The original OVC was manually operated, an idea that originated when Bill Sebastian played keyboards for the Johnsons in the early Seventies, spelling the band’s name out in lights. In the fall of 1973, a friend had advised Sebastian to catch an Arkestra gig in downtown Boston. He said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you but you have to do this.” So Sebastian did that and spent the next five years of his life designing and building the Outer Visual Communicator.
Construction began in a warehouse on Thayer Street until one of the tenants blew up the building while attempting to devise a homemade oil centrifuge in the basement. Sebastian then relocated to a Swedish machine shop at MIT, a haven for vocoder research, where he held a day job welding laser base plates for NASA. He wore a vulcanized helmet with a window and daydreamed about “ripping apart old organs and doing strange things to them.” Sometimes Michael Jonzun would show up and help wire the OVC to pay for his lodging at Sebastian’s mildly ghoulish manor in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Bill Sebastian at the controls of the OVC, circa 1980. The OVC was partially built in the basement of a machine shop at MIT, where Gunnar Fant invented a vowel synthesizer called the OVE (Orator Verbis Electris) in 1953. (illustration credit 5.7)
In October of 1978, Sebastian finished the OVC inside a barn in Ore City, Texas. Local farmers saw this sixteen-foot sentient hexagon and assumed he was either building a spacecraft or harvesting killer bud. Sebastian, to his credit, did little to dissuade them. He listened to Sun Ra records (“Tapestry from an Asteroid”) and mumbled to himself while tractors drove in circles.
Sun Ra finally met the completed OVC in the fall of 1978, in Sebastian’s drafty loft in downtown Boston. There, he found his new friend hunched over a small hexagonal keyboard, his fingers flitting across touch-sensitive “capacitants.” Sebastian was making “spacescapes,” as if he had Close Encounters on speed dial, consuming 15,000 watts of power in the process. Sebastian told me he would play the OVC just to keep warm in the winter. “The capacitants respond to the magnetic field in your hand,” he says, calling from the parking lot of a Cape Cod grocery store. “It’s like electronic finger-painting. You could shoot comets across the screen. Seventeen million colors at mind-dazzling speeds. I didn’t even have to think about my fingers.” Sun Ra would finally leave Sebastian’s loft three days later—he had to have the OVC.
By 1980, Sebastian and the OVC were performing with Sun Ra’s Arkestra at the Massachusetts College of Art. Sebastian wore a pyramid on his head and hopped around onstage in a purple gown. “To see him do that with his red hair was amazing,” said one witness. “It was way over my head.”
“Bill looked like a wizard from fairy tales,” adds Michael Jonzun’s older brother Calvin, a horn player. “But I never thought he was strange. You gotta be into the character. If I’m gonna believe it, then you gotta believe it. That’s the Outer Visual Communicator. You see, this guy Sun Ra, he had a big following. I mean, the guy’s been around a million years.”
One night, Sun Ra asked Michael Jonzun to substitute on the sound board at Mass College of Art. He was told that the OVC was “designed to go infinitely dark.” “The OVC operated in the Scotopic Shadow World,” says Sebastian. “Or Suboptic Shadow World. When we performed, we extinguished every light source in the auditorium. We’d starve the mind in darkness. There were Light Police to enforce this policy. The OVC could function effectively at the threshold where there was no color—just apparitional shadows in a totally blacked-out room. So much of our visual experience is based on filtering out information. Denial. Visually, everything is spam when you walk down the street. There’s umpteen trillion photons hitting the retina. You can only see little pieces of it. When you get down to the Scotopic Shadow World, it’s the other way around. Your brain and your cones are trying to pick up any photon, any piece of information they can get. So when the OVC lit up—half of what the audience saw was in its imagination.” With its 20,000 wires, chips and endless racks of equipment, the machine filled two trailers. Sebastian soon found himself spending more time under the OVC’s hood than onstage in his purple gown. Brilliant isn’t always practical—it’s hard to get to Saturn when you can’t even get off the truck.
After the Jonzun Crew signed with Tommy Boy Records in 1982, label manager Monica Lynch and CEO Tom Silverman visited Bill Sebastian’s baronial residence in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Lynch described it as “the Munsters’ house.” She remembers the OVC, coiled up in the back of the studio behind a curtain. “It was crazy, like a hybrid of a time machine and a Chinese magic dragon.” “The OVC was long,” adds Silverman. “The length of the room. I never really understood the shit behind it, though. I have a science background but I still couldn’t figure it out.”
I THOUGHT I HEARD
Arthur Baker, who discovered Jonzun and Starr, also produced New Order. Prior to working with Baker, New Order vocodered, “I thought I was mistaken / I thought I heard your words” in “Blue Monday,” while also using the device for polyphonic shading. Released in 1983, New Order’s “Ecstasy” was essentially a vocoder on a tone bender, mumbling “I’ve lost my way.”
In 1984, Sebastian took Sun Ra to Mission Control Studios and plugged him into a leaner, new and improved OVC-3D, a “mouth-controlled virtual reality hologram machine.” It would be used for Sun Ra’s video “Calling Planet Earth,” which was partially funded by Michael Jonzun. At the time, Michael and his brother Maurice Starr (“Larry”) were grooming New Kids On the Block and recruited Sebastian to direct the video for “Be My Girl,” a song that Starr had written while in junior high. Sebastian’s editing helped synchronize the New Kids’ choreography, which ultimately led to a deal with Columbia Records.
Maurice Starr had been calling the New Kids “NY NUK,” or maybe New Nuke, possibly as fissile vengeance against New Edition, another kid group Starr produced in 1982, with much success. Starr and New Edition parted ways the following year when, by coincidence, Columbia decided to pass on a Sun Ra 12 inch called Nuclear War, a record that posed a tautology about what to do without your ass when your ass is gone.
The New Kids practiced at Mission Control Studios, trying to dance their way out of New Edition’s shoebox. This would not be easy, since New Edition had already gone platinum just after cracking puberty. Fifteen years later, when Earth would scream for boy bands, Sun Ra had moved on, leaving his fans behind breathing holograms. Bill Sebastian, meanwhile, remained in Boston with his faulty Outer Visual Communicator. “He [Sebastian] was Frankenstein’s assistant,” says Donnie Wahlberg, on the phone from Hollywood. “He was this computer-genius gremlin who kept popping out from behind some equipment with some tool in his hand. He had this really scruffy red beard. He’d just kind of stand there and twirl his beard into balls and talk about stuff. None of this, ‘Pack Jam’ and all, would’ve been possible without him.” “Pack Jam was about the OVC,” smiles Sebastian. “The vocoder was talking to that little video-game critter. ‘You’re about to be annihilated by the OVC!’ ” Sun Ra had once said: “A voice from another dimension will be speaking to Earth. You may as well practice and prepare for it.” In 1983, Donnie Wahlberg was sort of prepared. In a record store in Boston, the thirteen-year-old stood with his younger brother Mark, with $3.99 between them, and faced the ultimate decision: “Pack Jam” or “Candy Girl.” “I had to go with the Spaceman!” Wahlberg tells me.
Michael Jonzun in the studio with Danny Wood, Donnie Wahlberg, and Jordan Knight of NKOTB. According to Wahlberg, watching Jonzun use the vocoder was like playing catch with Mickey Mantle. (illustration credit 5.8)
When I initially asked Wahlberg about the vocoder, he paused and exhaled, “That’s my shiiiiiiit.” Wahlberg remembers first seeing the machine at Mission Control. Maurice Starr had gimped in late from a game of pick-up basketball, using a busted mop handle for a crutch. (“Must’ve landed funny.”) Sebastian wore grease-encrusted jeans and a yellow plaid shirt. Michael Jonzun played with the vocoder while the OVC lay in th
e back room in a state of disrepair.
Wahlberg was in awe. “The first time Michael whipped out the vocoder and started using it, it was like, unbelievable. It was a big thing for me, man. He’d do it to show off because he knew I loved it. It might sound silly to sit around in the studio and watch Michael Jonzun mess around with the vocoder. But understanding what I grew up listening to—the fusion of the funk and Kraftwerk and Bambaataa—for me to actually see this thing … to see Michael speak into this microphone and hear this whole other thing coming out, it was pretty incredible. I could never fathom how they were made—it’s like playing catch with Mickey Mantle. As a twelve-year-old kid, these are the biggest things in the world to me.”
North End, “Tee’s Happy” (1980, Emergency Records). This was an early disco collaboration between Jonzun, Starr, Arthur Baker and Tee Scott. Emergency also released Kano’s Italian vocoder dance classic “I’m Ready.” (illustration credit 5.9)
WITHOUT SOUNDING LIKE SOMETHING
The last time I saw Donnie Wahlberg, he was missing his eyebrows, shivering in his underwear in Bruce Willis’ bathroom after escaping from a mental institution. By the time The Sixth Sense was released in theaters, New Edition’s “Candy Girl” had already claimed its third generation. On a front stoop in Brooklyn, I witnessed two pigtailed fourth-graders do a Candy Girl update of a Patty Cake standard. A song old enough to be their chaperones was now a playground classic on a summer day when cats hid under sedans. “Can-dee girl! You’re all my world!” The shorter one popped her gum on “girl” and “world.”
Dwayne Omarr, Holy Rock. Maurice Starr-produced vocoder album from Florida, featuring “This Party’s Jam Packed” and “Save the Children.” Starr also made the amazing “Electric Funky Drummer,” with vocals by a squirrel in tight britches. (illustration credit 5.10)
Jonzun Crew’s Lost In Space, 1983 (illustration credit 5.11)
“Candy Girl” is the child star who never grew up and became a pink ringtone instead. New Edition’s hit also boasts one of more gloriously hairballed vocoders on record, a Drano clog to the pipsqueak pipes of Ralph Tresvant, the group’s fifteen-year old lead. If helium causes the vocal tract to vibrate at a higher rate, then the producers of “Candy Girl,” Michael Jonzun and Maurice Starr, had cloned the Jackson 5’s “A-B-C” for all it was worth, which was too much for Tom Silverman, head of Tommy Boy Records. He was still smarting from being sued by Kraftwerk for replaying their synth riff for Afrika Bambaataa’s hit “Planet Rock.” Arthur Baker, who signed New Edition to his label Streetwise, was less concerned. “When Maurice played me ‘Candy Girl,’ I said, ‘Fuck, I’ll sign it right away.’ It sounded like ‘A-B-C’ but wasn’t close enough that you’d get sued.” Long before co-producing “Planet Rock,” Arthur Baker had been using Maurice and Michael for various disco 12 inches in the Seventies and Eighties. “I had been making records with them and none of them really did anything. They were great musicians—really clever.” Michael Jonzun was a gifted singer who could replicate any voice. To the public, his true identity (and biggest success) would be with the vocoder, a device that rebuilt his voice box in its own image and became the faceless face of the Jonzun Crew and their 1983 vocoder album, Lost in Space.
Michael and his brothers spent most of their Florida childhood replicating famous larynges, specializing in Al Green, the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, the Bee Gees—whatever the gig required. They did Patsy Cline covers in a nursing home. They warmed up a Farrakhan rally with New Birth. They played Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line” at a party for the KKK. “The damn Klan treated us better than the Muslims [did]. I remember that,” says Michael’s oldest brother, Calvin, who played horns and helped manage the group. “The Muslims searched us and searched our instruments and when Farrakhan got there, they kicked us out.”
By the late Seventies, Calvin and Soni Johnson were backing the Allman Brothers in Daytona, while a frustrated Maurice Starr—then fresh off his role as “Kid Playing Garbage Can” in Floyd Mutrux’s American Hot Wax—would ambush artists at clubs and music stores, sometimes playing their own bass lines with his teeth. In the early Eighties, Michael and Maurice were hired by Sylvia Robinson to play (uncredited) on Sugar Hill projects like Grandmaster Flash, Funky 4 + 1 and Sequence. “He and Maurice would spend a few days in the Sugar Hill Studios in Englewood, New Jersey,” says Sebastian. “Maurice would buy a pink squirrel fur coat and a king-size bed. Michael would put his money into equipment.” By then, the musician-for-hire thing was getting replaced by cheaper technology. “You could pay a string section twelve thousand dollars a session or just do it with a synthesizer,” says Jonzun. “Arthur and I did music together—real music. But we discovered great singers rarely make it. The kids in the clubs wanted noise.” It was Calvin’s idea for his brother to make a song about a creature born from Japanese chewing sounds and a missing slice of pizza. “I’m like, boy, what a dumb game—but if that’s what they like, that’s what they like.” Though “Pack Jam” didn’t exactly put up “Planet Rock” numbers, it did its lemons-to-lemonade thing by selling 250,000 copies. As Calvin once told me, “Something can remind you of something without sounding like something.” “We could never get away with calling it “Pac-Man,” explains Tom Silverman. “We had to change it because we knew we were going to get sued. Didn’t want to piss off the people at Pac-Man.” To Jonzun’s credit, there’s no evidence of the video game in the song. No high score, no floating pretzels. Just a beat with a Star Trek door-slide. The arcade is empty.
Not surprisingly, my first phone call with Michael Jonzun was through the vocoder. (He greeted me with “Space is the place.”) A typical conversation might include NASA (Jonzun Crew sold well in Houston), the Three Stooges, a date with Donna Summer’s cousin, and an appearance on Saturday Night Live with the J. Geils Band. He said he recorded “Space Cowboy” because Westerns and Martians came on TV at the same time. “Space Is the Place” was the second single from the Jonzun Crew album, perhaps a nod to when Sun Ra used hand-coded signals to send Arkestra members out for ice cream when staying at Jonzun’s house. If “Pack Jam” is vocoder speech compression, then “Space Is the Place” took infinite measures to increase the bandwidth and played its bass lines with iguanodon thumbs. “People got into it,” says Calvin. “The vocoder. The character. It was almost unnatural.”
Michael tells me he was getting messages back then. “It was so long, Michael Johnson! I was the spaceman at the dump.”
Brazilian pressing of Jonzun Crew “Space Is the Place” (Ariola Fonograficos/ Industria Brasileira Disco e Cultura/ Tommy Boy). When Jonzun first phoned me on the vocoder in 1999, he said the song was inspired by a dream he had about a Martian running through a field. (illustration credit 5.12)
MR. BAGS TAKES A TRIP
Zounds! A Gorgon Death Station appears! Evasive Action!
— Spaceman Spiff, Calvin and Hobbes
If it appeared as a light, was it brighter than the brightest stars?
— Question 10, US Air Force UFO Report Form 164, October 1962
A 1956 Pontiac Star Chief hurtles across central Florida with a trunk full of last week’s garbage. Its grill is peppered in bug grit, a frog lunch at seventy-five mph. The road is long past supper, crittered in darkness. The Star Chief reminds its driver to fasten his seat belt. As the only fourteen-year-old in town with a talking car, Calvin Johnson is somewhere out the window. His brother Soni is quiet. Neither is thrilled with the nighttime drop, considering the possibility of running into Mr. Bags, a one-armed vision of ain’t-rightness rumored to live at the dump, known to wear flood pants and three coats. Calvin had seen Bags around town, taking swipes at nothing while his sleeves flailed along, giving the impression of a man trying to flag down an octopus. Pulling into the dump, Soni and Calvin agreed to jump out together, chuck the garbage and peel out, until they realized that something was hovering over the car. “It was bright,” says Calvin, on the phone from Boston. “Bright, bright, bright. It weren’t no dam
n aeroplane, I can tell you that! It stayed there for like ten seconds. We couldn’t move, the car wouldn’t move. It had a blue light on it. It was big and didn’t make no sound. The last thing I remember sayin’ was, ‘Oohhhh, shit! Look out!’ Then it took off slow, two or three miles per hour. Planes just don’t go two or three miles per hour. Then all the sudden that sucker took off. It created a lot of dust.”
Michael Jonzun with Roland SVC-350 vocoder at Mission Control Studios in Westford, Massachusetts, circa 1996. According to Arthur Baker, Jonzun and his brothers were incredible vocalists, reproducing four-part soul harmonies. (Photographed by Dennis Ackerman, courtesy Michael Jonzun) (illustration credit 5.13)
When I asked Calvin what the dust was doing, he said the dust was doing what it was doing. His talking Star Chief was quiet and the only sound was tree frog night. So they tore off to the nearest filling station, looking for witnesses. “I saw the damn spaceship, now! I’m not sayin’ I saw no little green men or no Pac-Men … but I saw what I saw. And I know I didn’t pass out.”
In Harlan Ellison’s 1967 story “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream,” a bitter supercomputer transforms the narrator into a “soft jelly thing.” In 1941, Harlan’s Russian grandmother threatened to permanently staple him to his mattress for sneaking out to see Mr. Bug Goes to Town on his seventh birthday. Ellison, who may have coined “bugfuck,” would later denounce the term “Sci-Fi” as the sound of crickets doing the sex act. (illustration credit 5.14)
Calvin—who said the OVC was fancier—suspects that the spaceship was looking for Mr. Bags. “Bags used to tell people that aliens used to come visit him out at the dump. Nobody took him seriously, because the guy stayed out by the dump. He’d have on three coats, so everybody thought he was crazy. Sometimes he’d be in town and have on pants that looked shorter than Lil’ Abner’s.”
How to Wreck a Nice Beach Page 8