How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  Calvin and Soni finally drove home to scare their next of kin, nine-year-old Michael. Not to make a mountain out of mashed potatoes, Michael remembers feeling rather practical about the incident, as kids do when crediting logic to the unreal. “The UFO was probably picking up some trash and going back to make some stuff.”

  IT BECOMES THAT

  That sounds like some crazy shit Jonzun would come up with.

  — Arthur Baker

  Michael Jonzun didn’t need drugs to see UFOs.

  — Jordan Knight, NKOTB

  In 1983, when Jonzun turned man into jam, the Pac-Man brand was already binging on ash trays, air fresheners, socks, hats, light switches, cereal bowls, TV trays, more than a few theories of Eighties consumption and jelly. “It was an imaginary war,” says Bill Sebastian. “At the time you had those silly video games. Michael saw this other visual monster and I think he imagined it attacking and demolishing Pac-Man. The problem was because of copyright laws the name was changed to Pack Jam.” On the run-off wax of “Pack Jam,” you’ll find a family of Pac creatures etched in by the engineer, laughing their way around the black spindle hole preparing to gobble serial numbers. For the OVC’s warning, the vocoder let the reflux do the talking, inhaling a trucker’s five-star breakfast and belching, “Look out for the Outer Visual Communicator.” Calvin Jonzun called it “the thunder and the hell and all that type of stuff. The earth is opening up. As if you had a thousand-piece orchestra or something. You know—the stars and all that opening up and goin’ for it.”

  Homemade “Pack Jam” sleeve discovered in San Jose, California, rendered in Magic Marker. Artist unknown. (1983, Tommy Boy Records, unearthed by Hua Hsu) (illustration credit 5.15)

  “I always looked at the OVC lights eating up the Pac-Man,” says Michael Jonzun, realizing the letters O, V and C actually formed a Pac-Man—the V being the mouth. “By destroying it, it becomes that. The letters. The O, the V and the C are the symbols in the Pac-Man thing.” “There’s many ways to interpret the conflict,” continues Sebastian. “When somebody plays Pac-Man, you’re playing a game where everything you do is structured according to somebody else’s rules. With the OVC, you create your own environments with your own rules. The OVC is creating an experience rather than playing a game and following someone else’s rules. There’s a fundamental cultural conflict between the two attitudes. It’s mind control. Of all the things you could do with your life that they could focus you on something that has such a limited set of possibilities. You’re just moving a cursor up, down, left or right. In a maze. Squares are artificial.”

  Bill Sebastian’s Outer Visual Communicator (OVC), photographed with the Arkestra at the Modern Theater in Boston, December 1978. The OVC was a 16-foot hexagonal chromatic scrambler controlled by a “Spacescape” keyboard. Originally built for Sun Ra, the OVC would be Michael Jonzun’s muse for “Pack Jam,” making room for another dimension. (illustration credit 5.16)

  Jonzun claims that Bell Labs had been waiting for him all along. The vocoder’s function in World War II—spread spectrum communications and bandwidth compression—fits the description of “Pack Jam.” When German intelligence intercepted SIGSALY transmissions in 1945, the signals were not recognized as human speech. Disregarded as random interference, these vocoded pulses were spit back out over the airwaves as jamming frequencies. American Signal Corps officers, however, caught something else in the ether. When connecting SIGSALY calls, officers reported hearing “gobbling sounds.”

  In 1983, Jonzun and the OVC won the war on the home front when Atari buried five million unsold copies of its inferior Pac-Man home version in the New Mexico desert. The cartridges were flattened with a steamroller and entombed in cement. Atari’s bankruptcy was partly blamed upon the creature’s unsatisfactory death. There was no shrivel, no dramatic pop. The video game giant quickly learned that one of the key pleasures of Pac-Man was the death of Pac-Man. On Jonzun’s original version of “Pak Man,” the vocoder simulates Pac’s last breath, a shrinking “ooohhh” after admitting “The OVC has got me!” Instead of a hyper-desiccated pop, the creature simply dwindles down the drain, as sad a sound as a single-color, two-dimensional pixillated video being could make.

  In 1975, the Johnson brothers’ van nearly flew off the side of a mountain during a blizzard in Vermont. “I thought I was a goner,” says Michael. “We were swinging around at the top of an abyss. You look down. Now that’s death. I was hearing things.” What Jonzun heard, in that yeti pillow fight, was the van’s radio, the dissipation of white noise into David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” This near-death experience became “Ground Control,” the only track from Lost in Space too slow and dark for radio. “I thought it was time to leave Earth,” he says. “ ‘Ground Control’ was the sad intergalactic feeling of slow-moving time. Earth has a lot of problems.”

  “Ground Control” baffled Calvin Jonzun more than the UFO at the county dump. “I don’t know what the hell Mike was thinkin’ when he made ‘Ground Control.’ Man, please! For a minute there I thought he was on drugs. The other songs were more or less specifically made. But that one … that one was a little strange.” To refresh himself, Calvin hums “Ground Control” through his nose. “Some songs just be so far removed from other ones. That one definitely made the list of Far-Removed-from-the-Other-Ones.”

  GROUND CONTROL TO THAT THING IN YOUR BACKYARD

  Johnson, you fool! You have attempted to overload my circuits!

  — Colossus: The Forbin Project, 1970

  We need batteries. The Suboptic Shadow World has descended early on the western tip of Cape Cod in December. Bill Sebastian stands in his kitchen, holding a dead flashlight with his eyes closed. He’s talking about how the mind begs for photons in absolute darkness, scrambling. “Please, just give me one photon,” he laughs, shaking the flashlight.

  Sebastian’s wife is preparing eggplant parmesan, one of Sun Ra’s favorite dishes. The Sebastians maintain a communal kindness that was part of Arkestra survival for so long, a rarity in today’s gated peephole fear. Dinner won’t be ready for a while, so Sebastian says he can show us what’s left of the OVC, if we’re interested. “It’s somewhere in the woods out back,” he says, and then disappears on a search for batteries. My friend quickly says he could run to the store and get batteries right now, no problem at all.

  Slightly embarrassed, Sebastian says the OVC is now just squirrel housing. “It’s cool for someone to come up and ask you about all of this stuff twenty years later. The reality is even stranger. Why would anyone want to see the OVC ruins?”

  On the way to the store, we listen to “Pack Jam” and then “Ground Control.” Sebastian hasn’t heard the Jonzun Crew in over twenty years, and “Ground Control” is a favorite. The organ is more St. John the Divine than Sam Ash, and the vocoder feels downright sad as we pass by houses netted in Christmas lights. Inflatable snowmen wobble and smile in the wind. One has keeled over, face-down and fat, impaled on its broom.

  At Wegmans Supermarket, we wait in the car, allowing “Ground Control” to finish its lonely trudge. Sebastian leans down to tie his shoes. “I couldn’t imagine Sun Ra being skilled at navigating conventional reality,” he says.

  The OVC ruins, photographed in daylight in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, October 2009. Bill Sebastian, inventor of the OVC, finished his creation in Ore City, Texas in 1978 and later retired the remains in the backyard of his home in Cape Cod. (illustration credit 5.17)

  With the OVC and Spaceship Keyboard, Bill Sebastian and Sun Ra would channel the colors out of space. Sun Ra would often have Sebastian take a silent “OVC solo” during performances. (illustration credit 5.18)

  Inside the grocery store, conventional reality is blaring with holiday stress. We load up on D-cells, and Sebastian suggests getting some cave lights to wear on our foreheads. Kidding, sort of. I’m all for it. We agree that all price checks should be conducted with a vocoder and pick up an extra flashlight for backup. You deal with the photons you’re given.
Upon returning to Sebastian’s house, we check in on dinner and file out back. “We go to the graveyard as a team,” he whispers. In the woods, next to a green canoe, is a silver backboard shaped like a trapezoid. One half of the OVC, decapitated by a low-flying bridge. The Plexiglass is dead-tooth gray and covered in duct tape. Rows of hieroglyphics have been carved out of the tape with a box-cutter. An ankh, a wolf, a queen, an amulet, a curse.

  The wind follows up. We duck thorns and branches and crouch inside of Sebastian’s dream, amid racks of hard-wired logic boards that have endured more than two decades of Cape Cod winters. Our flashlights play across racks of electronics and consoles, wire clots in fishgut pink and tiny bulbs and coils, partially buried in pine needles and damp leaves. “The OVC wasn’t practical for touring,” Sebastian says. “There were malfunctions. It took about a week of working full-time to set the thing up. Every time you took it apart and moved it, you wondered if you were ever going to get the thing back together and working again. But life goes on. Different things happen.”

  He hands me the flashlight and pries open a long rectangular silver case leaning against a console. Along with the promised squirrel nests, this is the Spacescape keyboard, the controls of the OVC. Sebastian moves his hands across the map of tiny round capacitants. I ask if his daughters, both at Harvard, ever wondered about the crashed spaceship in their backyard. Sebastian says no, they never asked about it.

  “The OVC is designed for you,” he says. “It’s the stuff you want to see. You must accept it without filters.” Sebastian ducks under a panel, looking for a 3-D harmonica transducer. Along with the OVC, the harmonica transducer occupied the “weird half” of Mission Control Studios in Westford, Massachusetts, where Sebastian and Sun Ra played with their mouth-operated virtual-reality hologram machine. By the time New Kids On the Block had made Maurice Starr rich, Bill Sebastian had run out of money and abandoned the OVC. In 1988, he and Jonzun started a company called Virtual Scene, which broke off into Intelligence Compression Technologies. ICT now does data compression for satellite networks. “That’s what the vocoder was,” says Sebastian, flashlight bobbing. “Data compression. Unfortunately, Sun Ra couldn’t wait around on the planet for me to finish.”

  Like the vocoder, the OVC was another form of spectrum communication. Though the OVC was never successful in destroying all Pac-Man machines, it did put on dazzling light shows when Bill Sebastian performed with Sun Ra, from 1978 to 1980. (illustration credit 5.19)

  We shield our faces and stumble back through the briars. Sebastian pauses, flickering back at the OVC. “See how it’s slightly convex? The OVC was intended to be part of a larger whole.”

  He’s not kidding. The OVC was intended to be the first piece of a massive dome, with Sebastian and Sun Ra performing inside, live at the OVC Dome, maybe forever, only breaking for ice cream. “Total immersion environment.” He smiles, passing a hexagonal birdbath. “The best view is inside the dome.” We follow Bill Sebastian and his photons back to the house, leaving the OVC to another winter.

  Bill Sebastian envisioned the OVC as one hexagonal piece of a massive dome, similar to one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic spheres or the ship from Jack Arnold’s 1953 science fiction classic It Came from Outer Space (which looks like an indoor tennis court for aliens). (illustration credit 5.20)

  I’m willing to risk bodily harm in order to get my voice to sound like Roger Troutman.

  — John Walker Lindh, “American Taliban,” 1997

  Bell Labs’ R.R. Riesz with his artificial Electrolarynx, photographed in 1925. Riesz also built one of the first electronic vocal tracts and helped design the Voder with Homer Dudley. (Courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center) (illustration credit 6.1)

  SO TO SPEAK: THE ACTUAL HISTORY OF SYNTHETIC LARYNGES

  Let us dissect, so to speak.

  — Charles Bogert, herpetologist

  A toad and a frog are hard to tell apart.

  — Vocoder test sentence, Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 1971

  The man who couldn’t color his sound lived on the corner of Voorhis Avenue in Deland, Florida, in a house bleached dog-tongue pink. Michael Jonzun, ten years old in a cowboy hat, would drop by to taunt the bulldog leashed in the back. The screen door would slap open and out popped the dog’s owner, jamming an electric deodorant stick in the side of his neck: “You-damn-kids-get-outta-my-yard!” A crabapple buzz in monotone. Jonzun saw the hole in the man’s throat and scrammed like a Little Rascals routine. Hang onto your hats, gang!

  “I was like, ‘that is the coolest sound.’ But I was afraid of this guy. He looked like … umm … who was that guy from …” (Pause) “Was it Herman Monster [sic]? No. Not him. This was a bald scroungy fella. The guy from Gunsmoke? No, his hands were too clean.” Jonzun finally decides upon a mix of Lloyd Bridges from Sea Hunt (1958 snorkel drama) and Froggy from Our Gang (a show where kids get chased by cranky men). “That’s it! Everybody on TV looks like the same guy anyway. But he had that hole in there and that hole looked nasty. It really scared me. And man, that dog was ugly.” Calvin Johnson remembers the incident. “That man kind of sounded like a vocoder. GetoutofmyyardGetoutofmyyard … Yup! Vocoder!” “The spaceman had another mouth,” adds Michael. “And I dreamt later that he had changed his mouth.”

  On January 20, 2005, the telephone informed me that our forty-third president was on TV being inaugurated by a vocoder. It was Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a man without a windpipe, swearing in George W. Bush, a man who would spend his administration talking out the side of his neck. A longtime sufferer of thyroid cancer, Rehnquist had been speaking with the aid of an electric larynx since undergoing a tracheotomy in 2004. What the dejected TV audience heard that day was a more refined version of what yelled at young Michael Jonzun on Voorhis Avenue. The spaceman’s spare mouth was a fistula, the site of larynx extirpation for victims of throat cancer. It is a hole where a hole should never be, and Philip Morris would rather it not appear on television ads, much less the Marlboro Man’s gizzard. (He can be spotted on an ad for Truth.com, squatting on a busy New York sidewalk with a tuneless jingle: “You won’t sing worth a heck with a hole in your neck.”)

  Bell Labs’ F.E. Hayworth does a soundcheck with an Electrolarynx in 1959. (Reproduced, with permission, from “New Artificial Larynx,” in Transactions of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, Vol. 63, American Academy of Ophthalmology, 1959) (illustration credit 6.2)

  Chief Rehnquist and the Marlboro Man are indebted to Wolfgang von Kempelen, the seventeenth-century Hungarian baron who detailed the first manmade leather throat in his book Mechanism of Human Language with Description of the Speaking Machine. Yet von Kempelen was discredited due to his bogus invention of a master chess robot called “The Turk.” Undefeated throughout Europe (and rumored to have beaten Napoleon and Ben Franklin), the Turk could roll its eyes and smoke a hookah while moving castles at will, thanks to a paraplegic Polish chess master hidden in its gut.

  The actual history of synthetic larynges claims inventions no less bizarre than robot fraud. Many are German-made, with sources of inspiration ranging from balloon reeds and woodwinds to one patient who had created his own fistula with a hot ice pick. In 1870, Dr. V. Czerny installed artificial larynges in canines, with dubious results. (“The dog could yawn and make some noises.”) Dr. T. Gluck devised an underarm accordion bellows that plugged into the nasopharynx. More ingenious was Gluck’s motorized gramophone purse. Wired to a denture plate (with tongue-flicked pitch control), it allowed patients to channel their favorite singer, a form of lip-synch by necessity. Gluck could have been taking a cue from nineteenth-century French writer Villiers de l’Isle Adam and his imaginary robot chanteuse named Hadaly, who channeled speech from a gramophone and the record collection housed in her electric bosom.

  “Let me clear my throat.” Bell Labs diagram of frog-shaped larynx, pictured here with a Bell Labs Voder scheme, from the Homer Dudley article “Fundamentals of Speech Synthesis” published in 19
55. (Courtesy Audio Engineers Society) (illustration credit 6.3)

  With its articulation being “far from natural,” the Gluckian model could’ve been a mobile vocoder turntable prototype. Dr. Anton Phibes would use an Art Deco version in the 1971 horror classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes, in which Vincent Price starred as a dead inventor who drank champagne by pouring it into the speaker jack in the side of his neck. Looking like Captain Kangaroo with a hangover, Phibes was a foxtrotting romantic, despite losing his face and voice box in a car crash. He spoke through a golden Victrola on wheels, which was plugged into his neck. “As you see and can hear, I have used my knowledge of music and acoustics to recreate my voice!”

  In addition to channeling speech through record players, Gluck’s experiments in “phonetik surgery” would inform the research of Bonn University philologist Werner Meyer-Eppler, an early vocoder advocate deemed by many vacuum-tube nerds to be one of the godfathers of electronic music. With the invention of the transistor in 1947, Meyer-Eppler began developing an Electrolarynx, a device that originated in 1925 with Bell Labs vocoder designer R.R. Riesz. In 1956, the US government issued a “consensus decree” to AT&T, requiring them to construct their own Electrolarynx as well as research underwater acoustics for the military. By 1959, AT&T had unveiled what appeared to be a can of battery-powered Right Guard. It had a modified vibrating phone diaphragm and a pitch-shifter for inflection. Though it did provide cordless communication, the device’s persistent buzz seemed to indicate the presence of an invisible barber. According to Bell Labs, the Electrolarynx was more intelligible when used over the phone than in person.