to scare up some facial hair.
Sun Ra can breathe easy and be a man from Saturn in peace. Three narrow plastic tubes snake from his mouth into an electric harmonica, which is wired to the OVC. Sun Ra’s cheeks deflate, causing the hexagon to erupt in a scramble of color. Tiny flashes of light, also hexagonally shaped, chase each other across the screen’s Plexiglass surface.
How to Wreck a Nice Beach Page 7